Tag Archives: Africa

America is starving the children to death in Somalia

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The US started the current war in Somalia by bombing the country early this January and sending in its Ethiopian proxy troops to occupy the nation. Now, it is slowly starving the population to death, as 400,000 refugees from Mogadishu alone remain homeless in the countryside.

SOMALIA: Malnutrition stalks once fertile region Especially hit hard are the children.

The US is directing this war against the Somali people. Troops forcing residents from homes in Somali capital, rights group says We must pressure the world to stop this US government terrorism in Africa. We cannot let the world forget about what the US is doing to Somalia.

Che, The Internationalist

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Che Guevara lives on in the victory of his ideals over those of his adversaries. Che was an internationalist appalled by the poverty that the US Empire and its capitalism had delivered to the common people across the Americas and on other continents like Africa.

Today, he remains the living antithesis to our government’s constant desire to conquer other peoples and to rule over them in the consequent misery that comes to the fallen.

Che, like Martin Luther King, had a dream. Forty years later it is still honored by others in their respect for this true American hero. And in the country where he was murdered by the CIA’s henchmen, the people honor him more than ever. Bolivia The press makes it out as if it is a party, but Che’s dream lives on as US power in the Americas begins to erode.

The Darfur Deception

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‘In trying to spur action, some humanitarian groups are framing the conflict as a too-simple contest between good and evil.’ By David Rieff October 7, 2007

The Darfur Deception is a good read on the current situation. Note that while the author does not doubt the good intentions of most people concerned about the issue, he does title his article as he does, and uses the word ‘deception’ to describe how the ‘Save Darfur’ people go about propagandizing to get the US-European military intervention moving into gear.

This is the key, since most pro-interventionists claim to not be calling for military intervention at all, when in reality they are. This is the real DECEPTION they practice.

It is totally similar to how many Leftists demanded intervention into the Balkans while Clinton was president, all the while claiming that they were equally against Milosevic and NATO. You don’t hear a word from them opposing NATO today though, even as NATO moves into new corners of the world.

Yes, there is a ‘Darfur Deception’ being practiced.

D.C. Capitol police versus Colorado Springs police

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Charges Dismissed Against African-American Minister Targeted and Tackled by Capitol Police

Meanwhile, here in Colorado Springs the city continues to go after a woman with multiple medical problems needing multiple hospitalizations since the day they roughed her up at the annual city’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, even though she was not found guilty of any wrong doing at her first trial! Why?

The amazing thing about this effort to get Elizabeth Fineron convicted of something (this will be the third set of different charges the city has accused her of) is that the Colorado Springs police didn’t want to arrest her in the first place, they just wanted to rough her up, which they did by hauling her fast across the pavement. When she finally managed to struggle back up she was outraged and wanted to know if she was under arrest? The answer from the police was NO.

However, Elizabeth had just been deliberately humiliated by this police brutality in front of a large public crowd, and like the Reverend Yearwood Jr. in Washington D.C. had gotten upset by his rough treatment, Ms. Fineron was also upset, as any normal person would have been at that point. She did not feel that the police should just be allowed to treat her as if she was nothing more than a big bundle of trash to haul around at their free will, and demanded ‘to have her day in court’.

Still, the police refused to arrest her, at that time perhaps feeling some shame at what they had done to her? Elizabeth though, went from policeman to policeman stating that they had manhandled her for no cause at all, and that she wanted to be arrested alongside the other people being roughed up. They kept saying that she was not under arrest at all.

At last, one cop reluctantly told Elizabeth that if she tapped them with a finger they would call it assault and arrest her, though they wished she would just go away. Elizabeth’s response was simply to say NO… You guys beat me up, an elderly lady in poor health for no real reason at all, and now you want to act as if that was all right????… and she touched a cop with her finger tip… softly. Some arrest, huh? A real dangerous lady that the cops are now wasting our city tax money on for the umpteenth time to get her in the press… It is all very sad.

The city has decided not to retry 5 of the others their police roughed up, but goes after Elizabeth still, and Eric Verlo? As amazing as that seems?! Who can begin to try to understand their reasoning there? And all this time the Colorado Springs head cop, Richard Myers, has been playing with the Justice and Peace people as if the police is out to protect everybody? It just is not convincing at all, Police Chief.

At this point, not even the pro-war, Far-Out Right Wing Gazette editorial staff wants this idiotic attempt at prosecution to go on. Today, they came out with an opinion piece asking that no retrial of either Verlo or Fineron be launched. It was couched in their usual vile rhetoric, but still they thought it insanity to go through a trail again. They had the courage to take a position.

But where is the city council and mayor on this one? They like to talk nice, but have refused to speak out against city prosecution of the folk that police under their managerial direction roughed up. They are mum.

Shortly after St. Pat’s Day, the police had a riot in Los Angeles and beat up on people there, and even that notorious city not known for having their police under control disciplined some police for their actions. And now, the Capitol police admitted that they had gone wild taking down the Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. as they did. What’s wrong with the city government and its officials here in Colorado Springs? It’s certainly not for lack of other municipal areas’ more positive examples that they act as they do.

The sad thing about this, is that the city council and mayor have expressed a desire that the city not be put in a bad light but they are completely unwilling to do the things necessary so that the city does not stand out and be seen as being a more intolerant and disrespectful place nationally than is the norm. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. That’s certainly the message they are giving out by wasting tax monies on yet another trial. Or, actually it will be two trials this time, as both the prosecution of Eric Verlo and Elizabeth Fineron will have two separate trials. It’s all very crazy…

Stop wasting our city tax monies on this nonsense, and come up with some legislation that would demilitarize the annual city St Pat’s Day Parade. By continuing this prosecution with yet another trial, you are using tax money to promote the idea that marching soldiers, Hooter girls, and politicians downtown is A-OK And city monies are to be allowed to promote such, yet city monies will stamp down hard on any counter social message trying to come out alongside the business as usual stuff.

