Vantage Point

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:13:00 +0000

Deepwater Horizon: America’s Chernobyl Moment

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” - Albert Einstein

The working title for this Vantage Point has been stuck in my mind since first news of the explosion and sinking of Deepwater Horizon. I was away from the computer which was a good thing because I could develop my own images with bare bones news from a Blackberry. I wouldn’t talk about what I thought to my children or grandchildren. It was and is just too damn scary.

Anyone who studies politics and culture knows the BP corporate bosses are lying through their teeth and will continue to cover up their irresponsibility with every deception possible. The mainstream news coverage will support the corporate script while Federal agencies duck and cover. Government leaders will tough talk without removing the controlling corporate hands from their open pockets.

This leaves the rest of us just where as a 2’ diameter pipe driven by a minimum of 20K psi pushes crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually the oceans of the world at the rate of 56-84,00o Barrels Per Day? This is the rate of disaster if the well doesn’t completely blow which all the smart boys in Houston know is exactly what will happen if they can’t contain the well head. About that possibility one oilman said in true southern style “Katy bar the door” - not sure who that Katy is but it doesn’t sound good.

The nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl cost the lives of thousands of heroic people who went into the blast zone to their certain or slow death, encasing the failed reactor in cement before the core melted. Chernobyl had every mark of an end game for life as we know it on Earth and there was some sense of the horrific potential at work, but thank God and the courage of those who sacrificed themselves, what might have been was averted because the event could be bounded. The Soviet government lied to everyone throughout the meltdown and their ineffective “cleanup” endangered then and sickens now tens of thousands. However, if the core reactor had melted through into the Earth there was no boundary possible.

What are the boundaries for Deepwater Horizon? An unchecked well 5ooo foot below the surface of the ocean in a reservoir four to five miles below the bottom of the sea at enormous geophysical pressure; what boundaries can be established on this catastrophe?

I can’t stomach rooting for the bad guys, and for the soft soaping “this is all our problem” nonsense this was not just the result of our driving cars or refrigerating cheese. The abuse is connected to all of us who live and breathe in this wondrous modern world but the catastrophe of Deepwater Horizon is the direct result of enormous and insatiable greed on the part of a very small number of people for whom enough is an unknown quantity and sufficient an irrelevant term. Nonetheless, if the smart guys can manufacture a goof shot, mud sling, diversionary well, whatever outrageous solution, here’s hoping they succeed.

One question remains on the great white hope of a diversionary well. Deepwater Horizon failed because of decisions made by BP that not only put their precious corporate lifestyle at risk but a vital habitat for the world. There’s no possible excuse for that, but more importantly, their technology failed. No matter how confident the next “expert” appears or what bogus certainty BP musters, they overran the limits of their knowledge and ability beyond all reasonable boundaries and crashed... utterly. Why are they being permitted to drill another well in the same place with a higher degree of difficulty? Is this not madness or am I just too dull to appreciate the wonder of such expertise?

Did anyone recall Chernobyl when President Obama began advocating nuclear power as a safe technology in his Administration’s response to the energy crisis? When will we understand there must be enforced limits to hubris when it comes to human endeavor? No one has the right to risk the life of this precious planet for the sake of personal gain, abysmal ethics or a simple lack of humility. When our collective demand depletes and destroys an Earth meant for generations to come then in fact there is no vision and as it was written centuries ago, without vision the people perish.

What should have our attention: Lost Generation

Gulf Oil Spill

Giant Plumes of Oil Found Under Gulf of Mexico

Gulf Disaster - How Big is the Spill?

Leaked report: Government fears Deepwater Horizon well could become unchecked gusher

U.S. Oil Regulator Ceded Safety Oversight to Drillers

U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study

An American Chernobyl

Deepwater Horizon: A Firsthand Account

After Gulf Coast oil spill, scientists envision devastation for region
"Father, we pray for a prevailing north wind," he said, "to drive that oil slick southward."

Earth

Dead Zones in the Oceans Worldwide

British fish stocks drop 94%

Loss of wildlife threatens food supplies

Puget Sound's slow oil spill

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer

Confronting the Peak Oil Crisis

Economy & Finance

We Have Crossed the Rubicon

Goldman Sachs Hands Clients Losses in "Top Trades"

High Frequency Terrorism: How the Big Banks and Federal Reserve Maintained Their Death Grip Over the United States

The New World Order Currency Crisis

Lock Limit Up; Fannie Loses $13 Billion; VIX Plunges Most on Record; Goldman Sachs No Trading Losses for Entire Quarter

CBO Budget Projections: Make Way for More Debt

Outing the Fed

Foreign Affairs

Obama's Gulf of Tonkin

Times Square Bombing Part of CIA False Flag Against Pakistan?

Obama's AfPak Flip-Flop

Violence in Iraq

Bunche 1948 UN Report on Terrorism in the Near East

National

Obama's natural choice of Kagan

Kagan Faces Queries

Kagan Gets the Kitchen Sink

Secret Erik Prince Tape Exposed

Upending Twisted Norms of Urban Violence

Rustbelt Rage

Culture

BP and the "Little Eichmanns"

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

Party Every Day

Mother’s Day Pieta

Swiss Artist Catalogs Mutant Insects Around Nuke Plants

Chemical Concussions and Secret LSD: Pentagon Details Cold War Mind-Control Tests

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Mon, 03 May 2010 00:41:00 +0000

Gulf Oil, Gaia’s Blood

“Every day you will find some local “tragedy” described in the pages of your newspaper: a child drowns, a car crashes, a woman is murdered. The word is used so frequently and sometimes with regard to misfortunes that in the overall scale of things are so commonplace, that it has been emptied of its primal force. If the word had been treated with the respect it deserves, kept ready for the truly awesome and world historical horrors then the word might have genuine force instead of being a mere formula that rolls off every politician’s tongue.”
- Macbeth, an Introduction by Jonathan Bate

Tragedy, catastrophe, these are the words for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, though as the quote implies, the meaning, the power in these words have been stripped and trivialized through overuse. When Hurricane Katrina submerged the City of New Orleans the scale and scope of that event was ignored by the highest levels of Federal office. The national media couldn’t grapple with the level of tragedy that unfolded and remains largely unresolved these five years later. I have the same gut response to the oil spill fouling the Gulf as when word of levees breaking hit the news. This is no ordinary event; it is a milestone of horror, loss and a shameful mark in the continuing degradation of our planet.

A flood of information and opinion will follow upon this catastrophic occurrence even when the true extent of what is yet to come is hardly known. There will be scientists who understand the mechanics of the fatality, politicians who express their concern and assure us safeguards will be forthcoming, every kind of regret for how this affects the human population and industry but precious little grief for Mother Earth and repentance for the systemic demand which set up the conditions for the travesty. I will write in the only language I have from the place where this lives in me, of sorrow and pain for the damage to our Earth.

Gaia’s Blood

Oil covers the Gulf of Mexico
a slick the size of Delaware and growing;
oysters disappear from Chesapeake Bay
once crystal clear to a hundred feet
where herons fish from pilings in brown water;
Puyallup and Makah hold first salmon festivals
though fins without hatchery marks are rare;
miners die inside a mountain gash
for ore to burn the air and blacken the sky;
airplanes haul grapes from Chili,
trains drag coal from Wyoming,
trucks burn gas across the prairies
for party favors and peanut butter.
Underneath the sea Her artery lays open
dark blood flowing in a plume
as shorebirds and sea life watch their fate
spread through the tidelands,
Her pulse bled out and weakening.
The story may end in silence
not the sound and fury of an opera finale
but quietly across open water
a thick mass blown ashore on the wind
the relentless rise of a sickened black tide.

Earth

Oil spill disaster "out of control"

Gulf of Mexico oil spill reaches Louisiana coast

Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster: Total wellhead failure raises fear of worst case scenario

Mother of all gushers could kill Earth's oceans

Whistleblower: BP Risks More Massive Catastrophes in Gulf

2nd garbage patch: Plastic soup seen in Atlantic

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

350 Degrees of Inseparability - The Good News About the Very Bad News (Climate Change)

Economy

ECB may have to turn to 'nuclear option' to prevent Southern European debt collapse

The Financial Terrorists Who Destroyed Our Economy Will Pay Zero in Taxes

The Costs of Complexity

Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks

Lloyd Blankfein (CEO Goldman Sachs) Vampire at Large

Heavy Insider Stock Selling

Breaking the Banks

Chink in the Armor

The Business of America Is Kleptocracy

Microsoft's Chinese workforce, too tired to stay awake

Foreign Affairs

The Truth Behind The Recent Unrest in Kyrgyzstan

Indo-Pakistan Proxy War Heats Up In Afghanistan

Iraqis Subjected to Torture

3 Killed in Qandahar Bombing as the UNO leaves; South Asia now Most Dangerous

Darfur Aid Dollars Suspected of Funding Israeli Projects

National

Publisher defends Times reporter over federal subpoena
(Ed: Why is D of J stepping over the networks of vipers pillaging this country to prosecute one of the few “good guys” in the collapse of US investigative journalism during the Bush era?)

Is the CIA Involved in Mexico's Bloody Drug War?

Behind the Arizona Immigration Law: GOP Game to Swipe the November Election

White House reporters afraid to criticize the White House

The long, clear, inspiring record of Diane Wood

Dr. Strangelove, Made in Israel

Culture

Bill Moyers Retires by Eric Alterman

Noam Chomsky Has ˜Never Seen Anything Like This" by Chris Hedges

Five Freedoms for All

Elephant Seal and Human Contact

Power of Place

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:52:00 +0000

Empire and Energy

President Obama’s recent success with health insurance reform continues to draw a firestorm of right wing criticism and diminishing left wing disappointment as the strongest proponents of the public option came over to support and pass the legislation.

The issue was inflamed by the corporate media as a polarized argument between diametrically opposed forces with both sides claiming moral high ground. As social legislation the flag was not an available prop and the poor and disenfranchised though good story lines for Oprah have little leverage beyond sound bytes in our Federal governance.

The major argument posed by Republicans was fiscal responsibility as if the right side of the Congressional aisle had suddenly found religion after profligate spending on two foreign wars, unlimited homeland “security,” a bail-out of the financial criminals who nearly destroyed the world economy and tax protectionism for those who profit most from the commons of our nation state.

It is a simple task to contribute to the mountain of hypocrisy and falsehood that have been offered on this subject by both sides and I have a personal bias against the approaching fiscal cliff toward which our deficit is driving. However, I don’t believe entitlements or social legislation are the primary cause of our financial debacle but war and the American empire.

Our proclivity for militarism as tool for foreign policy hasn’t decreased since the removal of the Supreme Court appointed Bush administration, with over 700 known (and many more secret) military fortresses circling the globe, particularly in the mid East and other resource rich geographies.

The CIA / NSA conglomerate operates an off-budget shadow government intruding Machiavellian fashion in most foreign governments under an Orwellian rubric of “national interest.” Our decade long military occupation of Afghanistan is supposedly in this “interest” though not three in ten Americans could locate the country on a map and not one in ten could voice a logical argument for the continuing predatory violence the Afghan people suffer.

Our last president had enough family experience with Houston business practice to craft the “surge,” a wholesale payoff to the forces opposing US military occupation in Iraq long enough for the media to spin a success out of this terrible story. Our political “leaders” followed by putting the blame for the lagging repair of our destruction on the Iraqis, criticizing them for not “standing up,” “learning to ride the bike” or whatever condescending metaphor our dysfunctional governors could dream up for Iraq failing to clean up our mess.

The United States currently spends more on military spending than the other top five developed nations combined. Most of our meaningful industry has been off-shored with our largest export becoming implements of war to our own military but even worse to the world arms market.

Empire and energy go hand in hand and to comprehend demand for fossil fuel is to understand our military deployments, our foreign intelligences on every continent, and the huge drain of blood and treasure that may help some below the median bar of the great wealth divide but largely benefits the select 5% of our population who control 90% of the wealth.

The great dissimulator Ronald Regan, professional actor for the corporate class, convinced the Vietnam / Watergate weary population that social issues were un-American, justice something required of the poor, privilege a national birthright and America again as city on the hill despite the best efforts of Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, John Lennon, Howard Zinn, Rosa Parks, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisolm, Maya Angelou and countless other intelligent, passionate and truth telling voices raised to awaken the sleeping giant to its political and cultural reality.

The current Tea Party movement has some valid issues and a list of demagogues twisting them to serve the primary concern of the elite which is to divide and conquer. Congressional emotions rose to a peak about deficit spending on health insurance reform yet devoted less than a day of debate and but a handful of nay votes against a hugely profligate military appropriations budget.

Until we understand that our life force as a nation is being drained off to feed the vampires of energy demand and world empire our nation’s progress will be stifled in the 21st century.

Economy

Demon Debt and the Dalliance of Denial

Drugs, terrorism and shadow banking

The Global Debt Bomb

States’ Debt Woes Grow Too Big to Camouflage

Silver Short Squeeze Could Be Imminent

Investigating Friedmanism at the Fed

Workers in California Crushed by Toyota

Lehman Brothers Scandal Rocks the Fed: Geithner and Bernanke's Possibly Criminal Roles

Credit Agency Warns U.S. and Others of Risk to Top Rating

Public Pensions Are Adding Risk to Raise Returns

Fed Audit Bitterly Opposed By Treasury

Prophet of Doom Finds Joy as Film Stirs Efforts to Survive Oil Crisis

Foreign Affairs

Disaster filmmaker declares situation in Haiti out of control

Gen. McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number of People' Who Were Not Threats in Afghanistan
(VP: Compare Tiger Woods press saturation to this story.)

Two-Thirds of Boys in Afghan Jails Are Brutalised

Marjah, the city that never was

The Opium Wars in Afghanistan

Widening Sex-Abuse Scandal in German Catholic Church Enmeshes Pope Benedict XVI

To Sinead O'Connor, the pope's apology for sex abuse in Ireland seems hollow

Tony Blair's secret dealings with South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corp

The Poodle Gets Kicked (Biden in Israel)

The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story

The New ‘Forgotten’ War: Iraq occupation falls into media shadows

Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds

Official dogma: Iraq War a success

National

We Still Don't Hear Dr. King

Confirmed: Obama authorizes assassination of U.S. citizen

All the World's a Stage (for Us)

Counterfactual: A curious history of the C.I.A.'s secret interrogation program

Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?

