Tag Archives: corporations

Climate Change -who benefits?

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Are “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” a rather convenient way for the large investment companies (now that they’re all jumping on the bandwagon) to step forward, in lock step with the Congress, and find the ways in which they can become the “players” in the unfolding “crisis” and have a new tax that will, of course as always, be a burden most on those who can least afford it?

Or are they really concerned about the planet? Was Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” more of an investment talk aimed at these owners of capital getting in on a carbon tax and trading scheme, rather than a real debate that gave time to the dissenting scientific view? And, is the dogma now that CO2 and greenhouse effect are really driving the race toward ownership of emerging large alternative energy companies in which the corporations will likely win? Calling CO2 a pollutant is deception. It is what trees and plants thrive on.

Ethanol has now become the new “savior” in our effort of curbing the import of foreign oil. But ethanol is net-energy. That is, it takes more energy to create it than it gives back, besides the agricultural mess it will lead us to. How is it in past earth warming cycles, man’s absence was a causation? Seemingly impossible. Is the Solar cycle part of a natural global warming process? Why aren’t we moving instead to form citizen owned solar and wind utilities that will help the vast majority to utilize these energies without the huge up front costs usually associated? Or unless implemented immediately and widely, would it be all for naught as the worlds energy needs will never be affected by alternative energies? In other words, how do you replace the 85 million barrels of oil a day the planet uses? Not to mention the tons of coal and millions of cubic feet of natural gas?

Gore’s 7 good foot soldiers steps to reduce Co2 “pollution” is almost Hitlarian. Don’t think, just do what I say …from a spineless politician who wouldn’t stand up (and told others not to) for an investigation into the 2000 stolen election.

Capitalism will overtake any real discussion of problems we face and destroy dissenters who offer up real solutions to energy use that are owned by the populace at large. And once they’ve taxed us for carbon they will figure out a way to tax the sun or wind for those who take advantage of it for their homes. Yes, reduce your use of oil, gas, coal, etc… but beware who really benefits from this mostly un-debated scare of global warming.

What do we get for behaving as they want us to? A cleaner world? But no monetary gain for us? If our government was really serious about this the tax incentives would come back as in the 70’s and much bigger this time. And in all states. But that would hurt the oil-energy companies.

Some interesting articles and comments for your consideration:

Denial
By Frank Furedi, Spiked Online

“The charge of denial has become a secular form of blasphemy … The heretic is condemned because he has dared to question an authority that must never be questioned. Here, ‘overwhelming evidence’ serves as the equivalent of revealed religious truth, and those who question ‘scientists of unquestioned reputation’ — that is, the new priestly caste — are guilty of blasphemy … ‘Denial’ has become part of a secular inquisition that stigmatizes free thinking.”

Preaching the Climate Catechism
By Lorne Gunter, National Post

“Since 2003, the upper layer of the Atlantic has lost 25% of the extra heat it had built up in the past three decades…The broad consensus among solar scientists is that the Earth’s warming is almost entirely explicable by increased solar activity that began about 100 years ago, and which will end around 2020…But these inconvenient truths would be bad for the cause…”

Lehman Brothers contemplate and study profitability of Climate Change

Austrailian carbon credit purchase. Who owns the wind farm in China? Not the citizens.

Is carbon tax a shelter for the rich?

A Progressive state of mind

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My friend belongs to the Pikes Peak Inter-Religious Clergy Alliance. The members are from a diversity of denominations, but feel united by their common stand on social issues. Progressive issues actually. “We would have included Progressive in the name except for its connotation of Palestine-Israel advocacy.”
 
I love it.

Here’s what Wikipedia describes as the tenets of progressivism, a political movement started at the dawn of the last century, and its accomplishments:

Democracy
. Ballot initiative
. Direct primary
. Direct election of U.S. Senators
. Referendum
. Recall
. Secret ballot
. Women’s suffrage

Efficiency
. Professional administrators
. Centralization of decision-making process
. Movements to eliminate governmental corruption

Regulation of large corporations and monopolies
. Trust-busting
. Regulation
. Socialism
. Laissez-Faire

Social justice
. Development of professional social workers
. The building of Settlement Houses
. The enactment of child labor laws
. Support for the goals of organized labor
. Prohibition laws

Environmentalism
. National parks and wildlife refuges

Neo-liberal regime in France hits hard road block

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France doesn’t want the neo-liberal program that its government is trying to shove down its throat. Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in May as France’s president, and it is clear that he was the French corporate candidate of choice. France gripped by massive strike

Those corporations want him to destroy the social benefits that the French currently receive and to break all opposition to corporate control over everything in French society.