Not all this city is made up of intolerant people who want liberal ideas censored using city tax monies. Not all this city wants its police to be used to rough people up and then to harass them using the judicial system afterwards. Get with the times, for they have changed since you in the city council used our tax monies to pay John O’Donnell to organize your march of squads of soldiers in a supposed Iraqi War ‘victory’ parade through downtown from the same spot your police assaulted Elizabeth Fineron for expressing a counter social message.

Somalia- a US-made genocide in the making, tying it all in together

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Even as the US spreads its intentional genocide into Somalia, there are naive US liberals vocally demanding that the US intervene yet more into Africa, to supposedly stop genocide, they say!

Somalia’s main market for the whole country just burned down yesterday, a direct result of the war that the US unleashed on the country by its bombings of the country and then using Ethiopian troops as the US proxy army. Fire engulfs main Somali market US military contractors the Ethiopians are, so to speak. It is a made-by-the-US genocide that is slowly unfolding in that country.

Cry for the Somali people which the UN itself has says is now has the worst humanitarian crisis at this time in Africa. I have yet to see many (if any?) US pacifist antiwar activists demanding that the US get its butt out of Africa. What the hell are they waiting for?

We need to stop now with all our confusion and mobilize. It seems that the national, state, and local antiwar coalitions are led by folk addicted to solely staring at their own navels. At times, they appear to have entirely forgotten that the US is waging a total planetary war and just seem to be on Cloud Nine with their religous dogmas.

WE… CAPITAL LETTERS… are the problem, not the Bush gang all by itself. I have sat through 2 excruciatingly silly soul trips by local followers of this creed in the last few days about the importance of using only non violence. Religious paralysis and delusions that we have a democratic system where voting matters at this point gives people the excuse to do so little. Just get out of the house and talk to your neighbors and get them to make up some signs and do something together. It’s nonviolent! Then do it, please.

US Out of Africa Now! US citizens out of their king-super-boxes now! And please stop all this nonstop drivel about peaceful non-violence all the meanwhile sitting on your collective asses! Non-violence hardly worked in Myanmar, but at least the Buddhist monks got out and tried.

The US pacifists still are in church though. LITERALLY. Or in little group get togethers talking about much of nothing except the importance of being non-violent. Meanwhile, their opponents are entirely too violent yet the pacifists are out to lunch giving out hugs and love to them. Or ignoring their pro-war opponents’ activities altogether.

France sneaks its troops into Chad

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The advance US- European troops have arrived to ‘Save Darfur’. All along, all the liberal proponents of interventionism have denied that they favor military interventionism, even as they propagandized for it.

Now, they remain silent as the thuggish Bush allied French government of Sarkozy sneaks its troops into neighboring Chad. Time for the Europeans to ethnic cleanse and juggle boundaries once again on the way to gaining better control over Third World resources.

All this was done under the name of the United Nations Security Council which is almost always the front that US and Western Europeans use for sending in UN troops to countries they want control over.

Save Darfur from China getting their oil

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Demand Western Re-colonizationIt happened again at today’s peace day observance, somebody snuck a SAVE DARFUR .ORG banner into the International Peace Day signage. What part of Save Darfur from Muslim Encroachment on Western Exploitation don’t these White Man’s Burden throwbacks understand?

I’d rather tolerate freedom of diverse expression in making our public statements, but some of us agree to temper our indignity about Bush, why can’t others play ball? The immediate challenge: how to keep the Darfur war drums from infecting our otherwise peace-seeking message? The only thing the Darfur Meme has to do with Peace are the armed, imperialist peace-keepers the UN wants to send in to protect Sudanese oil and other Western investments from falling into the hands of the Chinese.

These are actual graphics from the SaveDarfur.org website! Above, they are soliciting online petition signatures to favor a militarized Western occupation, read re-colonial administration of the Sudan. Below, they are perfectly satisfied to have President Bush make the appeal to the UN to, hehe, send in the troops.

Save Darfur are Promise-Keepers and they want to speak through President Bush

The Save Darfur Coalition has made a promise to the Sudanese, apparently, in your name. Now they want you to help them keep YOUR PROMISE. What wankers!

Student Zionist group, Hillel, and Darfur

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Hillel, the US’s most prominent student Zionist group, is actively pushing for US intervention against and into Sudan. On their web site which passes itself off as progressive and green, you will not find any concern for the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan. All these being countries currently being torn apart by US interventions into their affairs.

Instead, Hillel is all into encouraging the notion that US and British imperialism is a benign humanitarian thing for the peoples of Sudan to experience, just as so many other colonized and semi-colonized peoples have. Onward Christian and Jewish soldiers, I guess?

One local activist who is often times connected with the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission through his work at Springs Action Alliance, is now celebrating Hillel’s work over at the University of Colorado in Boulder. There some students have erected a ‘shanty town’ to ‘call attention to Darfur’. Some of these folk were Hillel sutdents for sure.

The Springs Action Alliance’s most recent newsletter called our attention to this ‘shanty town’ constructed by a few students over at the UC at Boulder. This activist is concerned about Darfur. Good. He wanted us to know about this ‘shanty town’ build for us to try to get our support for intervention into Sudan.