Numbers to Die For

9-11 & Public Health

President Obama: Replace Rahm with Me ...an open letter from Michael Moore

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

The Democrats' scam becomes more transparent

Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us

Earth

The Wrong Kind of Green

Brazen Environmental Upstart Brings Legal Muscle, Nerve to Climate Debate

Monsanto GM-corn harvest fails massively in South Africa

The Attack on Climate-Change Science

Obama Administration Cops to Looming Oil Shortage

Huge Methane Leak in Arctic Detected

Study Says Undersea Release of Methane Is Under Way

Endangered Earth: Palin Recants

James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change

People's Petition to Cap Carbon Dioxide Pollution at 350 Parts Per Million

Protest the Pebble Mine

US proposes to veto mountaintop removal coal mine

Culture

We Stand on the Cusp of one of Humanity's Most Dangerous Moments

Saudi Arabia Delays Execution of TV ‘Sorcerer,’ Lawyer Says
(VP: Coalition of the willing progress.)

Is Baseball a Fading Allegory for the Fading American Way of Life?

Slaughterhouse-Five at Forty

Lewis Lapham, Art and the Money Exchange

Love Freedom? Kill Your iPad

Maybe the coolest thing

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Our One Desire

Gaia sends her signals from deep within
tremors of neglect shaking her wounded body,
asking for help in so many ways
yet only drama compels attention
in these days of Narcissus.
She is not a mechanism for study
nor a faulty watch we can replace.
Is it possible the beauty she gives
is intended for us, to soften our hearts
and release our spring color?
Like Aladdin we possess a magical gift
to create from the wellspring of our hearts.
How would it be today if our one wish,
our one desire was for her?

Economy

The Zombie Economy

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

European banks face showdown over €1 trillion of debt

Breakdown in the Gold Market

Wall Street owners angry with their purchase

Stick a Fork in it, The Dollar is Done

Banks - BofA and ex-chiefs face fraud lawsuits

Funds flee Greece as Germany warns of "fatal" eurozone crisis

Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows
VP: The real news here is where this article was published.

The Geithner AIG Story

Taxpayers Help Goldman Reach Height of Profit in New Skyscraper

Contrarian Investor Predicts Economic Crash in China

Foreign Affairs

The Road to Armageddon

Iran Nabs Top NATO Terrorist With Pakistan Help

Rigi planned to meet Holbrooke in Kyrgyzstan

Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace
VP: Roll over Orwell!

Marjah push aimed to shape US opinion

The Afghan Mask Slips: Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan

Afghanistan bans coverage of attacks; blasts hit south
VP: Who’d they get the word “emboldened” from?

Yemen, the new Waziristan - Pepe Escobar

The Expanding US War in Pakistan

America's Secret Afghan Prisons

Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children

Bill Moyers with Greg Mortenson, Stones into Schools

Oil and Conflict in the Niger Delta

In the West Bank's stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying

The Lesson of Haiti by Fidel Castro

15 Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind

National

Hold Onto Your Underwear, This is not a National Emergency

Charles Pierce Reaction to State of the Union 2010

Come Together for Health Care

Congress Approves $636.3 Billion for Defense in Fiscal 2010

Pentagon Should Be Part Of Spending Freeze
VP: Boehner off leash.

The Lynch-mob Mentality

Kiriakou Recants - Scott Horton
VP: Infamous CIA defender of waterboarding’s “effectiveness” writes three years later he basically made it all up. Won’t they be breathing a sigh of relief at Gitmo, Bagram and Abu Graib?

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

Cause and Effect in the 'Terror War'

The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt

Earth

Captivity leads to insanity

Saving America's 1,000 Most Endangered Species

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change - Al Gore

Avatar Transforming - Its Power, Its Message, Its Possibilities

Major Antarctic glacier is 'past its tipping point'

‘Superberg’ Detaches from Antarctic Glacier, Could Disrupt Ocean Currents

Toxic Wastes and Haiti

The Real Reason Behind The Copenhagen Walk-Out

NatureBridge – Connecting Youth to the Natural World

Culture

Note to ESPN's Bill Simmons: Tiger Woods is not Muhammad Ali

The Death and Life of American Journalism - Chris Hedges

Decoding Limbaugh

21st Century Breakdown

Populism: Just Like Racism!

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

Translating David Brooks on Haiti - Matt Taibbi

Zimbabwe's forgotten children, struggling to survive

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:13:00 +0000

Obama, One Year In

“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.” ~ Tolstoy

Barack Obama is an enigma, a man capable of inspiring great faith and enthusiasm but whose record in office stands thus far incongruent with his promise. The “only been there one year” argument doesn’t hold because Obama has accomplished a great deal. The question is in what direction. While the acrimonious and often absurd debate about who or what he may be or may yet accomplish continues, more important is the quantifiable measure to which his present actions match his expressed intent for our country’s future.

The residency of his birth, the dead grandmas of the health insurance non-reform act, the many divide and rule strategies our corporate controlled media voice relentlessly are beside the point when it comes to clearing the smoke and mirrors to determine how we each come down on our present course of state. We need to keep it simple and look at the big picture with the forecast that Obama’s first year in office portends.

Economy: Despite the populist rhetoric with which Obama captured enough of the middle and working class votes to gain the presidency, in office he jettisoned his progressive economic advisors and turned to the establishment of money and power that brought on the financial debacle he inherited. Obama speaks about taking “fat cats” to task but the same run our Treasury, Federal Reserve and economic programs at his appointment. The current box score on economic policy finds Wall Street and the Big Five Banks rolling in cash while the rest of the country plummets deeper in debt with many out of work particularly in manufacturing cities like Detroit.

Health Care: During the election Obama invoked the dark reality of a two class health care system, one of haves and have-nots. But once in office he held secret meetings with big pharma and insurance whose huge cash reserves have incredible market influence. The deal made with industry and consummated by the corrupt Congressional parties eviscerated a public option through industry schill Joe Lieberman, directed by Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, establishes continuing control by the corporate machinery insuring nothing but profit for the few upon the misery of the mass.

Foreign Affairs: Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was a collection of duplex imagery. Speaking to an audience who sees Obama as a progressive hope in deterring an increasingly militaristic world force, Obama characterized his nation’s use of military power as if it were exemplary of a higher moral standard simply because our political apparatus in the person of our president says it is so. He lectured an audience, many of whom had either lived through the horror of WWII or its aftermath, on the logic of just war, a doctrine the Catholic Church perfected for its Holy Roman Empire. He wisely urged human rights and a distancing from a foreign policy without concern for international law but fundamentally his speech affirmed the use of military force as a presidential prerogative.

During his campaign Obama never presented himself as a peace candidate, more a reformer, but his cabinet and military appointments have entrenched the military hierarchy with its massive expenditure of blood and treasure which he committed to correct. In his Nobel speech Obama invoked the “terrorism justifies.. (fill in the blank)” model crafted by Cheney, Bush and their Israeli and British allies, ignoring tens of thousands more innocent civilians have perished at the hands of US military forces and its mercenaries in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan then died in the massacre of September 11th.

The foreign policy equation thus far is clear: the military corporate congressional alliance continues to rise vertically in profit and power while the American people become further impoverished supporting a war machine that brought ruin to the nation of Iraq and is driving Afghanistan and Pakistan toward the same chasm.

These major issues of the Obama presidency obscure whatever else should be gaining our attention, especially the environment, which has devolved into a meaningless debate about wealth transfer via carbon taxation rather than a genuine concern about planetary well being.

Many of Obama’s “accomplishments” contain direct or implicit contradictions, the most egregious being his claim of closing the Guantanamo prison while at the same time denying due process to many of the inmates by shipping them to a super max hell hole in Illinois for permanent incarceration under conditions that often drives prisoners to insanity with no legal means of redress.

In the cultural stewpot Obama is caught in a morass of demonization by a fundamentalist lunatic fringe who call for his death via biblically inscribed teddy bears, a marginalized white lower middle and working class who think the nonsense spoon fed by corporate wealth about health care somehow invokes patriotism, a left, right and center of reasonable people who are like deer trapped in the headlights of continuing ignorance, mixed in a cauldron of pay for play corrupt Federal governance ruled by a powerful and unyielding corporate elite.

We want to believe a king has returned after the long tortuous absence since the regicide of JFK, and why shouldn’t we carry that faith? We have a response to sovereignty woven into our DNA. However, sorting out how and if that inner compulsion is finding a true outer embodiment is the hard work of individual and collective discernment. In this present time, which is always like no other time, that work demands our most clear and critical thinking, no matter who may carry the collective mantel. Not only ours, but given the huge impact of our national footprint, the state of the world depends on our clarity.

Economy

Matt Taibbi on Obama and Wall Street

GM China Sales Pass US for First Time In History

Detroit house auction flops for urban wasteland

World Military Spending

Dollar Will Go to a Value of Exactly Zero Eventually

Michael Ruppert on Oil, Energy and 'Collapse'

Euros become currency of drug cartels

Volcker Warns Top Bankers They've "Been Inadequate"

India Buys IMF Gold to Boost Reserves as Dollar Drops

Goldman Sachs Head Says Banks Do 'God's Work'

Hospital cleaners 'worth more to society than bankers'

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

Anatomy of casino capitalism

Sliding US dollar drives gold to record high

Inside Trade 'Systemic' at Hedge Funds, Khuzami Says

Payback Time - Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government

Obama's Mortgage-Fix Program is Doomed to Fail

$71,206: Not Bad For Gov't Work

Health Care

Lieberman in Bed with Big Pharma

On The Lieberman Health Care Industry Profit Protection Act Of 2009

Rahm Emmanuel to Reid: Give Lieberman What He Wants

My Near Death Panel Experience – Congressman Earl Blumenauer

Goldman To Private Insurers: No Health Care Reform At All Is Best

Vaccine Coverup - Robert Kennedy Jr. (Video)

Deadly Immunity - Robert Kennedy Jr.

Public Health Expert Teresa Forcades on Swine Flu and Swine Flu Vaccination

Foreign Affairs

Who We are Supporting in Afghanistan

Matthew Hoh Letter of Resignation, Dept of State in Afghanistan

Welcome to Pashtunistan

How the US Funds the Taliban

Blackwater launching missions from Karachi

Erik Prince, head of US security firm Blackwater, ‘was CIA operative’

Gates: No intel on bin Laden for ‘years’

Ex-Islamic radicals on what motivates -- and impedes -- extremism

Beijing broods over its arc of anxiety

British nuclear expert's 17th floor UN death plunge 'was not suicide'

Was David Kelly murdered on the orders of the British Government?

The Great Wall of Israel

20-Year-Old Letterhead points to Israeli Forgery in Francop Affair

The Madagascar model: conflicts over natural resources will grow

Brazil crime wars: Spiderman's story of drugs and Jesus in Rio's slums

City 'dying' amid border violence

Who's Gonna Build Your Wall

National

Text of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech

The Strange Consensus on Obama's Nobel Address

My solemn meeting on Veterans Day with President Obama at Arlington

The Commanded-in-Chief

A Kept Man

The Psychological Implosion of Our Soldiers

Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan

New report questions "suicides" at Guantanamo

Welcome to Gitmo North

Is long-term solitary confinement torture?

Patriot Act Renewal Moving Forward

Empire of Illusion: An Interview with Chris Hedges

Earth

Bayer Admits GMO Contamination is Out of Control

Hopenhagen's dirty secret

Farmers scramble to finish harvest from hell

USDA Declares Half Of Midwest As Agricultural Disaster Area

Food Security and Climate Change Are Deeply Interconnected

Madagascar Cancels Water Deal with Saudi Arabia

Qatar Food Company Signs $1 billion Deal to Use Sudan Farmland

Leaders Agree to Delay a Deal on Climate Change

Caribbean Coral Reefs Wiped Out by Climate Change

A Campaign of Deceit Underlies Stolen Climate
Change Email Messages

Is Iraq's Next Crisis Ecological?

US gives Shell green light for offshore oil drilling in the Arctic

Nevada Takes Hard Look at Contaminated Groundwater from Historic Nuclear Testing Grounds

As economy grows, so do China's garbage woes

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

Culture

Indian Gangs Grow, Bringing Fear and Violence to Reservation

Welcome to the Women's Movement 2.0

Imprisoning a Child for Life

Anti-Obama Religious Rhetoric Is "Trawling For Assassins"

Fear Not: What does virtual rumor-mongering say about Christians?

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:22:00 +0000

Living With War

"Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” ~ Arundhati Roy

Of all the analyses of failed empire, even those positing collapse from within, few account for the psychic disintegration of a society living in a state of constant war. The exceptionalism that hallmarks presidential accolades upon their own nation, including the current chief executive’s, promote a triumphalism, a belief in invulnerability providing rationales for war and the volunteers to produce it. However, no amount of grandiose eloquence can undo the psychic damage that deteriorated every society devoted to aggression and foreign occupation since the days of Rome.

One of the unusual statistics facing our present dedication to militarism is the high degree of debilitating stress occurring in the Air Force operators of drone bombers who are neither in the country where their violence occurs or are in physical touch with the damage they inflict. However, the growing percentage of these men and women whose service is challenged because of traumatic stress is just the canary in the mine shaft of the American psyche.

The Bush Cheney junta forged a policy of never ending conflict after the horror of the September 11th mass murders. The tribalistic response they promoted produced a great deal of personal wealth for them and their corporate allies while dismissing an unbiased investigation of what really occurred and through whom. Worse however was their inculcation of permanent war through psychological attacks on the populace they were oath bound to protect via a complicit media and a political stranglehold on legislative oversight.

The various war like sports accepted as national pastimes are amplified through violent video games and war toys that inure our children to violence and suggest an acceptance of homicide to our next generation in order to support the empire with its array of military bases and armed forces on every continent.

The causa belli being corporate profiteering and the reason for the butcher bill paid across the heartland of America the acquisition of other countries natural resources are realities obscured by the wizard’s screen for the most part while flags unfurl and politicians intone nobility of sacrifice and security for the homeland.

As our economy eviscerates beneath the unsupportable weight of worldwide aggression and the systemic corruption that thrives upon it, the unrecognized disintegration is in the heart and soul of the culture itself. The church of football may rule on Sunday but no amount of bread and circus can contain the inner disease spawned by the violence of empire.

The media mouthpieces for corporate news, drones in themselves, may excuse “collateral damage” repeating the Pentagon whitewash with the occasional apology for civilian death, but the reality of those tens of thousands of human lives lost on our spear point in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan will not be dismissed, not at the intrinsic level of human consciousness where we are all connected and no violence will be forgotten.