The French Labor Movement is battling back, and unlike the British and American Labor Movement, the French working class still has some punch left in it. The Battle For France involves more than just the French though. Neo-liberal needs to be delivered a death blow, and the French workers just like the Iraqi population as a whole, are doing their very best to fight back. We wish both the best in their struggles against the common evil we all should be struggling against. That common evil is corporate control over all society against the will of those underneath corporate yoke.

Why?

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Black Americans are getting sick and fed up with the entire racist criminal injustice system of the US. Still fresh in memory is the picture of White cops with guns turning back Blacks trying to cross the Mississippi Bridge to get out of New Orleans. In mind, too, is the new blatantly open use of torture not only of American military held POWs, but also of Black common folk held in US prisons around the country.

Thousands marched against racial profiling this week In D.C., their protest fed by the movement to defend the Jena Six. Why?

Why? is the question that was asked in Miami this week, too, and got a young man shot down by the police there. Why? too another taser death, not just in Canada, but in Miami that same week, this time of a Black man? Why? Black Agenda Report reports these stories of the Miami events. Executed ‘Walking While Black’ in Miami

Why? The answer is simple. We live in a world ruled by corporations run by Whites of privilege. They control and run a police and judicial system run and controlled by Whites of privilege, too. We live in a US privleged White world where a White privileged and dominated system arrests and tortures prisoners of color without any sense of the human indecency of their actions, fed by an even larger White community that cheers this on. We live in a racist US society.

Nothing that much has changed from the past. MLK’s ‘dream’ is still a dream and not any reality. That is the answer to Why?

For Black Americans especially there is no national security under the so-called national security state. Instead, it is a state of criminal injustice Blacks live under and promises of change for the better cannot be fed when all the recent changes have been for the worse. Racial injustice cannot be disappeared, when class injustice is the norm.

Greens and the energy companies

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Everybody says they’re for helping out the environment these days, and yet nobody seems to be for protecting the environment that much. After all, who is going to say they are for dumping a pile of personal refuse into the middle of the city park, so to speak?

The most prolific talkers about the need to save the environment are the supporters of the world wide Green Party Movement. This political movement was formed because neither the Marxists nor the capitalists of the world seemed to take the issue seriously enough. Still, today the real issue is, does the Green Movement itself take saving the environment all that seriously? Unfortunately I think that the answer is really… NO, it does not. Why is that conclusion warranted?

Let’s take a look at the energy companies and the Green Movement, for example, and what do all the Green supporters always seem to advocate? They basically seem to advocate nothing. They usually talk about finding new non-polluting energy sources and turning to that as replacement for oil, coal, and nuclear. They advocate that individuals use less energy personally. They advocate less personal consumerism, but they don’t advocate much any real change in the structure of who runs the energy businesses, which is in private hands.
Is that really advocating for protecting the environment in a serious manner?

These energy companies are monstrous in size and are the major multi-nationals in the world. Can their structure just be allowed to stay as it is now, and the earth can be protected by that? Are these energy companies in private hands going to respond to reason and turn to ‘clean’ fuels in lesser amounts? We have to keep in mind that the rest of the multi-nationals demand humongous amounts of energy to be supplied to them for production, transportation, and sales.

Demanding that individuals reduce personal consumption while humongous multi-nationals should merely remain organized as they are is not a serious plan to combat ecological disintegration. Where is the Green Movement’s call to take these companies out of private hands and control their management so that profit making is not their single orientation? Have we missed something here, because allowing private ownership of multi-national energy corporations is not going to conserve Earth?

The Greens have to do what many countries have had to do in the past to be a movement that can seriously change the world. Many countries when confronted by huge multi-nationals that wanted to merely loot national resources and make a profit off that, nationalized these companies. They took them over and took back some of the loot taken into private hands by the super rich. It was necessary to do so, just as it is still necessary to do this with today’s humongous energy conglomerates. In short, the Green Movement must stop just making demands that individual peons change their consumer habits, and demand that energy multi-nationals be nationalized.

The Green Movement, to save Earth’s ecology, has to change from being a group of nice individuals talking intellectually about good things, and become a Movement that has serious demands that can actually effect serious change if implemented. Nationalize the energy multi-nationals now!