I guess though that this individual has forgotten about the segregated shanty towns of White Apartheid South Africa that Zionist groups like Hillel enouraged Israel and the US to accept for decades? He, and other local liberal Darfur fetishists seemingly are blind to the allies they sometimes keep, it seems. They focus on Darfur alongside at many times a rather mixed crowd, Zionists included. These Zionists of today want us to forget about Apartheid shanty towns, and to think that Muslims are putting people into shanty towns instead of Christian Whites, or Jews.

These liberals that push us to become more concerned about Darfur don’t seem to understand that we already are concerned about the violence there. We don’t need Hillel to ‘inform’ us of the problem. We don’t need the Carter Center folk either. We, too, are concerned with all the dying that is going on in that region of Sudan.

We don’t need Zionist backed construction of fake ‘shanty towns’ at UC-Boulder to prompt our interest. We are against the continued bloodshed in that sad region of Sudan, Darfur, with or without Zionists and Israel pushing the issue.

Unlike the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian in the US, we don’t primarily hold the mainly Muslim government of Sudan to be alone responsible for the killing that has occurred there. We also don’t think that an increase in US-British govenrment directed intervention is the solution to what decades of British colonialism in the region has brought about.

More Imperial directed colonialism is not the solution to problems accruing from several centuries of European colonialism, even if it comes disguised as UN or African Union intervention instead of directly Brit and American.

Hillel and Darfur? How sweet their concern for Africa certainly is. It’s just not very sincere though. Instead, it’s little more than a propaganda tool they hope to use to gain support for more Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians off more of the Palestinian’s land.

Who are they really going to fool long term here? Their concern about any killing going on in Sudan is nothing more than a distracting device, to help keep people’s attention away from Israel’s own crimes committed with the help of the US government. If they want to worry about shanty towns, then worry some about those refugee camps both Israel and the US have created all over the Middle East. Until then, their concern about shanty towns in Sudan rings a little too false to me.

Faith in UN intervention in Darfur misplaced

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Stephen Gowans’, Faith in UN intervention in Darfur Misplaced, explains well why demanding supposedly humanitarian interventions from one’s own imperialist country is a real loser.

Often times the people doing this, do not directly call for their own government to directly intervene but rather for it to use the United Nations to do so. They think that by doing this, it will somehow change the whole character of what is going on when Great Powers boss weaker countries around! They refuse to acknowledge that the United Nations is strictly a tool controlled by the US and the Western European powers to legitimize their own colonial-imperialism.

Activists in World Powers, such as the US is, should not demand that their governments intervene in the affairs of weaker nations, even when the reasons to do so might seem totally compelling. Instead they should be trying to disassemble the militaries used by their own reactionary governments, rather than trying to find reasons to mobilize them.

It is pure pretense to believe that our corporate governments will ever do ‘relief’ projects ‘right’, whether it be in Darfur, or in New Orleans. Surely, calling for one’s own government to rebuild New Orleans ‘right’ should come well before trying to convince our own failed government to take their profit-making mayhem into another spot on the globe. The Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t even build the levee system right in New Orleans, let alone be relied upon to save people in Darfur.

The United Nations is totally an imperial Frankenstein at this point. We should have no faith that it will do anything other than do as its masters will have it do. The UN record at guaranteeing world peace is quite appalling. It is a totally failed institution.

Why does nobody care about the genocide in Congo?

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In less than 10 years, 4,000,000 have died in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and now the fighting threatens to erupt once more in the Eastern regions of that country. Why doesn’t anybody care about stopping this genocide? Here is a report from France24 English language news.
 
When you combine this slaughter with the slaughter that earlier occurred in Rwanda, 5,000,000 have died in about 15 years. Add in the killings in Uganda, and the figure goes still higher. Instead of solving this mass war, the US instead is provoking new wars in the Horn of African countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia!

The think tank pretend thinkers

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Tim Robbins made a recent quip on Bill Maher, suggesting maybe “-if you fuck things up so badly, you can no longer be considered an expert.” I thought I’d call out the right-wing so-called experts, the traitorous anti-democratic unpatriotic lying think tank “scholars” for what they are: immoral and indefensible, opportunistic criminals, who by their damning credentials should be banned from public discourse until after long stints in prison.
 
THE INTELLECTUALLY-DISHONEST:
Heritage Foundation, (latest misdeed Africa)
Hudson Institute
Hoover Institute, (welcomes Rumsfeld)
Manhattan Institute, (welcomes Judith Miller)
Heartland Institute
Cato Institute
Rand Corporation
Brookings Institution
Progressive Policy Institute
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

THE ANTI-INTELLECTUALS:
American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
Center for Security Policy (CSP)
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
American Jewish Committee (AJC)
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
Council on Foreign Relations
Conservative Federalist Society
National Bureau of Economic Research
Center for the Study of American Business
Institute for International Economics
Competitive Enterprise Institute
International Institute for Strategic Studies
Progress and Freedom Foundation
National Center for Policy Analysis
Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
Free Congress Research and Education Foundation
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Capital Research Center
Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
State Policy Network
Center for Strategic and International Studies
American Council of Trustees and Alumni
(more)

IN DISGUISE:
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Reason Foundation
Freedom Forum
Coalition for a Democratic Majority
Committee on the Present Danger
Committee for the Free World
Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC)
Foundation for Cultural Review
American Studies Center
Accuracy in Media
Center for Media and Public Affairs
Center for Science, Technology and Media
Media Research Center
Media Institute
Media Integrity Project
Institute for Justice (IJ)
Center for Individual Rights
Washington Legal Foundation
Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD)
Institute on Religion and Public Life
Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
(more)