The future of our nation does not rest in presidential speeches or international prizes but in the reality of our actions, and it is what we do that will not easily be forgiven, by our neighbors or by our inner most selves.

Finance

The demise of the dollar - Robert Fisk

Beijing's derivative default stance rattles market

Monetization of US Treasuries In Isolation

Infographic of Bankruptcy In America

International

NATO Air Strike Kills Nearly 90 in Afghanistan

Pipelineistan's Ultimate Opera - Pepe Escobar

Putin lays down law for Clinton

Afghanistan, the proxy war - Andrew Bacevich

The Most Dangerous Nuclear Facility in the Middle East - Israel's

National

GOP House members call for investigation of Muslim political activity – Glenn Greenwald

Voices From the Wilderness, The New Israel Lobby - Eric Alterman

Power, Illusion, and America’s Last Taboo - John Pilger

Culture

Do Women Have the Blues? - Barbara Ehrenreich

Beware of the Psychopath My Son - Clinton Callahan

Earth

A Speech to the Garden Club of America - Wendell Berry

100 days to save the climate

The Shots Heard Round the World – Rebecca Campbell

Preparing For The Real Pandemic

Sustainable Prisons Project

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:56:00 +0000

Obama and Pigs for Free

“It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.” - Ken Kesey

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, two roommates and I were graduating from college and decided in our grand egalitarian manner to host a celebratory pig roast for our blue collar neighborhood. I had been expanding my knowledge of English literature with a mix of motorcycle mechanics, factory girls and the gainfully unemployed, so I called on one of my neighborhood buddies for counsel.

Blynn Shaw was a serial adulterer, amateur and convincing prize fighter, expert with a chainsaw, and knew a farmer south of town who’d be glad to sell us a pig so there we went in Eddie’s Ford station wagon. The pig farm was just that and since Eddie considered himself a seasoned entrepreneur he put himself in charge of negotiations with the farmer while Kevin and I took on capture duty. The farmer’s kid opened a small vertical door in the wood sided barn and to an inviting who-ee out stormed a hundred or so pigs.

The farmer said take your pick but remember you got to carry ‘er out. My teammate was a scrapper from Chicago and I had been thoroughly trained in urban warfare by the Salesians of Don Bosco in NYC but neither of us had ever seen a live pig let alone catch one. It had started to pour down rain and the thought of entering the mud hole did not reflect well on our investment in higher education though that’s what we did.

Kevin had enough brains to go for a small one and we did manage to tackle it after a few dragged us through the mud and pig you-know-what. The farmer’s kid threw us a rope and we tied up that pig with the fear of the Lord and all things wild in our hearts. We dragged the screaming beast toward the gate hollering for Eddie to back up the wagon. The bib overalled farmer greeted us with tears in his eyes. He said he hadn’t laughed that hard in years and the pig was on him!

I don’t know if you’ve ever driven to a slaughterhouse with a live pig in the back of a station wagon but it proved to be memorable. Eddie kept telling Kevin to hold down the pig while I stopped Kevin from killing Eddie before the swine.

The boys at the slaughterhouse had thought they’d seen everything until a few badly stained and worse smelling college boys pulled up with a live pig. “Where in thunder did you boys find that pig” they hollered. We weren’t in a joking mood but they were laughing too hard to haul the pig so Kevin and I grabbed the poor beastie like a bad drunk from Corby’s Bar and hauled her (or him, we’d never know) up onto the loading dock to its eternal fate.

We didn’t talk much on the ride home and neither Kevin nor I would lift a finger to help Eddie hose out his wagon but we cooked that pig in our front yard a week later to the delight of our beer drinking neighbors and the shock and awe of our university colleagues.

What’s all this go to do with a Vantage Point on current affairs you may be wondering? Well, since we selected Barack Obama to manage the animal farm we call Congress and the variety of pigs and piglets therein, why are we aghast that they’ve soiled his clothes and are dragging him through the mud?

Barack is a smart young fellow and could talk a farmer out of his lunch pail but pigs, they’re a breed apart, and talking to a pig is much like conversing with a dining room table as Congress Frank recently lamented.

Given this far reaching umbrella of understanding and exception for Barack and his first months in office, I humbly offer our good president the following:

Heath Care Reform
Quit having secret meetings with big pharma and the insurance boys. They already have your wallet and they’ll have your eye teeth and kid’s lunch money before you can say public option. Also, try calling the “debate” what it is: not “health care” but corporate profiteering on the suffering of others. The idea of hospital as profit center and medicine as business are destined for Dante’s hell and should be dispatched thereto if there’s any hope for meaningful change.

Economy
Ok, Goldman Sachs financed your election and Tim Geithner looked honest in a befuddled altar boy sort of way, but between Treasury and Fed everything of value that wasn’t bolted down is being looted by the Wall Street vampires. You are not in charge of running America’s economy. Just wake up the SEC, start housing the thieves from Sachs and AIG up in Attica with a few new homeys, put back the laws that curbed the gluttony of the Hamptons pariahs and call it good.

War
Never a good idea though your predecessor squandered every ounce of our country’s good faith to promulgate them. You should know better having read a few books, at least about the futility of conquering Afghanistan. Look over your shoulder. Iraq is now a third world gas station. And by the way, when did we declare war on Pakistan? No pipeline through this apocalyptic landscape is worth the blood and treasure and the endeavor will corrupt what’s left of your and our moral compass.

Last but not least, one subject you ought to be leading on but ARE NOT:

Environment
Stop strip mining Appalachia is a good start but clean coal is a cruel joke and our abuse of natural resources and pollution of the air, earth and seas hasn’t slowed a fraction. Regulating environmental crime is something you can take on that is vital and worthy. If you don’t, the world you leave to your beautiful children will make today’s Iraq and the Horn of Africa seem like tomorrow’s Martha’s Vineyard.

Vaccines

Swine flu jab link to killer nerve disease: Leaked letter reveals concern of neurologists over 25 deaths in America

A third of nurses will refuse to have the swine flu jab

Fear, Intimidation & Media Disinformation: H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic

Healthcare

Anatomy of American Ignorance

Whistleblower Tells of America's Hidden Health Nightmare for its Sick Poor

The organ of last resort

Obama on Drugs: 98% Cheney?

This Is Reform?

On 'Death Panels,' 'Socialized Medicine' and Other Red Herrings

Who's Driving Health Care Reform?

Finance

It's Not a Recession. It's a planned demolition

FDIC is Bankrupt

UBS Money Laundering: What Did Phil Gramm Know?

National

Militarizing the Homeland

Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11

Arms expert warns new mind drugs eyed by military

Attorney: FBI trained blogger to incite others

Three city mayors and several rabbis held in New Jersey corruption inquiry

'Organ trafficking': Rabbis arrested over massive crime ring

Ridge says Bush Administration pushed to raise terror alert for re-election

International

Surging Over the Cliff in Afghanistan

Who is funding the Afghan Taliban?

Cheney's Snuff Program Involved Blackwater

Lockerbie and Kafka's Labyrinth

The Holocaust's shadow over Israel's choices

Earth

Seaweed on French beaches emitting lethal fumes

Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate: Why Americans Are So Easily Bamboozled About Energy

Iraq in throes of environmental catastrophe

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:19:00 +0000

Afghanistan: Looking to the Whole Tapestry
Guest Vantage Point by Eleanor Milner

Ed: The following Guest Vantage Point comments are by Eleanor Milner (Oregon herbalist, writer and teacher, Program Director for Oregon Mycological Society for 18 years, animal and environmental activist, student of history and comparative religions) on the story of US Army Specialist Victor Agosto, Be Bold, by Dahr Jamail. Agosto publicly refused to deploy with his unit to Afghanistan and the publicity over his prosecution in Truthout lessened the Army’s stance against him.

For those who feel the need to have reasons to somehow have a war to fight somewhere, I would invite you to read Howard Zinn’s On War. Zinn rightly states that war is like crack cocaine, when after the victory shouts of "We won! We won!" subside and the winners sink into the trough of routine, it becomes necessary to create another war just to obtain that same high.

For those who desire to work for world peace I would print up bumper stickers that say "War creates mental illness"... unless I have been directly attacked. I have always been puzzled by the promulgation of wars for any other reason whatsoever. In the case of Afghanistan, it is either heroin production that feeds the coffers of moneyed drug dealers and/or pharmaceutical industries or the bloated egos of politicians and power hungry exploiters or some other remote reason that is keeping the US military in Afghanistan.

Since our government created the Taliban and put Bin Laden in charge of them to to ram a pipeline through to oil rich lands before the Russians took it, there has been a US military foothold there that someone wants to keep boots in. Obama didn't want to stay there but he was persuaded by the man he put in charge of what is happening in the Middle East and who speaks from the Pentagon. Maybe there is something that many Americans don't know about the "why" of it but it is still a war that should END already.

I love this quote from "The Prophet" in Crime and Punishment:

"You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked for they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white thread are woven together. And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also."

It might be fascinating if we could see the whole tapestry of Afghanistan. Afghanis are weavers of rugs. There is always a flaw left in the pattern as it is their belief that humans are not higher than the Creator. Afghanis have a rich history that few of us know about. How wonderful it would be if the media emphasis would be on the people, their lifestyle, their diversity, instead of the us and/or them seesaw.

Agosto is right to refuse to go to that country and fight where we really have no business. I profoundly hope this sort of incident leads us in the right direction... OUT! Majorities can make the difference when people's voices reach critical mass. For example, there were many who refused to fight in the Vietnam War, were jailed or took a border crossing to Canada. So many cemeteries, so many broken lives followed that mistaken intervention.

Since then, there have been other wars: the Gulf war, the war in Iraq, and now the continuation of the war in Afghanistan. How much time will continue to pass without due clarification of the 9-11 disaster? As a nation we must keep the focus on what needs to stay in focus and I agree, let’s be bold!

Vaccines

Swine Flu: What I Believe by Catherine Austin Fitts

Lawsuit against Manufacturers of the Avian Flu Virus Vaccine

Now legal immunity for swine flu vaccine makers

The 1918 Influenza Epidemic was a Vaccine-caused Disease

Energy and Finance

The Great American Bubble Machine – Matt Taibbi

What the Big Banks Have Won - Mike Whitney

Goldman Executive Named by Obama to Top Economic Position in State Department

Goldman Sachs to make record bonus payout

National

US Food Safety Czar
Ed: The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history made the US food safety czar by Obama Administration.

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit by Bill Maher

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies - Charles Eisenstein

Not Even Nixon Tried to Control the Media Like Obama - Helen Thomas

Gob Smacked and the “School” of the Americas

Biden Off the Reservation Watch

Ed: Is Obama running his foreign policy or is it a Biden / Brezinski (the Democrats Kissinger) cold war redux?

Biden strikes tough note on Iran – Gives Israel “Green Light” on Iran Strike

Biden says U.S. stands with Georgia a year after war

Biden Criticizes Russia in Move Called 'Perplexing'

Hillary Clinton admits that the CFR runs the U.S. Department of State

International

US drone hits Pakistan funeral

Afghan inquiry into American bombing of wedding party

Bagram Detainees Treated Worse Than Animals - William Fisher

Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle – Pepe Escobar

Iran faces greater risks than it knows – Paul Craig Roberts

Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away - Chris Hedges

Israel uses Hitler picture to sell its settlement expansion

Earth

Journalist Files Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder

Dr Kelly, British biological warfare expert, did not commit suicide, insist 13 doctors

Spilling The Beans - Food designed to produce toxin

A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia – Robert Kennedy Jr.

Britain's dirty little secret as a dumper of toxic waste

Videos

What is that?

Books

Human Robots and Holy Mechanics

The Lord of Death

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:32:00 +0000

Leaving War Behind – An Open Letter to President Obama

“Wheel and turn, wheel and turn the knights of old would when facing distress or the rare opportunity to serve their quest.”

Dear President Obama,

Your daughters and family are precious to you, the stability and richness of their present a motivator to your every action, the importance of their future woven into all of you and your wife’s hopes and dreams. Ironically, or perhaps because of your love for them, you stand at the controls of an engine, the world’s most militarized political force, that eats away at monstrous portions of their present life and darkens the very opportunity for their future. The issues that drive these apocalyptic shadows are economic collapse, peak oil & global climate change, and worldwide militarization & war.

Economic collapse will continue being the unavoidable result of unsustainable and ultimately unjust lifestyles fostered in the industrialized nations and spreading like cancer throughout the developing second and third tier nations. Peak oil and climate change were challenging concepts for your Orwellian predecessor but like gravity the obvious disparity between shrinking resource and the alarmingly growing world population presses upon even a Neanderthal mentality, now vividly apparent as the geo-political reality of our 21st century.

War, however, is the most powerful driving factor in our growing planetary demise, avoiding careful scrutiny because of the following: huge institutional and financial investments in global militarism; a nationalistic tribal mentality maintained and re-shored repeatedly about “defense” and the supposed “glory of sacrifice”; the hypnotically repeated meme of victim, perpetrator and rescuer that dominates main stream news and the inurement to violence fostered upon our children and adolescents through video games, films and almost every form of cultural exposure.

Far more than half of our annual national investment goes into militarism - the research and development, manufacture, purchase and deployment of sophisticated instruments of destruction. Besides consuming finances, our globally based military machine is one of the largest consumers of petroleum resources, although one premise for its advancing presence is the preservation and guarantor of such resource.

Abundant anthropological and sociological science verifies that when societal groups are challenged with survival, in the face of such attack or threat populations rapidly increase. Does this explain the exploding populations in the areas of starkest poverty and the grim resource wars of Africa, the mid East and Asia?

As President you may counsel your citizens concerning consumption and lifestyle. You may pour money into the financial morass of international banking hoping more debt will cure debt. You may encourage alternative energy and family planning and provide leadership and funding to these endeavors, but ultimately the dragon in the field is war and our nation’s parasitic relationship with the forces of military manufacture and proliferation.

War is the antiquated shell of our millennial potential, the hardened husk preventing the chrysalis of our collective future from emerging into our next generational and historic day. Every encouragement and advance you make in war forces a logarithmic decrease in our economy, our natural resources and to our planetary environment. Beyond these pragmatic effects, war is also a disease upon our collective soul, a regression in our spiritual evolution, for all war is war upon the Earth and an affront to the Creator.

