For years women in America, and everywhere else for that matter, have been fighting rather unsuccessfully to retain control over their own bodies and to retain reproductive rights that are theirs naturally by right of birth but have been stolen away from them by power mongering and in many if not most cases very sexist men.
Yet women have power unused that could be exercised for not only their own good but for the good of everyone.
Want universal health care and a complete unequivocal end to war? You can have it next month.
In 2010, American voters foolishly aided and abetted the Republicans by giving them control of Congress.
We now enter a very dangerous period in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
If Obama is not re-elected, and people don't work towards returning workable majorities in the House and the Senate to the Democrats, then the country only continues its decline, and all will be lost.
It may be the end of a two century great social experiment unequaled in human history.
Returning the Democratic Party to the glory days of house and senate control that it had until Obama and the party were unable to convince enough people that their batsh*t crazy drive for bipartisanship with batsh*t crazy republicans was the only way to go, is the only way to go. There is no other reasonable way to go.
They tell us we're dropping about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan so we can catch that Bin Laden guy...but eventually, we're gonna catch him, and as soon as we do you can imagine that folks will be wondering why we're still over there - and I gotta tell ya, I'm one of those people.
I mean, we're over here talking about how we're so broke that we have no choice but to cut a couple of billion from heat assistance for the poor, and a billion-and-a-half from the Social Security operations budget, and money from food stamps and childcare assistance and tornado forecasting in Alabama...but every single month, just as regular as clockwork, we seem to be able to find another $10 billion to spend in Afghanistan, even as we have an economy that could badly use another round of truly productive stimulus.
And I don't think y'all even realize just how much money $10 billion really is - but today we're gonna see if we can't fix that with a bit of a thought exercise.
Imagine if we set up a program that took that Afghanistan money and spent it right here at home for a year or two - and it was spent in the form of a lottery, where we stimulate the larger economy, help fix the mortgage crisis, and create a more energy-independent nation, all at the same time.
I got all we need except a catchy name; with that in mind let's move on to the description of how the Happy Super Fun Day Peace Lotto Stimulus Thingy works.
The other day, on April 15, veteran journalist, war correspondent and truthdig.com columnist Chris Hedges was interviewed on RT News about the state of American society, repeating his oft stated warnings about the long corporate assault on and takeover of politics, the seeming death of reason and critical thinking in public discourse, and the development of a feudalistic "totalitarian democracy" in which the vast majority of the population is reduced through a media manufactured state of ignorance, inability to think clearly, and entertainment dazed complacence to a state of serfdom as a renewable 'resource' for a capitalism defined by American and multinational big business, and critiquing from this perspective the US budget developments of the past few days.
The budget is closing American schools and libraries across the country while firing teachers and taking away collective bargaining rights, Hedges notes, while banks and the largest corporations are not paying any taxes, including Bank of America, Exxon Mobil, and GE. Protesters gathered on Saturday April 17 at New York City's Union Square for the Sound of Resistance protests, part of the US Uncut tax weekend protests challenging the banks, most notably Bank of America, for avoiding paying taxes.
US Uncut is a grassroots movement taking direct action against corporate tax cheats and unnecessary and unfair public service cuts across the U.S. Washington's proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans. That's unacceptable.
Obama seeks to trim $1.1 trillion from the budget in the next ten years by cutting or eliminating over 200 federal programs, many dedicated to social services and education. For instance, it cuts in half funding to subsidize heating for low-income Americans; limits an expansion of the Pell grant program for students; and decreases Environmental Protection Agency funding by over 12%.
Meanwhile, Republicans are using their new House majority to slash spending even more brutally. The GOP has made it clear that they are bent on raiding funds for Social Security, Medicare, education; determined to kill health care reform; and gut needed investments in infrastructure, climate change and job creation, at a time when America needs it most.
These cuts will come on top of very painful austerity measures made at the state-level across our nation--worth hundreds of billions--since the recession began.
In short, budget cuts demonstrate that Washington has abandoned ordinary Americans.
What is making the situation worse is the ignorance of politicians and others leaping around he fringes. Hedges also reminds that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world that argues over the existence of evolution. Magical thinking, combined with a military superpower, is frightening, he says. "We invest emotional energy on the ridiculous and the sublime... the liberal class has been decimated... what used to be unconstitutional is now legal", he says, pointing to illegal searches under the Patriot Act and corporate bailouts under the health care legislation. The rights and needs of citizens are being ignored in favor of corporations.