IN PRINT:
The New Republic
Commentary (AJC)
National Review
The Public Interest
The National Interest
Weekly Standard
The New Criterion
The American Spectator
Public Opinion [not Public Opinion Quarterly] (AEI)
National Affairs
Washington Quarterly
Defense News
World Net Daily
“Radio America”
“Alan Keyes Show”
“Dateline Washington”
“Firing Line”
“Think Tank”
“Peggy Noonan on Values”
Washington Post
Wall Street Journal
New York Post

FUNDED BY:
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Carthage Foundation
Earhart Foundation
Charles G. Koch Foundation
David H. Koch Foundation
Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
Phillip M. McKenna Foundation
JM Foundation
John M. Olin Foundation
Henry Salvatori Foundation
Sarah Scaife Foundation
Smith Richardson Foundation
Adolph Coors Foundation

I might as well mention the good guys, lest they get caught up with the similarly named miscreants. But why not stick to the experts in the Universities? Certainly higher education has become corrupted, but it should be easier to police, through peer review, than corporate funded experts who just hang up any old shingle and make appearances as scholars on the corporate funded media. For what it’s worth, the
ACTUAL PROGRESSIVES:
Economic Policy Institute
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Institute for Policy Studies
Worldwatch Institute
Center for Defense Information
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

Undeclared pacifism: No War On Bush

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Non violent pacifists by nature passivists
Bush counts on the Democrats to toe the line. He counts on the peace movement to take his actions lying down.
 
They’re passivists but won’t admit it. And the smirking chimp rolls on. Into Iran, Africa, Asia. While the peace-talking pacifiers quiet your outrage. Be Gandhi, be Jesus, be lambs to the slaughter, the non-violence disciples cry. You’ll die in good conscience. Don’t rock the boat, you’ll disturb our meditation. I call it slumber.
 
In Colorado Springs we live in the belly of the beast. Don’t upset it. Pass the cookies.

Israel to grant citizenship to hundreds of refugees

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I am a member of the local Colorado Springs ‘PEACE’ group, the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission. A couple of weeks ago, this group organized a benefit for ‘Darfur’.

The most active promoter and organizer of this event was a young Jewish woman who has told me that she had supported the US attack on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from being the head of that country. Of course, we know that a long US occupation of Iraq has followed. Now, it seems she has made her principle passion and work stirring up support for Western intervention against the current government of Sudan.

I find all this quite interesting in line of today’s news item. It stated that Israel was to grant citizenship to hundreds of refugees. Very interesting indeed. And where do these refugees come from?

My first thought was of course the Palestinian refugees that settler Jews in Israel created. Nah, that couldn’t be it, I thought. But what about the Lebanese refugees?

Israel had just recently invaded and deliberately destroyed the civilian infrastructure of that country, all contrary to international law. But then I thought… maybe it was the millions of Iraqi refugees created by the Israeli Jewish policy of supporting the US occupation of that country? Wrong again, it seems…

In a photo press shot, the Jewish government of Israel is granting citizenship to refugees from Sudan, of all places! I thought originally that these refugees from genocide might be from Armenia? But dumb me. Israel doesn’t think so much that a genocide ocurred in Turkey, a country whose government allies with the US government. Why then such concern from these theologicalrectically ‘Jewish’ thugs that run Israel for some Sudanese poh folk?

The answer is quite simple. Many Jews in Israel support claiming that there is a genocide in Sudan because they support the US’s goals to colonize Africa to block out Chinese access to African oil. Paranoid and delusional me no doubt! I should just naturally believe that Jewish government Israel is just a nice group of folk that are humanitarians.

We live in less than a perfect world. Who am I to doubt the motives of others? Jewish government Israel kills Palestinian children on an almost daily basis but their adopt a poor Black person program from Sudan must be so sincere. These are nice people, and so is the J&P’s Jewish comrade here in Colorado Springs. Save Darfur! Rah, rah, rah…

(PS- I am sending this post to the ‘Save Darfur’ activist I mention. That’s only fair. Let’s hear what she has to say about this news item? She really is a nice person.)

NATO sails to South Africa

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Six NATO ships sailed into South African waters yesterday to play war games with the South African government. This is certainly far away from the North Atlantic, is it not? This is certainly far away, too, from being a defense alliance.

If the local peace troop can tear itself away from demanding intervention into Sudan, is there any chance they could protest these new waters newly found for NATO ‘sailboats’? I rather doubt it though, since it’s not on the TV news and our liberal coed friends over at Colorado College can’t pose much for such a news unworthy cause as to fight to contain NATO’s feverish militarism.

US Out of Africa! Hasn’t that continent been fucked over enough by imperialism already? See NATO in South Africa news item

UK PM Gordon Brown nose continues Blair policies

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Gordon Brown has met the Bush-Cheney team and it is to be more of the same. Despite some empty rhetoric about world poverty and rethinking British role in Iraq, Brown has deliberately refused to order British withdrawal from Iraq.

Instead, Bush and Brown are ordering United Nations troops into Sudan, 26,000 of them in total at a cost of $2 billion dollars a year. What a miserable and stupid way to spend money which could have gone to improve the lives of the Sudanese instead of policing them. Yes, but that would not have increased imperial control over the region.

Gordon Brown is showing herself to be the Hillary Clinton equivalent for Great Britain, which is a lesson about how liberalism everywhere is nothing much more than a pillar and cornerstone of Empire. A lot of hope was put in getting Blair out of office as is the case in the US with the hope that change will come with merely getting Bush out of the presidency. The Democrats offer no more than the Labor Party has offered with Brown. Just more of the same.