Think that costs too much in the long run? Then think some about how these companies have directed the spending of $2 1/2 trillion dollars PLUS into occupying Iraq and Afghanistan? Save some money and help save the planet from non-sustainable production directed by private owners looting Earth for private profit.

Bio-fuels destroy land

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We are living the end of cheap oil, and bio-fuels are being proposed by multinational corporations and the Pentagon as an ecologically sound alternative to fossil fuels. But are they really?

When we factor in the conditions of the already degraded landscape of modern industrial agriculture we can see that bio-fuels will accelerate the destruction of land without being able to put a significant dent in energy needs.

George Monbiot addresses this issue some in his commentary The Western Appetite for Biofuels Is Causing Starvation in the Poor World Or check out this United Nations report.

We must be careful when the mass wasters of natural resources get behind a supposedly GREEN ‘solution’. We must ask ourselves if their ‘reforms’ and solutions’ actually improve things, or will they just lead us deeper into the abyss of economic and ecological collapse the world now faces?

Darfur

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Darfur AID not sanctionsYesterday’s Colorado College rally (October 29) by the interventionist group, ‘Save Darfur’, was quite an educational event. There, we got to see a train load of comfortable American speakers demand that we begin an economic war against a Fourth World country, Sudan, to be carried out by US corporations and the US government.

How could anybody be against that, their puzzled faces questioned those few of us that were there with signs against the increasing US military presence in Africa? Don’t you want to help the people of Darfur? As a matter of fact, we do, and that is precisely why we oppose groups like ‘Save Darfur’. They do not advocate economic assistance to Africans, but rather they advocate ‘policing’ them and dominating them from Washington D.C.

Not a word was said about opposing AFICICOM, the new Pentagon intervenionist command center designed to terrorize Africa. Not a word was said about the US use of Ethiopian troops to invade Somalia and overthrow the government there. The Eritrean government is predicting an attack on their country backed by the US government since they opposed, and continue to oppose, US actions against the people of Somalia. Not a word was said against US military aggression in Africa at the rally.

The mention of the US genocide against the Iraqi people met a shout from the crowd to ‘stay on focus’ about Darfur. Nobody talked about the need to end the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the Pentagon. Nobody talked about the genocide of the Palestinians by the combined US and Israeli governments’ aggression. Not a word was said against the what is being done in Gaza and Lebanon, Pakistan and Iran by current US foreign policy. Not a word was said in opposition to the so called ‘War on Terror’, a made-in-the-US war that breeds terror, and celebrates terror and torture everywhere. Not a word was said against US government torture and rendition of POWs to be tortured by other countries.

Instead, we were exhorted by the speakers to begin a campaign to blame China for African bloodshed! This campaign is to be brought to bear on the Sudanese government and China from the countries that have terrorized Africans for centuries! Nobody in the pro interventionist rally crowd seemed to see anything much wrong with this? Instead they acted as if their actions were some how saintly and divine.

They talked about genocide a lot, though even Jimmy Carter has just declared most recently that the killings in Sudan do not meet the defintion of being a genocide. We agree. See the Christiian Science Monitor report ‘Elders’ criticize West’s response to situation in Darfur…Brahimi says West ‘pampered’ rebels, while Carter calls US’s use of term ‘genocide’ to describe violence ‘unhelpful.’ We too want to see the civil war and bloodshed in Sudan to come to an end, but do not agree with the activities of the group ‘Save Darfur’.

The US has spent at least $2.5 trillion in tearing apart Iraq and Afghanistan. We call on the US to spend that sort of money to end poverty, war, and disease in Africa. Why isn’t ‘Save Darfur’ doing the same? Instead they are calling for troops to be sent in, economic war to be begun against an impoverished country, and blame to be cast on the developing country of China. We find this to be shameful, and say that the Peace Movement should not put its stamp of approval on this campaign by the misnamed ‘Save Darfur’.

Peace Now. Spend the war budget on human needs. End the bloodshed by holding our own government responsible, instead of calling for it to increase its intervention into other countries’ affairs. We demand that the US start an economic aid package, without strings attached, that gives billions of dollars of reparations for the crimes that our government has done to Africans over several centuries. Forgive all of Africa’s foreign debt now. That’s how you help the people of Darfur, not by urging US power plays to control African resources.

Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission must demand no more US intervention into the affairs of other nations.

We need to do this again- together we must win!