Here is your challenge Mr. President. As you seem to draw more and more resource for direction from the dark side, there is a largely untapped source of power and enlightenment in our citizenry to support a change away from war while glacial forces of financial greed and institutional ignorance oppose it. The fulcrum is in leadership and the reins of control are largely in your hands.

Continue to lead down the misguided path of empire and you ignore not only those you love but their future for which you and I and each of us are responsible. Take counsel from the knights of old. Wheel and turn, away from war and institutionalized violence and toward the sources of real richness and life, toward peace, justice and environmental wholeness. Wheel and turn. The people will be with you.

Energy and Finance

The New Economy: And Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance - by David Korten

A Presidential Energy Policy

Welcome to Pipelineistan - Pepe Escobar

The Nabucco Conspiracy

The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold: The Financial Bailout

Wall Street's False Armistice

Financial Bailout Plan Keeps Zombie Banks Alive - International Forecaster

National

Obama Looses the Manhunters: The Ir-Af-Pak War

Changing Obama's Mindset – Howard Zinn

The significance of Obama's decision to release the torture memos - Glenn Greenwald

Interview with Guantanamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene

Wars Abroad Continue at Home - Ann Jones

Why We Need a Liberal Israel Lobby - Eric Alterman

International

The Return of the Resistance in Iraq – Dahr Jamail

Iran nuclear leaks 'linked to Israel' - Gareth Porter

Death Squad Leader Was Top Cia Agent

Af-Pak War: The AIG of American Foreign Policy

Earth

The Meadow Across the Creek - Thomas Berry

Look on the Bright Side – Richard Heinberg

3 Bets On Ecology, economy, and human health - Sandra Steingraber

Ban Plastic Bags

The City that Ended Hunger - Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Spent - America After Consumerism

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:52:00 +0000

Something for Nothing

“heigh ho the derry oh
the rats take the cheese”

Every night and day the mind conditioning “entertainment” of television parades one or another “authority” on the complex world financial meltdown, giving the average human as much chance of deciphering as the Rosetta Stone. In reality the “meltdown” is the latest step in a highly placed bait and switch, a sideshow sleight of hand based on the basic rule of the midway: “something for nothing draws the rubes every time.”

The financial fraud on the American people has been running nonstop since the House of Morgan with its Bank of England ally purchased enough Congressional influence to establish the Federal Reserve, a privately held bank created to control the currency of the United States, something the Constitution thought better in the hands of Congress.

A few world wars later plus the removal of the gold standard (Nixon, Volker, Greenspan), more colonial wars (Vietnam, Iraq 1, Afghanistan, Iraq 2), removal of wage, price and environmental controls (Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2), banking regulatory control stripped (Clinton, Rubin, Gramm), appointment of Goldman Sachs executive Henry Paulson as Treasury Secretary to set policy and engineer “bailouts,” Alan Greenspan followed by Bernanke drawing in the rubes through gross scale currency and interest rate manipulation, and the world’s largest three card monte was underway.

The recipe was simple enough: bundle house and commercial property mortgages – good bad or indifferent didn’t matter because the shill depended on volume not quality, declare these bundled debts “assets” (monetizing debt) then sell the “assets” as “financial instruments” to bigger banks, pension funds, money markets and hedge funds. Re-bundle, re-sell the “instruments” over and again nationally and internationally. The world’s biggest insurers join the sharks (AIG, Lloyds) by “guaranteeing” the “instruments,” generating more paper profits by selling more debt while keeping interest rates near zero.

The tent gets bigger and bigger with more rubes on board, ordinary people convinced their house is an ATM machine, the wealthy conned by music men like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford. One day the music stops, as it inevitably would, and a few of the gristers were short a chair: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Mortgage, Wachovia Bank, a list of bad actors the people should be dragging to the tar pit with ample feathers but no, Paulson turns on the spin machine with the collusion of industry controlled financial media outlets, Bernanke rolls the printing presses, and the smoke and mirrors declare the side show “too big to fail” the midway “crucial to the country’s welfare” although it’s never grown an apple, a row of corn, made a car, doctored a horse or human, nothing but shell games and cheap toys from China.

At some point the midway must shut down and the circus leave town. People get enough cotton candy and carney tricks, take the few remaining coins and hard earned bucks left in their threadbare wallets and purses and tell the hucksters they’ve had enough sleight of hand and slippery tongue talk – they’re going home. Back to a life where what you have comes from decent work and earnest endeavor, where “something for nothing” is nothing, gristers gold, a cheap fake, and something for nothing is nothing worth having after all.

Noteworthy

How the News Media Fails Us - Robert Kennedy Jr.

Secession? We’re Already on Our Own - Jim Hogue

Men's Warrior Weekend - Peter Clothier at Huffington Post

Finance

The Great Financial Crisis

In Government We Trust? - Congressman Ron Paul

The U.S. Financial System Is Effectively Insolvent

Paulsons May Have Made $428 Million Shorting Lloyds

Hidden homeless: U.S. families living in motel rooms

Regulatory reports show 5 big banks face huge loss risk

Bill Moyers interview of Simon Johnson on US Banking Oligarchs

Billions Dished Out in the Shadows

Bailout Mo' Money

National

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All

'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney - Sy Hersh

Addicted to Force, Addicted to Failure - Tom Engelhardt

Chas Freeman Out: Intel Chair Withdraws

Chas Freeman Slams "Israel Lobby"

Obama's embrace of Bush/Cheney "terrorism policies" - Glenn Greenwald

International

The Hidden Soros Agenda: Drugs, Money, the Media, and Political Power

Everyone agrees: War in Gaza was a failure - Gideon Levy

Afghanistan + More Troops = Catastrophe

Taliban set to burn the Reichstag? – Pepe Escobar

Viktor Yushchenko's Star Has Fallen: Ukraine The Breadbasket Becomes the Basket Case

Earth

Fate of the rainforest is 'irreversible'

Bubbles of warming, beneath the ice

Hundreds attend global warming protest

The making of The Age of Stupid climate change film

Goodbye farmers markets, CSAs, and roadside stands

Monsanto's Michael Taylor is Back, this time to control "Food Safety" from the White House

11 Good Decisions From the Obama Administration

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:32:00 +0000

Studying War No More

The congruence and unanimity of President Obama’s speeches and press performances have continued to inspire an upbeat national mood, of hope in the future despite the prevailing news of economic implosion and war. My support for Obama is centered more in what his campaign and the removal of GW Bush from office brought forth in the American people than singularly in Obama himself. America and the pop nature of our techno global culture is devoted to the cult of personality from rock singers to movie actors to glitterati and celebrity of every sort. GW Bush himself was a “hero” to America just eight short years ago for coming out of his bunker to stand upon the rubble of the WTC, the image and metaphor of his long and destructive presidency, and because he could swagger out a sound byte through a bull horn America had its icon restored and faith to move forward despite the staggering tragedy of 9-11 and the economic collapse that followed.

Only a few voices in the wilderness cried out against the follow ups, the deliberate lack of protection for 9-11 site workers, the carpet bombing of Afghanistan as revenge against CIA asset Osama Bin Laden and the 19 or so Saudis who were aboard the crashed airliners on that fateful September day; over 50 Cruise missiles launched the first morning at over $1M each provided by Rumsfeld chum the Raytheon Corporation. As a nation we were aggrieved enough to give a pass on empire building, construction of dozens of giant military bases throughout the mid and near East, extraordinary rendition, the invasion and destruction of Iraq, the death of an estimated 1,311,696 Iraqi civilians plus 4,200,000 displaced and often homeless Iraqi refugees, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and to the list of Bush catastrophic failures was added the US economy which totters on the brink of a Chernobyl like meltdown, an abyss like his handling of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that seriously got the attention of his fellow aMurikans.

Obama’s campaign was a breath of fresh air to say the least. Here was an astute blend of idealist and pragmatist in one multicultural package that promised to lead us into a new era of Change, with change being one thing anyone with half a brain could agree upon after eight years of profligate empire. People rose up across the nation to participate in the political process, to make their voices heard, to celebrate, to question, to show up on that bright day in January to collectively say good riddance to bad rubbish and welcome a President who could think. But therein lays the trap, for as much as Obama’s personal talent is great, he and his office are as much a part of the system as his predecessor, working within a swamp of political corruption and incestuous corporate influence that has brought America to the shores of ruin.

Obama speaks about one nation, one people and I admire that aspiration but it’s as far from fact as the goat stories of GW Bush. Does the deliberate malfeasance and wholesale theft of the US treasury that Paulson and his Wall Street partners engineered have anything in common with 90% of the population standing in line at a grocery store? The Congressional performers take pot shots for the cameras at CEOs who show up for a little abuse and a load of gold while at least 10% of what Congress doles out to the corporations finds its way back into their own re-election chests. The bankers withstand the sterno can Congress calls heat while Timothy Geithner whose charmed career as a banking insider from Kissinger Associates to Chairman of the NY Federal Reserve Bank where he engineered the bailout of Citigroup which some analysts say started the meltdown in the first place, now dumps ton after ton of sand from his crew of Bernanke supplied helicopters upon the inferno at core reactor 11 Wall Street.

My point being this is no time for progressive voices to be silent, to find some new found respect for the office of president or blind belief in Barack Obama. America has risen out of its slumber through the Obama candidacy and election and the sleeping giant must not return to its comatose state. A greatly admired and intelligent friend recently told me that whatever Obama does they would support because over time we would realize that Obama’s intellect was superior. I looked down to see what I might be stepping in because I hadn’t heard that kind of horsepucky dropped in liberal circles while W ruled the White House and it shouldn’t be shoveled out now. Obama might be one of the smartest guys in the room but weren’t smart guys the ones that brought us Enron?

Obama needs all the backpressure we individually and collectively can put on his poor choices and all the support and encouragement we can provide when he’s right. Just one example: putting Rahm Emanuel in charge of his White House Staff makes perfect sense after the partisan dogfight of the Stimulus Package for you can be sure Emanuel made enough threatening neck-biting phone calls when that bill was in question to justify his salary. It is also well to bear in mind that Emanuel is directly connected through his family and his own personal history to the far right in Israel that is steering that country off a cliff into the most brutal forms of military oppression upon their neighbors. That doesn’t make Emanuel the wrong choice for Chief of Staff but it certainly demands constant scrutiny and a clear understanding that in all his appointments and policies Obama is walking a razor’s edge between corporate influence, onerous deal making, and choices that can and should stimulate We the People into standing up, speaking out, and doing the one thing that We the People CAN DO that government may not and that is to make this nation something to be proud of.

Cut and paste this note to the President and drop it in his email box:

President Obama:

I am strongly opposed to the drone bombings in Pakistan and to the increased war effort in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. This belligerent, force led foreign policy corrupted our nation over at least the last eight years and was something I understood you were going to alter through reason and dialogue. I recognize the commitment you made to strong defense but your actions just one month into office are presenting an America intent on using its military might rather than its intellectual prowess. I supported your election and I am not prepared to withdraw my support of your presidency, but if you are to be a president of true change, leading us beyond our faith and belief in war even MORE than the economics of our military industrial complex, will begin a truly evolutionary process.

cc: Your US Representative, your US Senators

"This Land Is Your Land" Like Woody Wrote It

Obama's Prayer breakfast speech

No one’s as Irish as Barack O’Bama

Geithner's Federal Bank of Chernobyl

Watching Republicans grieve – Alexandra Pelosi

America Has To Come To Grips With The Fact It Is Bankrupt

U.N. crime chief says drug money flowed into banks

Last Russian general warns US on Afghanistan

The Making of a Man - Rebecca Walker

"Boomers - Your Crisis Has Arrived" - James Quinn

Debate on Obama's Bombing of Pakistan – Juan Cole

Iraq from the Inside of an Armored BMW - Dahr Jamail

Attacks in Kabul - An Afghan boy wept outside of the Ministry of Justice

Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians "clear and undeniable"

Getting Away with Murder after Katrina - Rebecca Solnit

The Afghan Reconstruction Boondoggle - Ann Jones

The Defamation League – Eric Alterman

The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash - Glenn Greenwald

Action

Help the ALCU narrow the scope of the "state secrets" privilege

Central Asia Institute chronicled in Three Cups of Tea

Acid oceans 'need urgent action'

Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration - By Scott Horton

Uranium Mining, Native Resistance, and the Greener Path

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:31:00 +0000

The Inaugural Morning

Expectation grows full like the moon,
the cup filling with dreams and visions,
spilling over into the night sky of what may come.
Kneeling at the altar of imagination
we reach into the darkness of tomorrow
letting our inner fire spark the womb
of possibility, of creation, of kindness.
Perhaps the Earth will awaken again to our touch,
perhaps the long trance will be over,
all of this contained in the inaugural morning
beckoning us from our solitary sleep.

Inauguration Articles

Obama Inauguration Speech

Moment of history as Obama sworn in

Dr. Joseph Lowery delivers Inauguration Benediction for Barack Obama

A Change is Gonna Come

Passion and deliberate practice results in great leadership

News and Opinion

The Rights of the Land

Nuclear Power, Waste and Planetary Sustainability

Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery at Coretta Scott King's funeral

Brought to Heel: The Grim Realities Behind Bush's Humiliation in Baghdad

W.'s Twilight: A Man of Feeble Temper

Obama's impressive new OLC chief

BofA, Wells Employees Were Aboard Crashed Plane

Wounded Veterans Treated as an Afterthought

Gaza

Israelis shell hospitals and UN HQ

Gaza doctor's loss grips Israelis

How Many Divisions? – Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom, Israeli Peace Bloc

Gaza's Baffling Burnt Organs, Torn Tissues

Another War, Another Defeat - John J. Mearsheimer

A Call from Within - signed by Israeli citizens

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:45:00 +0000

The Temptation to Hate

The armies of death march upon the Earth, their weapons of destruction turned in this hour upon women and children and whoever dares to expose the gift of life. Rationales for their cruelty are as rampant as their violence, extending from base desires for land and natural resource to election advantage for Likud to the insane suggestion that those murdered are themselves to blame.

Behind this limited logic there is a more subtle and deliberate purpose – to stoke the fires of hate and promote the cult of death. Many intelligent voices declare the possibility that the craven attacks on Gaza will breed more enmity and vengeance yet that is not a threat to those who guide and control the perpetrators, rather a confirmation that their purposes will be fulfilled.