If you are for an end to US imperialism running the world, it will take more than elections of liberals to get it done. Liberalism just does the run around but the Empire is kept running. Those who hope for change are just conned.

March on Washington Sept 15

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Answer Coalition MARCH ON WASHINGTON Sept 15 2007A broad spectrum of national groups have united to mobilize for a massive fall anti-war mobilization called the Days of Action. Sept 15-21 will be a major showdown in Washington DC at the very moment that the Petraeus Report is released and Congress takes up spending over $100 billion to prolong the war. Led by veterans who have returned from Iraq, there will be seven days of actions to send a shockwave through Washington and the nation with the reverberating demand: End the War Now!

Sponsors of the march include:
The ANSWER Coalition; Ramsey Clark; Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation; USLAW; Mounzer Sleiman, Vice Chair, National Council of Arab Americans; Cindy Sheehan; Cynthia McKinney; Veterans for Peace (National); Garett Reppenhagen, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Chair of Board of Directors; Tina Richards, CEO of Grassroots America; Rev. Lenox Yearwood, CEO of Hip Hop Caucus; Code Pink; Father Roy Bourgeois and Eric LeCompte, School of Americas Watch; Kevin Zeese, Democracy Rising; Navy Petty Officer Jonathan Hutto, co-founder Appeal for Redress; Liam Madden, Pres., Boston Chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and co-founder of Appeal for Redress; Malik Rahim, founder of Common Ground Collective, New Orleans; Howard Zinn, Author and Historian; Carlos & Melida Arredondo, Gold Star Families for Peace; Rev. Graylan Hagler, Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Latino Movement USA; Hermandad Mexicana Nacional; Ron Kovic, Vietnam Veteran, author, Born on the 4th of July; Leonard Weinglass, Cuban 5 attorney; Michael Berg; National Lawyers Guild; Father Luis Barrios, Iglesia de San Romero de las Americas – UCC; World Can’t Wait; Frank Velgara, ProLibertad Freedom Campaign; Pam Africa, International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

Gold in them thar hills

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Darfur has undiscovered water! Water you say? In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart discovered that no fortune in gold could buy what he really needed in the desert, water!

Precipitating a gold rush has been a traditional underhanded mechanism to conquer and settle new lands, for America’s westward expansion especially, at the tricky impasse of land already deeded to the Indians.

Facing troops and lawmakers showing a moral reluctance to annihilate his red-skinned foes, George Custer played up claims of gold in the Black Hills and the land grab was on, poor white opportunists scrambling to invade Indian lands without anyone being able, if they wanted, to stop them. The betrayed Sioux were all but goaded into war and were soon displaced.

Now someone’s rallying the carpetbaggers to mine the water of Sudan. True, the circumstances are more complex. It’s not our greed they’re preying upon, but our eagerness to see a humanitarian solution. It’s been all to easy to feel there’s nothing to be done to help the Sudan because Africa’s troubles appear perpetual. But with water of course salvation is at hand, even though it’s a panacea.

The march to drill wells in the Sudan may not seem to be for our immediate gain, but let’s not forget that the real fortunes made in gold discoveries weren’t made by miners, but by those who sold them the pick axes and shovels. The drive to Drill 1,000 Wells For Darfur will reap a lot of pick axes and shovels.

Plus we’ll need to protect those projects, to make sure the new water supplies don’t fall into the schemes of evil warlords, so we’ll be authorizing troops to protect, not the black people, but our wells. And amid the militarized destabilization, the west will be able to wrestle China for Sudan’s proven reserves, oil.

Is there water in Darfur? Of course there is. Is there a subterranean reservoir the size of Lake Erie? Five thousand years ago. Experts are skeptical as to what remains. Professor Farouk El-Baz’s previous water divinations in the 80’s yielded 350 wells drilled in Egypt, but no accounts mention finding a rush of water.

J.K. Rowling and the Dead Zone

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With author J.K. Rowling declaring she’s written the last of the Harry Potter titles, there’s a panic coming from the publishing world that there will be nothing to take Harry’s place. I suppose this fear anticipates the readership’s sadness, it certainly expresses the commercial concern, but it cloaks itself in a [Scholastic] librarian’s voice: whatever now will the children find interest in reading?
 
Harry Potter has been around for ten years. Educators like to credit him for pulling children from the terminus of their gaming consoles. If Potter has created an upsurge in reading, I ask you, to where has it led? Ten years is enough to have nourished the new generation. Over 325 million Rowling books have been sold. The first Harry Potter readers are already graduated from college. What are they doing?

It’s a leading question, because I haven’t an answer. It’s not discernible. Blogs, Myspace, trivia-tourism, what? I’ll confer with college professors and get back to you, but it certainly isn’t the Peace Corps.

I would purport that the Scholastic [1] worship of Harry betrays a lack of faith in what it means to read. Do children need to be rewarded for reading? Is not escaping into the abstract a pleasure unto itself? I thought it was a fundamental need that even distinguishes us as human beings. Do we have to offer candy bars to induce people to eat? I’m sure humans can run themselves out of gas out of sheer distraction, but I know appetite is inherent.

A key is to educate children that there’s a world beyond theirs, an abstraction beyond their horizon, which can be explored through reading. Much of it, history, thought, imagination, lies only in books. Travel and science can lie beyond if they wish. Those subjects are taught in school, via reading. Teachers who suspect their students haven’t bought into reading are obviously not grading to challenging standards.