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Thirty eight years ago the US had its largest demonstration ever and we need to do this again. Two million marched to demand an end to the Vietnam War on October 15. It was The Vietnam Moratorium of 1969

Like then just like now, Americans demonstrating in the streets will not alone be enough. Ultimately it is the resistance of the Iraqis like it was with the resistance of the Vietnamese that will force the US to desist, and finally to withdraw. Today, we salute the heroes of the Iraqi Resistance. You will win the independence of the Iraqi nation from US government control through your sacrifices.

We as Americans owe a huge debt to the Iraqi people as we do to the Vietnamese people. We have allowed tyranny to once again prevail inside the US, our own country, and you have suffered disproportionately because of it.

Your struggle on your own behalf works for our own behalf, too. Thank you. We owe you, the Iraqi people, more than we can ever repay you. From your Resistance we will build our own Resistance, and we shall eventually together stop our corporations from destroying the entire planet. Together we must win!

Stop Them From Beginning a Terrorist War Against Iran!

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Woolsey was eight of clubs in the Neocon deck of villainsThis Thursday at Shove Memorial Chapel, a terrorist will be addressing Colorado College students, for that’s what R. James Woolsey is.
 
This ex-director of the CIA and now current Chair of The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) is one of the leading architects of the Iraq War and Occupation, and is perhaps the most prominent advocate for spreading this American-made disaster into Syria and Iran. In short, he advocates, and has advocated for the longest time, a continual regional war to help better loot Middle East oil for American corporations.

The Committee on the Present Danger is a Right Wing neo-con advocacy group made up from major business and political players in the military-industrial complex. Other infamous co-Chairs of the CPD are George Schultz and Joe Lieberman. It has a long record of supporting continuous warfare based supposedly on ideology, but more so on corrupt commercial and political self interest.

There is a lot of money to be made from The War, and the CPD has backed continual warfare since even when the Cold War was first begun 6 decades ago. Today, it wants us to engage in a ‘Holy War’ with the Muslim World to hide away their own military-industrial machine profit making.

Students, your Colorado College by inviting James Woolsey to address you, is encouraging you to accept the Iraq War, a new war with Iran, and the idea that a nuclear war is winnable under the leadership of the American corporate bloc. They are encouraging you to think that the advocacy of torture and terrorism is perfectly acceptable as real guidelines for American foreign policy.

We urge you to reject these ideas and to demonstrate with us against the presence of this war monger on your campus. We urge you to reject a regional extension of the Iraqi War into neighboring countries.

US out of Iraq and Afghanistan!
No War Against Iran!
Stop spreading US terrorism through a phony ‘war on terrorism!
Bring the Troops Home Now!
R. James Woolsey, Get Off This Campus!

James Woolsey is CIA, not a Green

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James Woolsey, ex CIA director under Clinton, is the managing director of Paladin Capital Group, which has multi Pentagon contracts supplying surveillance and military equipment.

They push themselves off as being eco friendly via company investment in the production of ethanol. See Go Ethanol.

You can get an idea of the type of pap that Woolsey will be spouting this week at Colorado College from this article, An interview with geo-green James Woolsey, former head of CIA. Woolsey and Paladin Capital Group is just the latest of the corporate fad where really odious corporations try to pass themselves off as being eco-friendly when they are the complete opposite. Continue reading →

Beware of Hillary Care!

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The local business idiots’ rag here in Colorado Springs (The Gazette) has been warning us all about something they call “Hillary Care’. It’s socialized medicine they scream!

The editors of the Right Wing chain mislabeled ‘Freedom Publications’ of which The Gazette is one sheet of, even hate enrolling the poorer of the nation’s children into a government paid health care plan. That would be the first step toward a World Communist government in their opinion. But just what is Hillary Care anyway? In fact, it’s the same thing it was the first time around, or in other words, it’s a sucker punch to the general public.

The original health care proposals by Bill Clinton and wide were a band aid meant to get infected, and infected the American public’s wound became. Things just got worse and the Clintons walked away playing like they were visionaries before their time. Hardly. What their proposals did was set into motion yet further cannibalization of American medical and nursing care by the insurance companies. And they sat by and sat by and sat by.

Hillary has no plan for a single payer system guaranteed by the government such as today vets and some senior citizens get, and a few kids under Chips programs, too. She is not going to propose that the nation be put under one umbrella of equal care equally applied. She is just as much for tiered care under corporate control as George W. Bush is. But she is running her campaign as if this were not true.