The multiple veils of worldwide propaganda are near impenetrable in obscuring true motivation. Over the last sixty years the United States government has financed the assassination and subversion of tens of foreign governments that promoted justice, stood in the way of corporate empire or opposed the international drug trade that our Central Intelligence Agency subsidizes and thrives upon.

The horror of rampant drug addiction in our poor communities nationwide was initiated by a US President and Vice President, their cabinet and the shadow government at their disposal.

Our corporations have sanctioned and supported human trafficking of women and children and the wanton rape of the Earth for profit and most abhorrent of all we’ve turned our abundant manufacturing resources into the production of prisons and the implements of war which we supply to every wrong minded government and group throughout the world.

The latest atrocities in Gaza which are armed and financed by the United States and overwhelmingly approved by our Congress are only one in a series of horrific and violent acts, yet for their grotesque and abhorrent arrogance, nearly nonpareil.

These depraved actions should and must be opposed by every conscionable citizen, but in that opposition our greater duty, our more difficult responsibility, is to be certain that in opposition we don’t succumb to the primary aim of the merchants of death, which is to lure those of good faith and fellowship into the abyss of hate.

This aim is not I suggest a byproduct of the war, but its very purpose, and in overcoming this oldest and cruelest of deceptions the forces of light and reason will be victorious.

News and Opinion

Israel in Gaza increasingly seen as Rogue State - Juan Cole

UN human rights chief accuses Israel of war crimes

Straight Talk from George Galloway on US

Difficulty Of Being An Informed American - Paul Craig Roberts

Congressman Dennis Kucinich Speaks Against House Israel Resolution

Weapons Killing People In Gaza Made In USA – Congressman Ron Paul

Olmert says called Bush and forced change in U.N. vote

War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe - Avi Shlaim

Papal response: Vatican compares Gaza to Nazi camp

Death is Our Business and Business is Good

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rules out talks with Hamas

Shock Doctrine Analysis

Palestinian Holocaust Museum

Action

Enough. It's time for a boycott of Israel - Naomi Klein

Boycott Israel Campaign

The Free Gaza Movement

The Courage to Refuse (in Israel)

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:31:00 +0000

Angels Await Our Decision

Bombs fall in demented rain
children with bodies exploded
scream to the sky
the Earth receiving
their blood with sorrow.

Cold reason finds
both sides to blame
thus no one at fault
and retreats to the library
for more study.

The Earth cannot retreat
and we are Her children.
We plead to the sky
but angels await
our decision.

There is only this time
and the ones who choose
death are determined.

Let our words be clear.
Let our will not waver.

The season is harsh
and those in the breach
depend on our choices.

Articles

Massacre of innocents as UN school is shelled

Norwegian Doctor in Gaza Decries Israeli Attacks: "It's hell in here. They are bombing 1.5M people in a cage."

Al-Fakhoura School Bombed, 42 Killed, Including Children; 13,000 Homeless, Water, Medicine in Short Supply

Iraq's Prime Minister calls on Arab states to cut ties with Israel

Israel’s Deadly Assault on Gaza – Photo Essay, Time

The Invasion of Gaza: "Operation Cast Lead", Part of a Broader Israeli Military-Intelligence Agenda

Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask - Robert Fisk, The Independent

The Monstrosity of War - Dahr Jamail

Take Action

Petition the UN Security Council, European Union, Arab League and USA: STOP THE BLOODSHED

Sign An Open Letter to President-Elect Obama: We Need a Change in Israel/Palestine Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:13:00 +0000

Collective Punishment of Gaza

No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Geneva Convention, Section 11, Article 33

Israel has maintained a privileged relationship with the United States since a portion of Palestine was partitioned to the newly created state of Israel in 1948 through United Nations Resolution 181, another British inspired “divide and rule” strategy which resulted in 780,000 Palestinian refugees.

This “privilege” continued to be guaranteed through a US based lobby for Israel both in the Congress and mainstream media, fortified in the American populace by a four decades long campaign to equate compassion for the suffering of European Jews during WWII and solidarity with the people of Israel into unquestioning support for the government of Israel and its foreign policies.

This “special relationship,” supported and defended by every American president since Eisenhower including president-elect Obama, became most emphatic during the last decade in which Israel retained suffering victim status under any circumstance with any and all Israeli military actions legitimized.

The recent attacks against Gaza extended this Israeli “privilege” to an unabashed bombardment of a tightly packed civilian area in which hundreds of people were killed whose only crime was being Palestinian. Review this web photo essay and evaluate Israel’s case for “self defense.”

Israel uses US financed armaments and munitions to wage war against a civilian population that it has caged for years in an urban prison camp, deprived of movement, food, energy or any reasonable degree of humanitarian support. The reported deaths extend to thousands of critically if not mortally wounded, suffering in ghetto like compounds where medical supplies and humanitarian aid are severely limited or unavailable due to Israeli embargo and military blockade.

Although the United Nations President called for sanctions against Israel and the Assembly of Nations was near unanimous in its condemnation of Israel’s attack, the US blocked censure through its veto power in the Security Council.

Lame duck president George Bush and his inept Secretary of State continued to parrot the near insane logic of blaming the only democratically elected political entity in the Palestinian territories (with no formal military defense force) for Israel’s aerial destruction and invasion of Gaza.

The people of Gaza have no hope in the US government and will find no solace or any viable assistance among their compromised and corrupt Arab neighbors who continue to supply Israel with fuel for their jets, bombers and tanks. Their only hope is in humanity, those who will penetrate the propaganda, be they Arab or Israeli, Jew, Christian or Muslim, and call upon their governments to not only censure but stop the war crimes of Israel and save the people of Gaza.

Breaking News

"It's Hell in Here - They are Bombing 1.5 million People in a Cage" – Juan Cole, Informed Comment

Take Action

Sign An Open Letter to President-Elect Obama: We Need a Change in Israel/Palestine Policy

Articles

Israel invades Gaza - Juan Cole, Informed Comment

If Gaza falls . . . – Sara Roy, London Review of Books

The Other Side of the Story! – Palestinian Mothers

The Politics of the Gaza Massacre - Justin Raimondo, AntiWar.com

The neighborhood bully strikes again - Gideon Levy, Haaretz Israel News

Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT - Ellen Cantarow, Counterpunch

Gaza and the world: Will things ever change? - alJazeera Magazine

Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel - Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

We Lived to Tell the Story: Lebanon Rescued Us - Cyntha McKinney, Dissident Voice

On Gaza - Starhawk

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:23:00 +0000

Children Danced on His Grave

The funeral was on island time, even the dead guy was late;
the hearse a green four wheeler driven by his friend
with an old tape deck playing Afro beat music.
As people gathered, the hand wrought pine lid
was lifted from the coffin and there lay Tony
laid out and calm with a peace we’d all know.
Old friends greeted one another,
children poured across the cemetery field,
the one room school let out for the internment.

His adopted daughter began the story circle
her tears watering the ground of his burial,
telling how years ago Tony escaped his native Budapest
clinging to the undercarriage of a train,
a revolutionary act to tyranny but just one of many steps
in a journey toward a place where he could be himself.
Friends spoke of his gamesmanship, his trickster,
his love for the cast off and castaway, akin
to his own life that arrived on this distant island
carried by the mysterious tide of freedom,
the rough cut gem of his unique soul in search
of a setting where he could love in his own way.

A single purple flower was placed upon his chest
before the pine lid was replaced with its antique cross,
then the coffin lifted down into the deep hole.
His old friend pelted him with a few stones
assuring Tony’s love for a prank was honored,
then the circle wrapped him in his last blanket,
the sandy loam of his adopted island,
the grave filling slowly, shovel by shovel,
friend by friend, each taking their turn.

When the dirt had risen a few feet it needed to be tamped
so a few adults jumped in the hole to step down the dirt,
a clear signal to the waiting children and they jumped in
filling the grave with laughter and gaiety, dancing
on the dirt over Tony’s coffin again and again, writing
an epitaph worthy of a soul who had travelled so far, so well,
a man so himself that children danced on his grave.

Ding Dong the Witch May Be Dead

Pennsylvania Avenue, January 2009

Let's Put Humanity Back on Earth

Learning to Lead

Wow! America is Cool

Day of the Citizen

World Leaders Bush No Hand Shake at G20 Summit

List of Bush Officials Indicted or Abruptly Resigned
Ed: Maddow’s “list” missed this significant Bush “departure.”
CIA Director Goss Abruptly Quits

Reflections on Obama Victory

U.S. Surrenders Power to Appoint World Bank President

Lest We Forget

He Lacks Privilege

Rich-Poor Divide Worst Among Rich Countries

The Bailout Profiteers

The Real Truth behind the Citigroup Bank Nationalization

Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose

Haunting Asia, a Brown Cloud Blots Out Sun

Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation

The Surge That Failed: Afghanistan under the Bombs

Olbermann on California Proposition 8

One Bank to Rule Them All

The Crime is Coming Unraveled

Monsters on Television

Healing Rwanda

Dangers of 'the best military'

World Wide Military Expenditures

San Francisco Mayor on Environmental and Social Justice

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Bush Cousin to Rock Legend Bo Diddley?

Vantage Point, dedicated to uncommon research and reporting, tackles any story no matter how difficult or controversial in order to bring the greater truth to you the people. Our reporting has challenged, eviscerated, gone where no blog has gone before, but we recently obtained a secret document that will rattle the halls of Congress, upset golf carts at Kennebunk and potentially overturn the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Rhythm and blues giant Bo Diddley died recently from stroke induced heart failure near his Gainesville FL home. What isn’t known is that a secret post mortem was performed in Archer FL by ex Gov. Jeb Bush’s personal physician with the shocking revelation through DNA testing and dental records proving Diddley’s parentage to be half white, his blood father one Alyre Squat. The reason for this secret inquiry - to put to rest the festering scandal, well known in European elite circles, that George W. Bush is related to both Diddley and Squat.

Diddley was raised in McComb MS by his mother’s cousin Gussie McDaniel. Previously unknown to the public was that Diddley had been born at Cedar Grove, the Walker family plantation in Faunsdale AL. The white overseer of the plantation was Alyre Squat III. Common invectives in the “quarters” of Cedar Grove alleged fathering by various generations of the Squats who drunkenly prowled the sharecropper homes in predatory hunts for women. This ignominy was believed to have been foisted upon Diddley’s black mother who gave the resultant baby up for adoption to her Mississippi cousin.

The long buried scandal which brought on the post mortem were repeated rumors over generations that Squats I & II had found their way to the “master’s house” and fathered several of the Walker children. Squat III had informed an elder Walker of this possibility in a drunken rage and had been banished from the plantation. The Walkers hid their shame for many years but the repeated childhood taunts of young George Walker Bush as “knowing Squat” led to a secretive meeting shortly before Squat III’s festering cancerous death, a knowledge Bush denied but that demonstrations throughout Europe implied with many placards proclaiming “Bush knows Squat” in an array of foreign languages, and even more embarrassingly for the proud presidential family, billboards appearing throughout Bush’s recent “legacy” tour proclaiming “Bush Knows Diddley!”

The secret meaning of these allegations escaped the American media and populace who remain enamored with a president who has presided over an apocalyptic presidency of biblically destructive proportions. Occult scientist HuNoesWat attributes the Bush demise to his family’s history of slave holdings on the shores of the upper Chesapeake and engaging slave labor in Europe prior to and during WWII. Wat traces the reasons for the denouement of Bush’s presidency to an inscrutable path along the Mississippi River with its slave history centering in the port of New Orleans and the racial tragedy that followed Hurricane Katrina to the heartland of the American farm economy collapsed under epochal flood waters along the great alluvial plain from northern Illinois to south Missouri.

During a press conference following Bush’s recent tour of mid-West flooding the president was asked about his plan concerning the historically unprecedented destruction and commented “I brought a lot of federal officials with me because it's real important that the rebuilding phase begins.” Federal officials? Local attitudes toward Bush’s reassurances were voiced by Lashawn Baker “whose family was just starting to clean her flooded home in a southwest Cedar Rapids neighborhood. ‘It took him a long time to get to New Orleans and he didn't help any of those people, so I don't think he's going to do anything to help Cedar Rapids now that he's here.’"

When queried about pre-flood preparations, the state of the river levee system, the deteriorating infrastructure of the United States, global warming and a number of important related issues Bush seemed to fall back on the issue that is tormenting him and denied knowing Squat, as well as Diddley, despite the rhythmic roots displayed during his 2007 tour of West Africa.

As Vantage Point goes to press whether Bush is indeed distant cousin to the deceased rock legend will only be proven if the results of his DNA tests are released from the Cheney vaults buried far below the granite fastness of a secret Wyoming location. Although the Bush Diddley Squat familial connections may remain forever in doubt what appears certain is that Bush never personally knew Diddley and that according to all the recorded history soon to be enshrined in the Bush Presidential Library, Bush has never known Squat.

Epilogue

Unfortunately in these matters of great national importance there are those in the political milieu who seize the opportunity to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the public. John McCain who has never known Squat thrust himself further into the category with his expressed interest in a reward for automotive battery invention as a cure for the energy crisis facing the civilized world. Not to be left out of the limelight, Barrack Obama professed a new found understanding of Diddley in his recent nuanced stance on FISA and telecom immunity and the removal of gun controls from Washington DC although violent crime has been declining since 1990 when the city was known as the murder capital of the United States. Hope remains for Senator Obama although the temptation to horn in on and even mimic Bush’s knowledge of Diddley Squat is sorely tempting to any preeminent American politician.

Top Links

McClatchy Series on US Torture

RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) Issues Global Stock and Credit Crash Alert

The Fed and Its Mad Money

The Hedonists of Power

Preparing The Battlefield (in Iran)

The Sad Death of a Dangerous American

Action

Petition to End Israel’s Restrictions on Freedom of Movement and the Press

Amnesty International – Spotlight on Torture

Support Iraq Veterans Against the War

Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran

Save the Tongass National Forest

The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education

Cynthia McKinney Joins Cindy Sheehan Campaign For Congress

Earth

Katrina in Slow Motion

Corps of Engineers' Projects Magnifying Flooding

Peak Oil Movement Is Unprepared For Its Two Biggest Challenges

Big Bad Boom: Radioactive Déjà Vu in the American West

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill

Sea of Trash

Economy

Ron Paul on Inflation and Bellicosity Toward Iran Causing Energy Cost Increases

Morgan Stanley warns of 'catastrophic event' as ECB fights Federal Reserve

Barclays warns of a financial storm as Federal Reserve's credibility crumbles

Goldman singles out Citi as brokerage ratings cut: $9 billion in write-downs cited

Global markets reel after first-half carnage

Bear Stearns Brokers Busted

Market Full of Oil, Price Trend Possible "Fake"

Russian Drilling Research Suggests 'Peak Oil' May Be Misleading

Election 2008

Not Sure There is a Real McCain

McCain's Secret, Questionable Record

Theft of Nation by ENRON Connected Directly to Senator Phil Gramm & McCain

Obama's Israel Shuffle

International

LA Times Series on Food Diplomacy

The Semantics of Bush's Torture Policy

Exodus: Cross-border views of the latest wave of migration from Mexico

U.S. Not Likely to Try Bush officials for War Crimes - but a European Country Will

Iraq

The Real State of Iraq

The Oil Majors Take a Sip of the Ol' Patrimony

The Haditha Massacre and What It Means to be an Empire

Baghdad Calling
(Ed: Photo collection by Iraqis from the war zone.)