Through books lies an existence of infinite proportion, as n approaches the finite lifetime. Are the Potters hypothesizing that children must be coaxed into this world, without regard that it might be form over substance? Do children whose thumbs twitch for video games need to be lured by books that feel like video games which lead, like arcades and the pool halls before them, nowhere? With Harry Potter, are we creating readers or are we killing them off? Form has become the new substance, which to some sounds clever and new, but really means empty is the new full.

Dead Zone
There’s something happening outside the Mississippi Delta where man’s agricultural runoff, waste and industrial pollutants meet the sea. It’s being called a Dead Zone, which describes it literally, and it’s growing. The phenomena is a total collapse of the ecosystem leaving Hypoxia, the absence of oxygen in the water. It starts with the algae, then never mind every next link in the food chain [2]. We’ve measured it only since 20 years ago. Doubtless it started earlier. Doubtless too it’s happening exponentially in every estuary downstream of overpopulation. I read about Hypoxia overtaking Lake Victoria in Africa, rendering it a sinkhole, the social repercussions of which match Dante.

I cannot but wonder if such a consequence of pollution cannot manifest itself on the human population. Could not our minds become sink holes? Could not a culture or generation be faced with a Dead Zone?

Debilitating, not irreversible in the grand scheme, but certainly final, like stunted growth. Generations of minds shrunk below capacity, below what we might have wished for them, like fingers crippled by the early industrial age. A dead zone of thought, of initiative or motivation, of energy needed to get out of the dead zone. Why it’s called a dead zone, not merely an empty one.

Booksellers seem happy as snakes to see our children want sugar instead of oxygen.

Footnotes
1. The publishers of Harry Potter, Scholastic Press, is a commercial enterprise, not an educational concern as the name implies. It’s like the pseudo-junk food company Subway, owned their ads say, by Doctors Associates, Inc.
2. Overuse of synthetic fertilizers has been causing rising hypoxia on every coast. The excess nitrates lead to blooms of algae which pull all the oxygen from the water, knocking the breath from all other living things. So my analogy is closer than I intended.

Mincing Words with Nature’s Matriarch

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I learned about Sudden Wetland Dieback yesterday. What’s that? The salt marshlands of America’s east coast are turning inexplicably to muddy wastelands and scientists have developed a euphemism for the occasion.
Not nice to fool Mother NatureThe nomenclature reminds me of another unnatural phenomena that’s been given its own death form: Coral Bleaching. That describes coral reefs which have suddenly expired white as ghosts. As if we’d need to call the piles of bones in the elephant graveyard, Elephant Bleaching.

I understand that scientist want to name what they are seeking to study, but doesn’t a name confer the unfortunate suggestion of a natural occurrence?

It also adds a step, is seems to me at least psychologically, between the effect and the cause. The poor Indonesians in 2004 didn’t suffer a Rapid Oft-Fatal High Water Relocation. It was a Tsunami. Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance wasn’t due to Cement Negative Buoyancy Cankles. It was the mob. Do we need to study the criminal element’s access to poured concrete, or do we need to go after who done it?

The immediate agent of the dieback may be dust from Africa, just as an impassive Pacific may be blamed on an intensified gulf stream (belittled with the appellation El Nino), but wherefore comes this unprecedented toxicity of the elements? We all know. It’s not nice to fool mother nature.

I’d like to know what specifically is meant by dieback? Perhaps those subversive academics are allowing after all for the inclusion of the principle of equal and opposite reaction: blow-back.

We know what’s behind wetland dieback, coral dieback and El Nino blowback, it’s man’s unnatural pollution. It’s our excess carbon emissions and then some, which are heating and killing the globe. There’s already a neat term, sufficiently unnatural sounding: Global Warming. Corporate polluter think-tanks have already re-termed the problem Climate Change to introduce an ambiguity of inherent badness. Change can be good. Only Luddites fear change. The fittest survive change.

The corporate media very cleverly reframed the recent Enviro-palooza concert event as A Climate In Crisis. Sound the alarm there’s a crisis! But what to do, what to do?! The Global Warming warning was too simple. When bath water becomes too warm, for example, we know what to do: shut off the hot water.

Do we need to rename extinction as Pervasive Survival-Instinct Reversal? We could, if we are seeking to ameliorate the intermediate effectiveness of the death blow. Or we could find out who took out the contract on our murder and prevent it.

To belabor mixed metaphors, put an ambulance at the base of the cliff to address Near-Instant Altitude Deceleration Injury, or go to the mountain and curb Dead Man’s Curve.

How the Far Right targets Africa

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Let’s face it, the US Antiwar Movement has had an abysmal record for mobilizing people to oppose the military-industrial complex. Over a decade and a half since the US first militarily attacked Iraq, the killing still goes on. And the record in regards to Africa is much worse, despite the fact that the US has a large African American population that should potentially be easy to mobilize support against US military interventionism on that continent.

For decades, the US used Portugal and South Africa as its subordinate clients in ruling Africa, much in the same way that it now uses Israel to help it rule the Middle East, but these regimes were ultimately forced to disassemble themselves. Now the US has a plan to bully into formation a new group of subordinate African client regimes. This is an interesting article about what led to the formation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command system or African interventionism. How the Far Right targets Africa In it, we discover the role of the Heritage Foundation.

If we don’t begin to pay some attention to what’s really going on in Africa, we will soon become bogged down there with US troops in the same way as has occurred quite recently in Muslim Asia and the Balkans in Eastern Europe.