Whither America?
While all across the blogosphere and in mainstream media I watch people argue about which faction of the 'corporatist party' to elect in 2012, I'm reminded strongly here of something Chris Floyd wrote nearly four years ago, in September 2007:
Emotional day today in Guantanomo tweetland. I've spent much of yesterday and today following along with the live tweet squad tweeting from the media pool on the Sentencing Hearing of Omar Khadr, the Toronto-born Guantanmo prisoner, now 24. The somewhat well known (in certain circles) "Child Soldier" who was shot and captured on July 27, 2002 in Afghanistan by U.S. Special Forces at the age of 15.
For a better take on the final plea deal a few days ago, I'll point you this article by Dan Gardner who concludes:
So what does the plea bargain really mean? Khadr has already spent one-third of his life in prison. He is being tried by a stacked military commission. He faces the very real possibility of spending the rest of his life in a locked box. And so, on Monday, after eight years maintaining his innocence, Khadr confessed. Sure. He's a terrorist. Whatever.
A coerced confession is no confession. And if Omar Khadr's confession cannot be described as coerced, the word should be stricken from the dictionary.
I read a piece last night by Jason Linkins at Huff Post in which he describes the experience of CNN correspondent Michael Ware and Ware's difficulty in dealing with the memory of the death of a presumably innocent young Iraqi shot execution style by US troops in 2007.
Mr Ware tells of the alleged incident he says he witnessed and filmed in 2007 when working for US news giant CNN, but claims the network decided the footage was too graphic to go to air.
He alleges that a teenager in a remote Iraqi village run by the militant Islamist group, al-Qaeda was carrying a weapon to protect himself.
"(The boy) approached the house we were in and the (US) soldiers who were watching our backs, one of them put a bullet right in the back of his head. Unfortunately it didn't kill him," he tells Australian Story.
"We all spent the next 20 minutes listening to his tortured breath as he died."
Ware left CNN last spring after being denied extended time off when apparently suffering from PTSD from his experiences. I respected Ware's work as a corespondent and wish him well. I also know that he has an important story to tell when the time is right.
Thousands of our kids, if they come home at all, are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan physically wounded and carrying the enormous weight of the emotional baggage picked up during their experience of war. This is nothing new, we brought back the same cargo from Vietnam, Korea and WW2. All wars provide their participants with a dismal tide of dark memories, the material of a lifetime of tortured nightmares.
"What, Me McWorry?" noted that by replacing Stan McChrystal with David Petraeus, Barack Obama has bought the Pentagon's Long War agenda lock, stock, and pork barrel. "Helmand in a Handbag" discusses why it seems that our national security team is losing its woebegone wars on purpose.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal had ample reasons for wanting to get fired as top banana in the Bananastans*. The Marjah offensive that was hyped as the "test" of the Afghanistan strategy had, by his own admission, turned into a "bleeding ulcer." He'd been forced to postpone the follow-on offensive to liberate Kandahar - called "the most critical operation of the war" - because the Kandaharis told him thanks anyway, but they were liberated enough for now. "It takes time to convince people," McChrystal told his press entourage in early June, well aware that time was a commodity he was fresh out of.
Inside reports have it that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, thefraudulent head of state of the second most corrupt country in the world, has "lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country." That's probably why he's told us to bugger off and is looking to strike his own deal with the Taliban and arch-rival country Pakistan.
Afghan troops, whom we've been training for nine bloody years, still woefully suck. A January 2010 60 Minutes piece noted that "elite" Afghan Special Forces were incapable of loading their rifles or even carrying them the right way. Once their Green Beret instructors helped them load and hold their weapons, the Afghan commandos quite literally shot their instructors and themselves in the foot.
The Conspiracy of the Elite has always been able to throw the kill switch. It's what they do. They kill whatever stands in their way. Whether it is the resistance to their domination by the common man. Or a "Leader" who doesn't want to go along with their agenda of world domination. Or the Earth herself who does not yield to their rape and pillage without a fight. This Elite of banksters, financiers, industrialists, military professionals and philosophers of elite exceptionalism gather under names like Bilderberg, Trilateral, CFR, G8 and others in secret and public places always protected by a phalanx of kill switch security armed to euthanize the prying eyes of the public and those brave enough to resist.
To deny this conspiracy of the elite is to deny the earth orbits the sun or the tides are effected by the moon. To deny an elite gathers in secret to decide the fate of nations or the value of money or to plan war and recession is to deny we need water and air to survive. It is a truth which is self-evident.