Iraq Major Source of Refugees in 2007

Israel

“Apartheid Road” 443

US Policy and the Pro-Israel Lobby: A University in Jerusalem Takes on the Debate

Palestine Amidst a Region in Flux: Signs of Accommodation and Fears of War

The Spy Who Loves Us: Israel’s Mossad Spying on US

French Leader Sarkozy Targeted By Assassins in Israel, 2 Dead

National

This Land is Their Land

Techno-Fascism: Every Move You Make

US Nuclear Weapons Parts Missing

How the Russert Test Failed America

The Camptown Ladies Sing Behind the Concertina Wire
“A government is only as good as the people that represent and administer it.”

Bush/Cheney Administration

When Anonymity Fails, Be Nasty, Brutish and Short

Kucinich Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush
(Ed: Important 4th of July reading.)

US General Tuguba Accuses Bush Administration of War Crimes

George W Bush is a Saint

Essays

Consumer Confidence at All Time Low by Bob Chapman

Taking Back The Republic by Gore Vidal

Eulogies for Tim Russert Ignore His Role as War Party's Sounding Board by Justin Raimondo

American History

Dark Alliance: The Story about the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Books

Blue Shaman - Stone of Sovereignty

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

Music

Tinariwen – Water is Life

Neutral Milk Hotel - The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. I

Tim Eriksen - Amazing Grace

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:16:00 +0000

What May Fill the Human Heart

The rituals of war are the altar sacrifice
of our collective confusion.
We think to put a bloody ram
upon the broken table
thinking the blade and the blood
will give us merit with the God
we have forgotten.
No remembrance comes
from this pointless sacrifice,
no feeling from the recurring violence,
only the increased numbing
of our once rich and fertile hearts.
The argument, the altar, the sacrifice,
these are the instruments
of the delusional priesthood,
the deceptive magicians
who steer our misbegotten course.

Deep in the mountain
there is a creek winding back
to a green and fertile canyon
abandoned by the merchants and slavers,
producing nothing worthy of sale
except ancient trees set in glacial silt,
rooted down to middle earth.
In that forgotten place
where the creek runs cold and brilliant
She awaits the lover She lost
when the Earth shifted
and he became dupe to the engines of war.
She knew his once bright fire
and is not fooled by what he has become.
She rests in her obscurity,
the cedars and firs Her guardians,
the rocks and flowing water
Her touch stone and glimmer
of continuing presence.

She waits the time foretold of his awakening
amidst the bloody remains
of his brutal and ignorant practice.
She knows the greater Light is needed
and She feels that stirring in Her soul,
sending a message to all Her frightened children:
“The Light is returning, the Light!
Now may he awaken and allow his love for Me
to once again fill his heart.”

The human world knows little of this prayer
and less of the sacred place where it is spoken,
yet the magic of incantation has its way;
as the wages of war diminish,
the bankruptcy and dawning light
combine to bring new awareness.
In the quietness of this sacred moment
between what was, what is and what is yet to be
the wholeness of creation takes a first new breath.

Top Links

What it means when the US goes to war
(Ed: Hedges takes no prisoners in a moral sense and is no respecter of persons or nation states.)

US Supreme Court upholds habeas corpus for Guantánamo Bay prisoners

Articles Of Impeachment filed by Congressman Kucinich

Kucinich Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush

Be Careful What You Say...

Net Neutrality

Action

Grow the grassroots movement of people speaking out against a U.S. war with Iran

Canada says "sorry." Will we?

Take-Action Toolbox: Center for Biological Diversity

Earth

Oglala Sioux could regain Badlands national parkland

China, Tibet, and the strategic power of water

China clearly overtakes U.S. as leading emitter of climate-warming gases

A legacy of salt in Uzbekistan

Election 2008

It's a Mitzvah
“A mere 12 hours after claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday -- and changed himself into an Israel hard-liner.”

No, I Can't!
Uri Avnery on Obama’s Speech to Aipac

Angry Clinton Women ♥ McCain?

Obama's Chicago Boys

John McCain: War Hero or Collaborator?

Economy

Suburbia: The Next Slum?

Oil prices seep into asphalt costs, detour road work

Fade to black: Is this the end of oil?

Voice of the White House on Oil Bubble

Lehman posts $2.8 billion loss

International

European Parliament passes Depleted Uranium resolution in landslide vote

Ireland votes against Lisbon Treaty

Lebanon and the West's Weapon of Self-delusion

The Failed Expectations of U.S Trade Policy

Bil’in, a Village in Palestine

Iraq/Iran

Iran's Khamenei: Bush 'mentally ill'

Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
(Ed: The internet broadcast of the Bush “deal you can’t refuse” to Iraq demanding permanent occupation gave the puppet government newfound strength to deny capitulation.)

'Special Weapons' Fallout in Iraq

The Love Stories Are Gone

National

Air Force leadership fired over nuclear issue
(Ed: Struggle within the Administration and highest command military concerning escalating war in the middle East.)

U.S. Military's Middle East Crusade for Christ

Garrisoning the Global Gas Station

Bad Cow Disease

The End of the Internet?

Bush/Cheney Administration

Senate committee: Bush knew Iraq claims weren't true

US holding terror suspects on prison ships

Bush considering new measures to stimulate economy
(Ed: Watch this brief video carefully. Clue: moving lips indicate lying.)

Music

Thunder On The Mountain – Bob Dylan

Sky Burial – Dadawa

A Black American – Smoky Robinson

John Lee Hooker & Van Morrison

Essays

A Woman Who Broke Poetry's Glass Ceiling

Revolutions per Minute: Radical transformation is all around us

The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:21:00 +0000

The Bush Gang’s Got the Money but Can They Get Out of Dodge?

“Watching Scottie grow” has become the latest soap in the day time drama of what used to be government by, for, etc. Never has a collection of the innocent from McClellan to Gonzales to Bush himself had their virtue so stained by such unambiguous trust. That they all lied to each other seems unworthy of attention but that the ultimate target is always the messenger and bury the message all are agreed.

McClellan is the first insider with Bush Deaf Con Highest Security clearance to break from the circled wagons. Arch criminal Rove declares it isn’t Scottie, just a lookalike left wing blogger. But beneath the pie throwing crudity that is the underlying character of the Bush minions, a tectonic shift is occurring. The Republican Corporate Party (not to be confused with the Democratic Corporate Party) delegated one of their true believers to drive a wedge between the puppets in power and those with their paws on the lever. If Bush goes under the proverbial bus whose bus is it and who will be left standing?

Hiding behind their flag pins and absurd canards the privileged have soaked the populace, sent their children off to die and drained the national treasury. Their corruption was debated along the fault lines of principle masked with a toxic blend of confusion, patriotism and art deco American fascism. But it has never been about principle (see duh!). It’s about money, as much of it as the octopus could drain with its body centered on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue, tentacles stretching from the Pentagon to Houston to Dubai, Baghdad and every life blood resource on the planet, sucking the proverbial well dry.

You don’t miss your water the Appalachian verse goes and missing it the people will surely be as the venality and brute theft of the Bush Gang becomes as horrifyingly obvious to the people of the United States as it has been to our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan, New Orleans and Gaza. Our friends to the South learned in the painful way through years of dirty wars, violent CIA sponsored dictators and death squads, banana and oil coveting industrialists, to fashion a new and evolving politic, lighting the lamp of hope among the oppressed and free thinking.

Here in the USA a wisdom teacher posed this scene and question to those of us who know but seek direction:

It will be much like a town meeting: You will be there with others and led by someone who organized the event. Someone who facilitates or leads the meeting will ask for suggestions, directions, guidance, insights and leadership from those in the audience. The audience may number five or six, to five or six hundred. In a crisis as this when everyone is numbed after the physical events that they have suffered through, who will say anything? Who will come forward? Who will raise their hands? I am asking you to raise your hand, and say what you must say, raise your hand and say, “I know a way.”

That day, that hour, that moment may be more starkly present in the future but it is also here and now. Individually and collectively it is time to raise our hands and provide direction. The call of leadership is not the adolescent fantasy of slashing swords and waving wands but the articulated intelligence of the dedicated heart that knows a cow pie from a garden meadow. Email and Internet are powerful tools and as yet unhindered. It’s time for a shout out brothers and sisters. Let's meet at the OK before the desperadoes escape. Let your Self be known!

Top Links

Body of War

Where Is the Outrage?
Ed: Complicity in torture revealed in lengthy government report. Nation’s reaction: pass the chips.

Daniel Berrigan: Forty Years After Catonsville
"The fall of the towers [on 9/11] was symbolic as well as actual," he adds. "We are bringing ourselves down by a willful blindness that is astonishing."

16 Documented Cases of Corruption at the Highest Levels of US Gov’t
A former high-ranking career member of the CIA, now retired, offers testimony on how Halliburton, the CIA, the Pentagon and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been stealing billions of dollars.

The Great Oil Swindle: How Much Did The Fed Really Know?

Treasons and Assassinations, Treachery and War

All the President's Nazis (Real and Imagined): An Open Letter to Bush

Action

Oppose the McCain-Lieberman nuclear power grab

Join Congressman’s Wexler’s call for Cheney Impeachment Hearings

Petition for Leonard Peltier Executive Clemency

Iraq / Iran

An Open Letter to the Pietro Sambi Apostolic Nuncio to the United States
Concerning your defense of the moral relativism of the U.S. Catholic Bishops regarding the unjust war on the people of Iraq.

Through Occupation, The Very Dreams Change

Will Sistani End The War In Iraq?

Statistics and Studies Show Why Rampant PTSD in Returning US Military

Veterans Administration Director: PTSD and TBI "Overblown" - More Like "Football" Injuries

Cindy Sheehan's Memorial Day

Earth

Her Undamaged Self

The Greatest Danger

Is Water Becoming ‘The New Oil’?

Evolve or die: Can we shed our moral primitivism before it’s too late?

Apocalypse in the Oceans

The Fatherland of Apples

Forced by Court Order, Climate Science Agency Issues Long-overdue Report

Vast Cracks Appear in Arctic Ice

Beyond Blubberland: In the land of the super plenty

Election 2008

Ron Paul Gets Best Primary Finish Yet

John McCain's Navy Flight Instructor Weighs In
I was John McCain's Navy Flight Instructor --- in formation tactics and air-to-air-gunnery. I shudder at the nightmare thought of this man becoming our next President and Commander in Chief. - CDR Jerry K. Loeb, USN (Ret.)

Is Obama big enough to ask Hillary onto the ticket despite RFK gaffe?
Ed: It is with severe self-loathing that I admit this opinion could make political sense.

McCain (Mis) Speaks

Poor sales kill Bush-McCain event
Ed: Where have all those valiant "pioneers" gone?

Economy

Paying $20 for a $5 bag of shit

Fed to keep making bank loans available to ease credit stresses
Ed: None of this money is hitting the street. Commerical deals have dried up nationwide. This money is being given to Banks by the Fed to shore up their horrendous balance sheets.

Sears majesty to hedge-fund dust

Silverjet Stops Flights as Oil Costs Cripple Industry
Ed: Gov’t inflation figures are falsified to control inflation based Federal entitlements.

The Old Titans All Collapsed. Is the U.S. Next?

International

111 Nations, Minus the U.S., Agree to Cluster-Bomb Ban
Ed: This moral abscess in our nation is not only because of the desire for power without hindrance but more venomously because the US is the chief producer of this terror weapon.

The Capitalist Ground Shaken by the Earthquake in China

US academic deported and banned for criticizing Israel

National

Court: Sect children should be returned to parents
Ed: The forced abduction of these children by State Authorities was a police state action that should have caused an outcry in America.

In search of reconciliation, gentrifying Portland opens a dialogue

The Pentagon's Expansion Will Be Bush's Lasting Legacy

Bush/Cheney Administration

Detainees Drugged For Deportation
The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

Bush's True Calling: An American president in Israel

George W Bush Authorized 911 Attacks Says Government Insider

USA Military Officers Challenge Official Account of September 11

The Case of the Missing Scandal
Ed: Whatever happened to the FBI investigation of the Office of Special Counsel?

Charles Pierce on Scott McClellan or “Watching Scottie Grow”

Bush Family History

The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement

‘Frauds-R-Us’: The Bush Family Saga

A Nazi in the (pocket) is worth four in the Bush (family)

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:28:00 +0000

Driving the Stake

“To fail here is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforth become foul things of the night like him – without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love.”
- Mina Harker’s Journal, 30 September

Bram Stoker penned this warning in his classic “Dracula” through his protagonist Dr. Van Helsing, articulating a deep set fear beyond personal injury to becoming one of the un-dead himself. In the presence of the vampire the living are subject to a parasitic trance, a paralysis of the will held in grotesque sway while their life blood is drained. It was this immobility Van Helsing warned against as the greatest danger in opposing the ghoul.

Fiction allows for a dramatization we’re reluctant to perceive or acknowledge with the rational portion of our mind. We satirize the ignorance and callousness of our President and his minions but hesitate before the certain knowledge of what he is and what our nation is becoming through his poisonous leadership.

Like Dracula’s victims we appear immobilized by the horror of war and continued military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. We are saturated by mass information with few exceptions that spread the propaganda of terror and fear while within the herd we take off our shoes and empty our suitcases before a coterie of Wackenhut pseudo cops.

The corporate media project further war in the Middle East as if it were the decision of our personal Caligula beyond the will of the people while every high office in the land has been corrupted.