Darfur is not 2 sides fighting each other

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The false version, put out by the ‘Save Darfur’ pro- do something folk, is that Darfur is a matter of 2 sides, a good side of Black victims and a bad side of Arab murderers. This couldn’t be farther from the truth though, yet this ‘Black and Arab’ view is very useful for prompting US interventionism into the region.

In truth, the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan is just one regional conflict amongst many throughout Sudan and neighboring countries. It isn’t even the deadliest of these wars. Both the conflicts in the Horn of Africa and those throughout Congo and the countries to the East of Congo hav been far more deadlier in loss of life.

Even in Darfur itself, the conflict is far more complex than Western ears usually hear about. Darfur is much more than the land of the Fur people, since there are several other ethnic groups living in Darfur than the just the Fur themselves.

The Fur themselves live in not just Sudan, but also in Chad and the Central African Republic. Those who want intervention from the US and Europeans, paint a picture of Arab horsemen from outside the region, raiding and raping into Dafur to genocidally wipe Blacks of the Fur off the face of the map to take over the region for themselves.

Here is another picture of the conflict that is quite different. Darfur Conflict Takes Unexpected Turn

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Balkans, we have begun to see the dangers of plopping ourselves down inside multi-ethnic conflicts that our society poorly understands. It certainly is good for the munitions industry that supplies ‘our troops’ when we do get involved in these conflicts. They make a killing.

Our own US population foots the bill for the killing fields ‘our troops’ involve themselves in creating…. the killing fields that benefit nobody outside those who have jobs or stock portfolios in the military-industrial complex.

Incredibly, many liberal Democrats have positioned themselves in favor of some sort of interventionism into Sudan, while the Bush Administration has actually, in this case, tried some to avoid it, though they favor interventionism throughout other parts of Africa (like in Somalia). We should be quite aware, though, that all calls for humanitarian intervention easily and quickly morph into calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ delivered by military forces. In fact, Blackwater is already in Sudan, supposedly carrying out relief operations in the southern portion of that country. We need to get them out of there.

El Mapale de Colombia Y Carnival

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What makes salsa, salsa? Like the Blues, salsa is heavily rooted in African rhythms and dance. From sensual Mapale came the sensuality of salsa.

Here is another great video of Mapale dance. And now Che Mapale makes it to Barranquilla for Mardi Gras. It’s the Mapale that gives Barranquilla, Colombia it’s edge on having the best danced Carnival celebration in the world. See Carnalavero to see why? The indigenous collides and merges with the Afro Colombian Mapale in Barranquilla with Checo Acosta. More Danza Mapale and back to a Tribute to the Carnival of Barranquilla.

All in all, you can see some of this style danced on occasion in Manitou Springs! And Mapale beats break-dancing USA style any day. In fact, break-dancing is probably just a degenerated form of Mapale. And who knows what the Manitou Springs form of dance degenerated from?

Farfour Mouse vs Mickey

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It’s hard to believe how lost in LaLaLa Land are America’s proZionist conservatives. One big issue for some of them is the supposed ‘hostage taking’ of Mickey Mouse by Gaza Strip’s Farfour Mouse. I’m not making this stuff up either! See Farfour for yourself.

These lunatics of the American Right don’t get riled up about what Israel and the US have done to the million plus people of the Gaza Strip, way over 50% of them children. It matters not the least to them that Gaza has the lowest standard fo living in the world, and that most of the inhabitants living in this total misery are children. No. Instead they are worried about this mouse, Farfour! They’re worried that he’s a terrorist rat teaching the kids to hate! Can you imagine how lost in nonsense these nuts actually are? They’re our neighbors, too. Scary.

Here is another clip with some CNN commentary of Farfour in action, but go read the American posters’ comments and see who is really sick in the head. And nobody seems too concerned about Farfoura. But then again she’s not a mouse, is she? She’s more the butterfly… The Daffy Zionist Ducks can handle that. But don’t pick on Walt’s pre-WW2 made fascist rodent, or they get all upset.

And nobody seems to care about Walt Disney himself. He wa a rather loathsome character.
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Below is the real situation in Gaza, where per capita GDP is now around $500-$600 per year and falling.
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on the 40th anniversary of occupation my statement in the UN
SPECIAL MEETING TO MARK 40 YEARS OF OCCUPATION
BY ISRAEL OF THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORY,
INCLUDING EAST JERUSALEM

UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK
7 June 2007
STATEMENT BY

DR. MONA EL FARRA
PROJECTS DIRECTOR
MIDDLE EAST CHILDREN’S ALLIANCE

Red Crescent Society For Gaza Strip
GAZA

?Your Excellency Mr. Paul Badji, Chairman of the Committee,
Distinguished guests and Excellencies,

It is my honour to be amongst you today, despite the gravity of the occasion being commemorated, on this 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

First, let me say that 2007 is the 40th anniversary of 59 years of the brutal occupation of the Palestinian people.

As we called for an end to apartheid in South Africa and the right of all people to live together and have equal rights, we must now, before it is too late, call for true justice for the Palestinians.

Today, we heard about the economic plight of the Palestinian people. We heard about Palestinians in Israeli prisons which number close to 8,000 men and women, including approximately 350 children under the age of 14, most of whom have been tortured.

How many UN resolutions must be passed by the UN? How many years of calling for 2 States before there is an understanding that Israel continues its aggression on the ground against women, children and men, the demolition of thousands of homes and the continued building of the apartheid wall?

Let us not just speak of the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza. We must never forget those who live as second-class citizens inside Israel and most of all, those who were forced from their homes and lands in 1948.