Representative Alan Grayson is proposing The War Is Making You Poor Act, which would redirect funding from Afghanistan and Iraq to relieve the income tax burden on incomes up to $35,000. I didn't end up paying taxes this year, War isn't making me poor, Mr. President. War is making me ashamed of my country. War is making me less free, less educated and less safe. War is making me afraid. These things are OK, though, because war is making other people much worse, it is making them sick and homeless and crazy and dead. War is making is making people so many things that are even worse than poor. I'm with Mr. Grayson, in that I think our national priorities are defined by our spending and that our spending indicates we value death, destruction and oppression. I think defunding these disasters is a great idea, but, instead of tax cuts, let's spend this money improving education, improving care and benefits for our veterans, strengthening domestic law enforcement and investing in clean energy. You see, taxes aren't making me poor, either.
I think Grayson's bill, even if I think the money could be better spent elsewhere, is something that deserves debate and serious attention in the House; sadly it is unlikely to be treated as anything more than a stunt. The inertia of our foreign policy, especially as it is inherited by one party from its ideological opponents, makes established conflicts seem inevitable. We're there, so now we have to think in small, strategic steps. We have to finish what we came to do, to sew up the wounds left by our clumsy surgery and hope we're able to revive the patient without too much brain damage. But I don't think this is an apt metaphor. I don't believe the havoc we've brought to these countries is going to help them, or keep us safer. I don't think that you believe this either. You were right to oppose the war in 2003 and you have promised us a foreign policy that represents our values. So, instead of spending another year tied to these wars, strangling our national budget and staining our reputation darker each day, let's get out, right now. The world does not always have to change so slowly.
Mr. President, I support this bill. In my case, that requires nothing extraordinary. For you, even to ask that it be seriously debated would require the kind of courage politicians usually can't seem to locate. I understand this, but I hope you find it anyway.
As a student at Boise State University, I was lucky enough to take classes from a gifted professor who had a friendship with Seymour Hersh. Mr. Hersh gave a lecture at our school that year, and, the morning before, spoke with the thirty or so students in my class directly. Our discussion was mainly about the recent revelations, brought to light by Mr. Hersh himself, about the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. I recall thinking, at the time, that Mr. Hersh's legacy of bringing the most intimate horrors of war to the public's eye was a testament to his tenacity as a reporter, but not to any increase in the brutality of America's wars. Mr. Hersh, who would have still gone down in history a journalistic icon if he'd retired after breaking the story of the Mai Lai massacre, continues to bring us the sad news of our own war crimes, this time on your watch.
In 1983, the National Film Board of Canada produced a 57-minute film, "Anybody's Son Will Do". Arguably the best anti-war film ever made, and tailored for public television, it scared the hell out of the U.S. military machine, which has done its best to "disappear" it. For years it has been nearly impossible to find a copy, but some kind soul has posted it on YouTube where it can be seen in six segments.
The film shows the process by which young men become psychologically engineered to kill or die on command. While the model used is the U.S. Marine Corps, it's made clear that the modern techniques for creating soldiers are refined, dehumanizing and universal.
Military forces will take boys as young as the law allows, as witness African militias that, unrestrained by regulation, recruit children as young as ten. People into their twenties, having begun to think for themselves to too great a degree, tend not to be sufficiently malleable. In the U.S., recruitment below age 17 is not legal. However, as war has become ever more computerized, need is growing for tech-savvy recruits who can kill coolly and indiscriminately from great distances, as if playing video games. The military has become very good at video games.
[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.
The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.
The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.
When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.
In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world.Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.
The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.
After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.
(NOTE: updated to better video quality- not so blurry now, so you can really get a good look at the dead kids!)
This is not a typical post.
Instead of writing a blog post and further destroying my wrists in the process, I thought I'd try something a little different.
Below you'll find a video that I cobbled together from pictures I found online and designs created by my partner. I am not a film director, nor do I desire to be one. It shows.
The song, however, is one that I think many people here will enjoy. It's called "Money Machine", and it was recorded live at Eddie's Attic in Atlanta. The album is entitled Jeff's Last Dance, by Kahler & Mullins. I was at this show. It's just two guys singing, one of whom plays the hell out of the congas. I suppose my affinity for this song results from the fact that I do possess an inner hippie (shhh!). The song is all about corporate greed & US militarism, but it actually manages to not be cheesy. IMO. it happens to rock. I hope you enjoy my amateurish iMovie editing, which was intended to convey visually the sentiments expressed in the lyrics (with a bit of snarkiness). Even if you dislike the editing, I hope you'll enjoy the tune.