The vice president and the president’s family directly profit from the war machine they loosed upon the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Justice Department has been reduced to a contemptible charade by an ignoble and shameless puppet of the president now replaced by a zealot who condones torture.

The Senate and House of Representatives have proved unable or unwilling to put a stop to the horror of foreign wars while 191 Congressmen profit from them even though ending the war in Iraq was the clear and overwhelming mandate of the recent national elections.

Top ranking military officers with honor and conscience are forcibly removed under the cover of resignation, from General Shinseki who correctly predicted the cost of invading Iraq to General Taguba who exposed Abu Graib, from Admiral Fallon who opposed the Neocon madness of nuclear war against Iran and spoke bluntly about media hero David Petraeus to most recently Capt. Michael P. McNellis, Commander Of Carrier Air Wing 5 of The Kitty Hawk, removed because men of conscience will not be tolerated by the current regime.

The candidates in our presidential primaries are competing to see who can out-fawn their competition in regard to the Israel lobby even though studies have clearly shown that the American Jewish population is largely opposed to the Bush Neocon agenda.

Citizen paralysis is underscored by the cowardice of our elected officials, by repulsion at the militarism we are funding abroad and the violence of poverty our government’s outrageous war spending is causing in our own nation.

Psychological analyses demonstrate that on average only 15-17% of a population are willing to think independently, to challenge the herd mentality of the mass. This may appear a depressing statistic but in fact it enforces the crucial responsibility of the minority to refuse to succumb to the sickening dread of the population at large and to continue to affirm and expand the moral importance of individual freedom of conscience and action.

It is the irony of the vampire’s fate as Stoker describes it to rely on the goodness and virtue of the soil within the coffin to which he retreats at daybreak. The strategy of those who must end his bloodlust is not to fall prey to his sub-human means and methods but to re-sanctify the soil of his resting place.

The universe is a sacred and holy creation and though we find our culture in this dark night of the soul it is our duty to re-sanctify what has been despoiled. President Carter and his wife Rosalynn have been at least as effective as citizen advocates for peace and justice as their tenure in the White House afforded. We each have that same individual power and sovereignty, the authority and responsibility to drive a stake into the heart of the creature that is sucking the life from our nation and unhinge the door from the odious tomb threatening our future.

We can articulate the good road for our children and grandchildren and reaffirm this truth for our fellows. We can clearly and unequivocally affirm the road of peace, the ethic of compassion, the practice of forgiveness, the central way of enlightenment and evolution. Here lies the dawn of understanding beyond the night of the un-dead.

“It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”
- Etty Hillesum quoted in The Open Road

Top Links

Mr. Bush: Shut the Hell Up!

Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity

Immigration agency plans new family detention centers

Action

China Earthquake

Online Petition for Executive Clemency for Leonard Peltier

Iraq / Iran

US confession: Weapons in Iraq were not made in Iran after all

The Hard Truth on Sadr City, Iraq; and the Deplorable Treatment of Veterans in America

How under-the-gun Iran plays it cool

Secret Bush "Finding" Widens War on Iran

Earth

Oxygen-poor ocean zones are growing

Beaches suffer as walls go up

Chaiten Volcano Special Report

China mourns earthquake victims

Mother Earth Gaia

The Defining Moment for Climate Change

Election 2008

The Daily Show's Primary Wrap: West Virginia and a Chris Matthews "Douche-Off"

Obama vs. the Lobby

The Cynic and Senator Obama

Obama's Money Cartel

Study Shows Conservative Blog Coverage of Obama Largely Focuses on Non-Policy Issues

The REAL McCain

Subliminal Fox Advertising

Economy

Damages Will Take Many Years to Mend

CITI is Beyond Repair

Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know

International

Burma's Desperate Hour

Asking the Tough Questions – Invade Burma!?

Tibet, China and the Dalai Lama

Changing the World One (photographic) Shot at a Time

The Truth About Zimbabwe

Famous Are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then--and Now

Bush/Cheney Administration

Kitty Hawk air wing commander removed for ‘loss of confidence’

Voice of the White House, 5-16-08

Beware the Psychopath, My Son

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sat, 03 May 2008 20:35:00 +0000

Choosing Higher Ground

The default to blame is a long standing operative in the human psyche, the shedding of self reflection and accountability by laying responsibility for what troubles one onto another. Whatever is wrong, whatever ails must be the fault of those different, those who live beyond the tribal boundary, the city wall, the border fence. Those who are not like us are the cause of our discomfort and they must be separated, subdued and if necessary, destroyed.

It’s an old, old story, finding root in the jealousy and vengeance of Cain, the apartheid between Ishmael and his brother Isaac, the burning stake of the middle ages and the blood red cross of the crusaders, the ignominy of slavery and the white hooded ignorance that followed, the untouchable, the terrorist and the unflagging lineup of those qualified to cast the first stone.

As I watched Senator Obama distance himself from the man who has been his church pastor for twenty years I felt a great sadness. Reverend Wright had spoken so eloquently in his hour with Bill Moyers and that dignity and intelligence along with Senator Obama’s bridging oratory on race appeared to be drawing America back from the chasm of racial divide, the wound opened self-servingly by the Clinton campaign and inflamed by the right wing.

What overtook Reverend Wright? Some say it was just press frenzy but here was a good and thoughtful man feeding it. Perhaps as a retired elder minister the national spotlight was too much. Much of what he said was true but his obvious pleasure in finally returning the scorn that had surely been heaped upon him many times as an African American and clergyman was raw meat for the media.

For whatever reason he broke from the ground Obama had founded his campaign upon and in that denial required Obama to divide himself from him, an act that denigrated the promise the Obama campaign had ignited throughout the primary, weakening the fragile fabric of renewal against the underlying despair about our government and misdirected leadership.

Many will enjoy this weakening, find satisfaction in the naiveté of ideal ineffective against long standing prejudice. Many support the tweedle dum tweedle dee theory of politics, “all the candidates get big money, all are sullied, all are the same” generic analysis which should have long ago been resigned to the ash bin after comparing the disaster of the Bush presidency beside what would have occurred under our rightfully elected president Al Gore.

We were gifted with a brilliant seed in the founding of the United States but that seed had to take root in a land and people already corrupted by genocide and slavery. We’ve opted for exceptionalism as an antidote, thinking ourselves better than the rest, “a city on a hill,” and displayed the audacity to cheer a president who demanded the world choose between “us and them,” them ultimately being anyone who dared oppose our will, our desire, those “others.”

Our current madness now includes 460 children torn from their parents at gunpoint in Texas. One purported complaint, some percentage of possible real issues and hundreds of children and families wrested from their homes, isolated behind a Stalinist wall of bureaucratic incarceration. The women wore long dresses, braided hair, married their cousins, low fashion quotient. Other.

The story is not yet finished, not of this campaign, of this nation, but in this time of planetary crisis, from waning energy to global pollution, from collapsing economies to an often starving and over populated world, these manifold problems and more demand that we work together creatively and collaboratively toward the higher good. Scapegoating was never a solution and today it only means regression, repression and continuing violence.

There are mature models of evolving intelligence amongst us, most recently President Carter in his dignified and eloquent approach to the charnel descent of the Middle East. These are the examples we must emulate, elevate and follow. The legacy of Cain is comfort to the ignorant but it promises nothing for the path forward we must create together if we are to grow beyond the simple mindedness of black and white, the prejudices and bigotries that reduce us, and choose the direction of increasing complexity, compassion, intelligence, and yes, hope.

Top Links

Pentagon Propaganda and the Media Stonewall
Retired military officers, who often appeared as objective analysts in the media, met with Rumsfeld to construct carefully honed messages. What’s been missing from the coverage of this story is any significant reaction or follow-up from the networks themselves or the other unwitting participants in this propaganda program.

The Last War and the Next One: Descending into Madness in Iraq -- and Beyond
Gates describes our war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called the 'Long War' [i.e. Bush's War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."

Pariah Diplomacy by Jimmy Carter
A counterproductive Washington policy in recent years has been to boycott and punish political factions or governments that refuse to accept United States mandates. This policy makes difficult the possibility that such leaders might moderate their policies.

Bill Moyers Interview of Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Bill Moyers Essay on Jeremiah Wright
"beware the terrible simplifiers"

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Take Action

Robert Kennedy, Greg Palast: The Final Investigation?
One million Democrats attempting to vote in this year’s primaries found their names missing from voter rolls. Law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and journalist Greg Palast are launching an investigation.

Support the Global Online Freedom Act, H.R. 275

Protect Coral Reef Habitat

Earth

Gray Thunder: Listening to Elephants
Elephants are exhibiting symptoms of a much larger malaise: the breakdown of not just habitat and family structure, but also of mind across an entire species.

Richard Heinberg on Resilient Communities

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

Election 2008

Hillary Clinton: Race to the Bottom

Divert, Distract, and Demonize: The War Party's strategy to sink Barack Obama

The Queen of Pork

Corporate America Hearts Obama

The Pastor Casts a Shadow

Bowling 1, Health care 0 by Elizabeth Edwards

McCain, Hagee and the Politics of God's Wrath

Economy

Costs killing Maine farmers

Dumb as We Wanna Be
The unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks.

Bankrupt Our Kids

The Precious Metals Market is Manipulated

The decline and fall of the American empire of debt

International

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales Urges Development Of Economic System Based On ‘How To Live Well’

“Bishop of Poor” Fernando Lugo Wins Paraguayan Election

Iraq

Mission Accomplished Fifth Anniversary
The words of Chris Matthews and the rest who drank the Kool-Aid for Bush on Mission Accomplished Day speak for themselves. Sarcasm really isn't appropriate because this isn't about a film star or a movie, it's about tens of thousands of human beings dead or wounded and hundreds of thousands more who suffer because of the ignorance of a few well placed individuals and the money trough they feed.

On that supposedly victorious day five years ago I stood on line at a local music store reminiscing about the President's actual military career or lack thereof and the sham of his appearance as a top gun. Next to me happened to be a man who took strong issue with my mocking words who had a son serving in Afghanistan at the time.

I apologized for what it was worth, not for my comments about the President but for whatever insult it might have provided to him and his son's service. We had a long heartfelt talk actually and he said despite what may have happened in the past we needed to give the President a break, let his actions as Commander in Chief speak for themselves.

It's five years later. The rest of the story has now been told, at least up until this bitter anniversary.

Gates Lies About Maliki And Sadr

Poverty Gets the Survivors

Please Let Me Marry Her and Then Kill Me

National

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Bad for the Jews by Eric Alterman
According to the American Jewish Committee's 2007 survey of American Jewry, released Dec. 11, a majority of Jews in the United States oppose virtually every aspect of the Bush administration / neocon agenda.

How a coterie of Republican heavyweights sent a governor to jail

Bush/Cheney Administration

Bush admits he approved torture by Helen Thomas
Bush acknowledged in an interview with ABC-TV that he knew about and approved "enhanced interrogation" of detainees, including "waterboarding" or simulated drowning. "As a matter of fact," Bush added, "I told the country we did that. And I told them it was legal. We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it."

Petraeus, Falling Upwards: Selling the President's General

View from the Right

If I Were President by Chuck Baldwin
If I were President, I would begin the process of safely extracting our troops from Iraq. In the first place, our troops are no longer fighting a war, they are an occupation force, which occupies a sovereign country. And this is being done without a Declaration of War. The Iraqi people resent our occupation as much as we would resent another nation stronger than ours invading and occupying America. If such a thing happened to our beloved country, I'm sure many of us would also become "insurgents."

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:18:00 +0000

The Next Generation

The cyclical movements of generational advance and retreat go largely unstudied with the exceptions of consumer advertising and pop culture. Much has been written about the “baby boomers” and “generation X” but little has been considered or applied to this phenomenon beyond sound bites and seductive advertising. The brilliant historical study The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe panoramically portray a twenty year four times over generational cycle that has dominantly and predictably influenced current events from the colonization of North America to the present. To understand the 2008 presidential contest as a difference of platforms or parties is to largely miss the point. The race between Obama, Clinton and McCain is about three different generations, with all their inherent strengths and weaknesses being fought out in an arena which is too often contemptible of complexity but which this critical juncture in our national and world history demands.

McCain is part of the “silent” generation who have not yet elected a United States president from their age group. Born between 1929 and 1945 they were the children of the great depression and WWII, a time of crisis when individual aspirations were subordinate to larger world wide struggles. George Bush Sr and Jimmy Carter, born in 1924 and 1923 respectively, are of the previous generation, as was JFK, young “heroes” of WWII and the Cold War, who came of age during national crisis. McCain, born in 1936, was 31 when shot down in a bombing run over North Vietnam, his family history shaped by prior generations of Navy admirals and Naval Academy life but whose own war had none of the supposed clarity of the previous global struggles and whose own heroism was largely defined by time served as a POW. There is much about McCain’s war record that demands further scrutiny, something he prevents by being almost alone in his Senate fight to forcibly keep secret Vietnam era POW and MIA records, but beyond his personal idiosyncrasies and foibles is a man who has devoted his political life to the art of compromise.

This strategy is born in the bone to this “silent” generation whose young lives were studiously and often punishingly subservient to the critical events they could only witness and admire. Perhaps this background offers some rationale for the almost inexplicable twists and turns of McCain from his humiliation at the hands of George Bush and Karl Rove in the 2000 Republican presidential primary by a smear campaign against McCain’s own family that morphed into the famously lame public hug of Bush by McCain in the 2004 election; his long fight against big government and big spending seemingly forgotten in his present support of the trillion dollar war against Iraq and the bail out of Wall Street billionaires by public funding. American voters may like McCain as does the press, particularly his professed image as a “straight talker,” but they’ve never put their faith in electing such a president (Mike Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and John Kerry).

Hillary Clinton forms the third leg of what history will surely describe as an infamous generational stool that includes her husband Bill and George Bush Jr. Born between 1946 and 1963, the year of the Kennedy assassination; they are the war children of the national “high” that followed the previous twenty year crisis. Few limits were placed upon them as children and despite the glaring differences between Bill Clinton raised in an Arkansas working poor dysfunctional family to Andover bred George Bush who enjoyed an equally dysfunctional yet thoroughly entitled upbringing, their (and my) generation are marked by a decided belief in their ability to run things better than their parents. This has required an ongoing attendance by those same predecessor “silents” to keep the effects of their policies and behaviors “cleaned up” (Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell).