Now is the time to call for a real peace, with justice for all the children in the region. This can only be accomplished by supporting the right of return of all Palestinians.

Now is the time to acknowledge that the two-State solution is not the answer.

From Gaza I came, where the children of my country have no safe homes, no safe streets, no proper and adequate health facilities, no proper food, clean water, or regular electrical power, no recreational activities and no good education. The list of deprivation of their basic needs is too long to count.

I lived this occupation as a child, and am still living it as an adult. I can see it in the eyes of my daughter when she is afraid, tired, restless and exhausted because of the unsafe and unpredictable quality of life in Gaza under occupation. I saw it as soon as we crossed the borders on our way to Egypt, where she sensed something new and different: freedom, safety and space. Gaza is like a big, unsafe prison. And it is a very small place for 1.4 million people, half of whom are children.

I face the occupation every day during my work when hundreds of Palestinian patients are denied permits and accessibility to proper medical treatment, outside Gaza. There are a few lucky patients who get a referral and permit for treatment outside Gaza. The majority, however, have to wait and wait. Many die while waiting.

What is more heart-breaking than children who do not have adequate food and a healthy atmosphere to grow up to be well rounded adults? According to the Health Work Committees Organization, 42 per cent of children in Gaza under the age of 5 suffer from iron deficiency anemia and 45 per cent suffer from some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, due to the experiences that they are subjected to as a result of the non-stop military actions of the Israeli Occupation Forces, which almost always affect civilians in one way or another.

I will never forget the story of a woman in labor, who had to wait several hours at a checkpoint last November, during one of many Israeli military operations in the north of Gaza. Eventually she arrived at the Al Awda hospital in Jabalia refugee camp where she gave birth to her baby. When she left the hospital with the baby to go to home in the village of Beit Hanoun, there was no home; her home had been demolished by the Israeli occupying army. There are many cases and many stories, but I believe it is not the numbers that really matter, even one incident such as the above is one enough human rights violation.

I remember a 4-year old child in the same village who was forced to stay in one room with all members of his family for 48 hours while the Israeli Army commandeered their home. The child was thirsty and the soldier was there with his bottle of water, the occupied and the occupier in the same space. The soldier offered water to the thirsty child. The child said “no, no, no”. The child’s natural reaction was a combination of fear of what the soldier represents and the steadfastness in the face of the occupation. This is what characterizes the Palestinian people: steadfastness and resistance in the face of all adversity; even small children can express it with their natural reactions more than any words or speeches. The soldier on the other hand is a human being that has been forced by the Israeli occupation machine to lose his humanity.

Whenever I think of Palestinian children and their lives under occupation, I always think of the Israeli children. As adults, we have a commitment to both sets of children to provide a safe environment for them to live peacefully. It is not the occupation or the wall or the ongoing aggression against my people that will bring safety or security for Israeli children, only peace that is based on justice will do so. Justice means that the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be considered. Israel must recognize its moral responsibility towards the Palestinian refugees.

While Israel is physically outside Gaza, it still completely controls our lives, all aspects of our lives: health, education, economy and freedom of movement.

Life under occupation is degrading to human dignity. It has deprived us of our freedom, and only free people can make peace. It is most peculiar that we are forced to deal with the patterns of life under occupation as normal, well-established facts and when people lost hope and faith in the world or any future chances for change, and when the world turns its head away.

On the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, it is fitting to call once again on the international community to put pressure on Israel to fulfil its obligations by abiding by the UN resolutions related to Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israeli occupation should be ended now and the right of return must not be forgotten.

Thank you.

‘The Peace and Stability Industry’ goes to work ‘for’ Darfur

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Yes, there is such a creature that calls itself ‘The Peace and Stability Industry‘. The ‘International Peace Operations Association’ considers themselves to be just that. And they’re for ‘Saving Darfur’.

The money for the Justice and Peace Darfur benefit tomorrow is going to a group called CARE. Here is an article that mentions in passing their general level of awareness of issues regarding US based military contractors and Darfur.
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The Privatization Agenda: Hired Guns and Darfur

The U.S. under the Bush administration has served up more money for Darfur than any other country has to date. But when President Bush announces that he’s giving an impressive $10 million a month to AMIS, as he did in one of his innumerable Darfur press releases last year, where do all those greenbacks actually go? The answer may surprise readers who are unfamiliar with the modern cash cow of private security contracting. Much of it is channeled to Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE)—an L.A.-based subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. Another significant portion goes to the L.A.-based DynCorp International, a name you may recognize from the child sex trafficking scandal in Bosnia, or the alleged beatings of journalists in Haiti, or the toxic crop-spraying in Colombia. No individual DynCorp employee has been prosecuted in any of these cases. To the contrary, DynCorp went on to win more lucrative contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan … and, yes, Darfur.

Whereas the lack of accountability for hired guns in America’s current wars has proved to be one of the major stories of the past few years (think Blackwater in Fallujah, or Titan at Abu Ghraib), there’s been hardly a peep about U.S. defense contractors on the ground in Darfur. When I asked a senior official from CARE—a major humanitarian group working throughout Sudan—about the phenomenon, she replied: “Our people are not aware of private contractors in Darfur. Some in Khartoum, but not Darfur.” This oversight is difficult to comprehend, given that the vast majority of AMIS projects in Darfur are managed by PAE and DynCorp employees, from the building of barracks to the provision of strategic transport…..
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This is just an excerpt from the whole article Can Drag Queens and Hired Guns Save Darfur? at Truthdig. One might also mention that Lockheed is the largest military-industrial employer in Colorado Springs.