This is not the Top Ten you might think. These are the Top Ten Humanitarian Crises from around the world that are selected by Doctors Without Borders at the end of each year.
New York, December 21, 2009 - Civilians attacked, bombed, and cut off from aid in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), along with stagnant funding for treating HIV/AIDS and ongoing neglect of other diseases, were among the worst emergencies in 2009, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported today in its annual list of the "Top Ten" humanitarian crises.
Continuing crises in north and south Sudan, along with the failure of the international community to finally combat childhood malnutrition were also included on this year's list. The list is drawn from MSF's operational activities in close to 70 countries, where the organization's medical teams witnessed some of the worst humanitarian conditions.
Is there such a thing as a 'just war'? The problem with that question is that when we answer 'yes', we end up in a world where there is 'just war'--just war as an ultimate solution to every problem, whether it be terrorists, international diplomacy, drugs in our streets or bugs in our gardens. War becomes the default setting for all of our responses. War becomes the measure of manhood and the definer of strength. War constrains our imaginations and limits our intelligence.
A chemical farmer sees a bug in his field, and declares war. Out come the poisons and the sprays, the herbicides and the neurotoxins, dangerous and costly.. Kill the enemy! The result--poison on the vegetables, beneficial insects die, some pests always survive, making the problem worse.
An organic farmer sees a pest, and says, "Hmmn, here's an interesting piece of information. Something in the system is out of balance. Perhaps some mineral is lacking in the soil, that's weakening the plants. What can I do to shift the balance, to create conditions that will favor the beneficial bugs that will keep the pests in check?" Result--increased fertility, clean and nutritious vegetables, bright flowers growing among the fields, reduced damage to crops and increased health for farmworkers and consumers.
Our policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, for decades, has been that of the chemical farmer--kill the enemy, and anything else that might happen to be in the vicinity, including civilians and potential allies, and when resistance develops, apply more of the same, regardless of cost. Then call it a 'just war'.
Imagine what our policy might be if, instead, we were guided by the maxim of the clever politician Harry Seldon from Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction novel, Foundation. "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent."
We might develop a policy more like that of the organic farmer--looking for the underlying forces that create the imbalance, that favor the development of terrorism and anti-U.S. sentiments. We might look for ways to support and favor the elements within Afghani or Iraqi or Iranian society that make for health, resilience, and liberty instead of employing the force that creates a perfect habitat for resentment, hatred, repression and terror. We might have supported and protected our Kurdish and Shiite allies after the first Gulf War instead of abandoning and betraying them. We might support the women's organizations in Afghanistan who, even under the Taliban, struggled heroically for women's rights. We might look at the model of Otpor, a student group who successfully overthrew the dictator Miloscevic using nonviolent resistance--with some strategic help and funding from outside. We might support the nonviolent resistance among the Palestinians, pressure the Israelis to lift the stranglehold siege on Gaza, to restrain their use of disproportionate force and to recognize that their true security can only be gained when Palestinians also have peace, security, and a just recognition of their human rights.
I'm deeply disappointed in Obama, because he is intelligent enough to forge such a policy. However, he operates in a country still controlled by a deep assumption--that strength equals force and violence, that a man who is reluctant to use force is less than a man, that a nation who refrains from wholesale slaughter is 'weak'. I can't help but think that his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan has less to do with the 'justness' of the conflict and more to do with the politics back home--an attempt to placate his right wing detractors and to look strong in their eyes.
In my futuristic novel, "The Fifth Sacred Thing," my character Maya says, "For five thousand years, men have been goading each other into acts of brutality and stupidity by calling each other cowards."
Until we confront that assumption, until we challenge our 'real men' and real women to embody a different sort of strength--the strength that nurtures, that heals, that uses intelligence and thoughtfulness and diplomacy to solve problems instead of brute force, until the thought of violence becomes abhorrent to us all, we will have no clear yardstick by which to measure any sort of justice.
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For years women in America, and everywhere else for that matter, have been fighting rather unsuccessfully to retain control over their own bodies and to retain reproductive rights that are theirs naturally by right of birth but have been stolen away from them by power mongering and in many if not most cases very sexist men.
In 2010, American voters foolishly aided and abetted the Republicans by giving them control of Congress.
The other day, on April 15, veteran journalist, war correspondent and 