Their hubris is complemented by a predilection for big picture ideas and generalities, a penchant for self indulgence and addiction in private but an increasingly conventional moral posture in public, and the fomenting of non-stop culture wars bred from an unreflective tendency toward polarization and fundamentalism (Rush Limbaugh, John Hagee). Think on these qualities and observe how they apply to Hillary Clinton. You will find an overlay that fits her persona, her public life both real and contrived, and her candidacy which appeals to her generation and in lesser measure to those older but little to those younger who have been following in the wake of boomer leadership and are now faced with a dysfunctional government and an imploding economy.

Born in 1961 Barack Obama could be among the oldest of the baby boomers but if his personal identification and political approach are analyzed he in his cusp year of birth is easily seen as among the oldest of the next generation, children of the societal "awakening" that took place between 1963 and 1984, the “nomads” of generation X who were often ignored or left to their own devices as children, who are more concerned with getting things done (Eric Schmidt & Sergey Brin of Google) than with the arguing or endless talk of their parents (Jerry Springer, Don Imus, Joe Biden). Their pragmatism can as easily embody compromise as hard position but always with the goal of achieving the task (Michael Jordan “just do it”) more than making the point.

They aged more quickly than their boomer counterparts, seemingly more mature at forty (Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill) than some boomers at sixty, and have developed through adversity a maturity for practice over precept. You can read Obama’s frustration through his disciplined demeanor as he is baited by absurdly polarizing boomer questions by Tim Russert or attends to the false Muslim allegations and race baiting of the Clinton team embodied by the acidicly divisive boomer James Carville, desperate for some edge over their highly skilled and increasingly popular opponent. If elected Obama will be the first of a new generation moving into their twenty year cycle of national leadership, the hand off from a President who like the alcoholic studies his generation championed, has careened from catastrophe to catastrophe leaving behind an animal house policy aftermath that seemed humorous only thirty short years ago.

Speaking to my fellow “boomers” who Strauss & Howe also term a “prophet” generation: are we ready to give up the pretense of eternal youth and its accompanying indulgence and become elders who will participate as much as pontificate? Can we actively support the next generation of managerial leaders who take the field littered by the effects of our generation’s governmental and economic leadership? Can we hunker down with those born after 1984 (the year of the second Reagan inaugural that marked the end of the awakening of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the beginning of a cultural and political unraveling), the young millennial “heroes” who will come of age during the surely coming crisis, who will put self behind service and will need all the support and wisdom their “elders” can provide?

We gave rise to the rebirth of organic farming, holistic medicine, the Beatles for chrissakes! Surely we can steward this epochal fourth turning with wisdom and grace. We needn’t bow to the cynicism that has been deliberately sown over the last twenty years but neither should we turn a blind eye to the depravity and difficulty that those who follow us into their time of leadership surely face. We can carry the burden of our past as well as the promise of a future, acting with sobriety and speaking with hope to our children and grand children. In that place of balance we may support those who must now take the helm of our nation’s governance, with all the graciousness and understanding we can muster.

Top Four Articles
IRAQ: 'Handed Over' to a Government Called Sadr
Hillary Clinton: Serious Questions about Ability and Integrity As Watergate Attorney
Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons
Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional

New Directions
Constitution for the United States of America
Ed: It's more than a "goddamned piece of paper."
Leadership Insitute for Global Healing and Transformation
Fangafrika
Fresh Ideas for a Tired Crusade (Tim Egan on the "War on Drugs")

Earth
Corporate Buying Organic
The Peak Oil Crisis: Load Shedding
Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?
Grains Gone Wild
Wolves Are Back, Humans Are Howling

Action
Say No to a New Generation of Nuclear Weapons
Support Amnesty International and Support Tibetan Freedom
Our Learned Helplessness

International
Chinese Police Fire on Tibetan Protesters; 8 Die
Chinese activist gets 3 years in pre-Olympics crackdown
NATO Marches Eastward
The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence
Kosovo: The US and the EU support a Political Process linked to Organized Crime
A New Diplomatic Order in Pakistan

Election 2008
Wall Street drives White House campaign cash flow
Closing the message gap
Obama in American history by Howard Zinn
Media wrong on Wright

Economy
Lenders Swamped By Foreclosures Let Homeowners Stay
Consumer Price Index underestimates inflation
Fed's New Term Securities Auction Facility (TSAF) Explained
A Vicious Circle ending in a Systemic Financial Meltdown

Iraq
“Tet” Happened (Basra offensive) and No One Cared
More Than 1,000 in Iraq’s Forces Quit Basra Fight
Embarrassed US Disowns Basra Operation
U.S. admits Special Forces fight in Basra
Why Did the US Invade Iraq? - by Jim Lobe

National
US lawmakers have as much as $196 million invested in defense companies
Apathetic Pastors And Christians Killing America By Chuck Baldwin

Bush/Cheney Administration
The General and the Trap
CIA / Bush wars against Panama, Iran Contra, Iraq and now Iran
The Green Light for Torture: Politics & Power

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:24:00 +0000

Barack Obama's Speech on Racism In America

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Articles of Note

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime
By Eliot Spitzer

The USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
by Dmitry Orlov

Spirit and Stardust
by U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich

The Battle of Baghdad
By Michael Schwartz

Winter Soldiers Sound Off
by Dahr Jamail

Red Cross Report on Iraq Humanitarian Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:22:00 +0000

Facing East

"President Bush just vetoed a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from "harsh interrogations" which included the torture of water boarding. In doing so, Bush again flaunted the US Constitution which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. For centuries the US has been the beacon of democracy and social justice for all the world to see. In vetoing this bill, Bush has shown the world that the US condones torture. Hopefully, the world will see that Bush does not represent the American people (he certainly doesn't represent me). Nevertheless, I consider Bush to be a blot on the history of America. May his memory die with him. Bush is a man who is contra to everything that America stands for. For shame, Mr. Bush, for shame. I wonder what's next for this despicable man. How about sawing off the uplifted arm of the Statue of Liberty?"
Richard Russell, Dow Theory Letter

"During twenty-two years of confinement (in a Chinese gulag), although I could not remember the sixty four gua (hexagrams), I fully comprehended the Tao of I, the essence of the I Ching, which holds that when events proceed to their extremes they give birth to their opposites. Every day I read the official six-page newspaper as carefully as I could, not missing a single word. As I saw the situation of my country deteriorating, my heart became lighter. I knew after the long darkness there would be a dawn. When the darkness grew darker and darker, the dawn drew closer and closer."
Taoist Master Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching

Facing East

Long days and nights continue
under the present tyranny;
injustice has become the norm,
every form of poor substance
replacing value and merit,
abuse of the powerless so horrific
even to contemplate becomes a poison.
Like a bloated animal
it is best not to prod
but allow inner corruption
to complete the beast’s fate.
Awaiting opportunities for return
I rest in the darkness
and face east with hope.
I cannot sense the planet turning
but observe movement by the stars.
With the season winter,
the nights yet long,
I use my faith like an anchor
to purchase a hold
and look toward the morning.

Editor: The shamans of old described the vast matrix of Earth’s interconnected life force as the wyrd and their communication and influence transcended the limits of time and space as we know them. However today we have the Internet, the global medium of connection which like the wyrd brings all events and people into the potential of collective awareness. Posting the articles that follow are intended to “tremble the wyrrd” as the shamans of old would say, to allow the influence of an intelligent awareness to be known amidst the pervading controls of ignorance and oppression.

Tibet
Dalai Lama: China causing 'cultural genocide'
At least 100 killed in Tibet unrest
Tibet unrest spreads beyond Lhasa
Chinese rule in Tibet: establishment, administration and maintenance
Dalai Lama interview on Tibet protests

Earth
My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
Relocalizing Eden
Food Crisis Will Take Hold Before Climate Change, Warns Chief Scientist
From Oregon to Mexico, officials might halt salmon fishing
Glaciers suffer record shrinkage

Election 2008
McCain Calls D.C. 'City Of Satan'
Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters
A Strategy for Peace and Survival

Economy
US Fed releases $200bn as credit crisis hits new depths
Bill Clinton's Role in the Mortgage Crisis
Sharing the Pain

Eliot Spitzer
Editor: Filed under economy where it belongs, not scandal.
Anatomy of a SWAT from a Lawyer’s Perspective
Questions About the Spitzer Incident
The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

Venezuela / Columbia
$300 M from Chavez to FARC a Fake
Pure Fantasy: Colombia's Laptop Revelations, the globalization of war propaganda

Iraq
The Myth of the Surge
Iraq is a country no more
40,000 Brits march against Iraqi war
A soldier fights for empathy
Iraq War “Winter Soldiers”: We Reacted Out of Fear, and With Total Destruction

National
Taxi to the Dark Side
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Hollow Women of the Hegemon

Bush/Cheney Administration
Admiral William Fox Fallon - US Central Command
Editor: White House forced Fallon resignation eliminates military command obstacle to furthering war in mid east.
Blowing Them Away Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry: Globalization Bush-style

noreply@blogger.com (Don Hynes) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:58:00 +0000

We the People

I Ching 59. Huan / Dispersion: Through hardness & selfishness the heart grows rigid, and this rigidity leads to separation from all others. Egotism and cupidity isolate men. Therefore the hearts of men must be seized by a devout emotion.

This entropy in our current condition as citizens of the United States is embodied in every aspect of our culture, with George Bush but one malevolent finger on the misanthropic fist of corporate governance and military power that is destroying this country: our constitutional government, our economy, our environment.

The tyranny of the last seven years did not begin with this presidency but extends back in time and precedent, from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery of African Americans to the Post WWII establishment of a shadow government in the form of the CIA and NSA, the unabridged and unaccountable financing of militarism out of all proportion to national defense, the destruction of our currency and wealth by the corrupt collusion of the US Treasury and the privately controlled Federal Reserve and the hollowing out of purposeful manufacture and agriculture into a miasma of currency manipulation posing as finance, agro-industry posing as farming and resource wars posing as responses to aggression.

The mendacities of the Bush era through the false flag events of September 11, 2001 (the government report for which even the 9-11 Commission Directors deny as truthful) produced a deadening depression of the spirit and soul in this country. As the not only covert but overt behavior of our government became more and more aberrant from founding principles - violating the constitution repeatedly, corrupting the electoral process, debasing the Department of Justice, dismissing international law & covenant, trampling human rights most horrifically abroad but within our nation as well; as congressional and executive branch corruption to advance the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the people became the norm, the ability of the populace to respond diminished with an inertia that deadened democratic initiative.

Despite the dissolution caused by this morally vacuous administration, the brutality of which is no longer hidden by the drunkenness of the increasingly defunct free ride of fake wealth generated through corrupt finance, despite all the hideous fear mongering and psy-ops against this country’s people and the countries we’ve invaded, a new spirit with heart and hope is again rising within America.

Just as an illness reaches its crisis in a dissolving sweat, so a great and stimulating idea is a true salvation in times of general deadlock. It gives the people a rallying point – a man in a ruling position who can dispel misunderstandings.

This truth is over 5000 years old, written by the sages of ancient China encountering the adversities of their time, and how accurately they apply to ours. The most important element to re-gain right now is a sense of movement, to come out of the paralysis of tyranny and the isolation of self centered materialism, to retake the authority we posses not only for our individual but for our collective lives. The most horrid lie of the fascist state is the disempowerment of free choice. This was the message in the despicable images and practices of Abu Graib, Guantanamo, rendition of every sort, the military boot applied to whoever and whatever lies in the way of corporate greed cleverly obscured with the wrappings of patriotism and purported national self interest.

One man, one administration, is not going to solve the problems of we the people. If this is to be our nation again, our government, the phoenix of independence will not arise from the ashes of our diminished present by putting all our faith in one individual and expecting him or her to restore order and dignity. However, the spark for this integrative movement can be found in the up swelling of positive energy toward the campaign of Senator Barrack Obama. He is providing a charisma igniting a new flame within our population, a belief we can re-direct our course and re-establish a meaningful and compassionate life.

The attacks on this promise have been of the sophisticated sort, deriding hope as if it were juvenile, impractical, inexperienced in the ways of adult governance, but this sophistry posing as intelligence will not win the day.

Senator Obama is certainly not stainless; his candidacy is supported by multi-national forces and players like Archer Daniel Midlands, Warren Buffett, Zbignew Brezinski and others that he promises to rise above. In this way his position is similar to President John F. Kennedy, not in the cult of personality but as a man attempting to navigate the corruption of illicit influence in order to shape a positive future.

The rising tide of new faith must be accompanied by an individual dedication to sacrifice, to re-think, to re-learn as necessary, and to work together for a common good not only for the United States but for the community of humankind and perhaps more importantly, for our Planet Earth with whom we share a singular and profound destiny.

If the phenomenon of Senator Obama becomes solely a projection of our collective desire for hero without the activation of our voices, our vision, our co-creative contributions, then it will have no meaning. This is the real choice we face today as human beings upon this Earth and as citizens of this nation. It is an old role and a very new one that beckons us, to find alignment with our inner truth and then to work together to bring those truths to life. In this hope filled and brilliant way the words “Yes, we can” have inestimable value.

If You Are Going to Read Just One Article
Lakota Nation – Russell Means
This video may be 14 of the most important minutes on the World Wide Web today.

Earth
Southern Appalachians, Firsthand
Orlov and the Wonderful, Terrible, Radical Simplification
Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food
Husky Dogs Encounter Wild Polar Bear
An Optimistic View of the World

Election 2008
Why the War on Obama?
A Closer Look at Obama
McCain's Empire
Higher Standards
Police concerned about order to stop weapons screening at Obama rally

Economy
U.S. called a house of cards just on brink
Queen of England Exposed
Worst Financial Crisis since 1931? German State-Owned Banks on Verge of Collapse
Fury as Chancellor Darling nationalizes Northern Rock
Shoes Dropping
Financial Crisis: Asset Securitization-- The Last Tango

International
Large Potential Albanian Oil And Gas Discovery Underscores Kosovo's Importance
A long road from Kosovo to Kurdistan
'Small brothers' are watching you
Wounded Nation - South Africa
Origin of Pys-ops and Manipulation through Mass Media Imagery

Iraq
Iranian president visits Iraq in historic trip
The true cost of the Iraq war
Not Our Country to Return To
The Million Year War
Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?

Israel
Something bad is happening to us - Haaretz
The Tightening Noose: Gaza under Hamas, Gaza under Siege

National
The Monster Must Die! Clemenstein (the Roger variety)
Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case in Federal Court - Now What?
Poverty Is Poison