Do not get sucker punched by the Clintons again. If you vote for her thinking that at least she will reform the way medical care is delivered in the US you will be voting for change, all the while guaranteeing that it will not come in a way you will like or want. She wants insurance control over your health, not taking away their control over you and your family.

Here is a well written article about the Clintons’ proposals. What went wrong with the Clinton plan? Health Care non-reform the last time The answer is that nothing really went wrong from ‘the vision’ that the Clintons had back then. The insurance companies kept running the entire show.

After opposition to reform quickened as surely it had to, while still in office they dropped any opposition to the big medical corporations they might have ever had, just like it was one big hot potato for them. Hillary is not about to oppose the insurance companies today any more than back then, and is a poor, poor choice to hang hopes on for even the most meager reform of the US Lack of Health System. Vote for her if you want a dirty band aid to be applied while actually wanting and needing major surgery. Hillary is quite a little sugar pill.

Their ‘Free enterprise’ hellholes for our elderly

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When ‘free enterprise’ doesn’t want to provide a social service it melts it down first. In the case of America’s nursing homes…

…the corporate sector uses its control over the federal government to create a regulatory system and funding system completely full of any and all holes possible.

Then it promptly sets out to loot the system it has set in place, all the while blaming the horrors taking place on the legal system and government agencies which are totally guided by them in the first place.

See the New York Times article today More Profit Less Nursing at Many Homes to catch a glimpse of this process at work.

Who loses besides the patients? That list is a long one. It includes family members, tax payers, and the workers caring for the elderly while the government and corporate administrators sabotage their care giving in every way imaginable. All come out losers excerpt the owners of the nursing home chains. They make their money at any rate.

Imagine how it hurts to work in such a hellhole? It breaks your back, your heart, and your soul. You are bossed around by people who don”t care either for you, or the elderly and infirm you are caring for. All the while, the lower level administrative bosses slime false ‘concern’ for your supposed lack of doing the proper job they have sabotaged you from doing. They slime false concern for the sick and infirm, all the while continually ignoring their most basic needs.

No amount of hypocrisy is beyond the government regulatory staff and the corporate hacks that run this business. There must be a special place in Hell for them. They have a total moral vacuum inside themselves. Their paychecks depend on doing less and getting more profit squeezed out for the big wigs by doing as they do.

One thing to remember, too, is simply that the corporate government and their bosses, the corporations themselves don’t want to deliver any care at all. All care given subtracts from their profits since it is expensive. Just like how they often try to squeeze wages and benefits to the point of total disappearance, they do the same to the actual service they contract to provide. In doing so, the ‘free enterprise system’ creates hellholes for America’s elderly, and these hellholes now pockmark our landscape just like the military bases and prisons do. They are dull ugly spots most people try to ignore as they pass by.

Capitalism is not an efficient system. In its production of products it turns out gobs of garbage and scrap. In its production of services, it does even worse. It makes scrap out of live human beings.

You need care for your family member or yourself, but unfortunately you just get a false phony smile and a knife in the back while looking for that care. You want to believe…. Yet you find the elderly going down an assembly line to death, illness, and scrap. Corporations have turned the downward process of aging into a torture of the aged. It doesn’t have to be this way, but this is often what there is.

An economy gasping for air

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Fed move risks long-term pain for short-term gain More cheap credit issued by the Federal Reserve was what drove the stock market rally yesterday. The US has an economy gasping for air.

The Iraq War has been a boondoggle that allowed the major international corporations to loot the American economy while providing no real service to either the Iraqi people or the American.

An economy based on allowing the real estate firms to loot America’s housing stock with cheap and crappy development, allowing the medical supply-insurance firms to loot funds needed for the elderly and the sick, and allowing the War contractors to loot funds from all of our society, but especially funds needed by children and their schools is an economy that can go absolutely nowhere except toward bankruptcy for the majority of the population.

The easy war is no longer going to be so easy for Americans as they now begin to lose their jobs, their mortgaged houses, and their ‘national security’. Why? We let ourselves be suckered into allowing the super rich to direct all our affairs without any brakes on their power.

This September 11 in Colorado Springs

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All THEIR plans for continued warfare are predicated on the US as being some sort of grand victim in the world, but it is not. Once the Christian Right Wing claimed that their persecution of Jewish people around the globe was based on their perception that Jews had killed Christ. Now, they substitute Muslims for Jews, and claim that persecution of Muslims is due to Muslims having attacked the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001.

Iraq is a Muslim country, therefore ‘Christian’ America attacked and continues to occupy it. Payback for September 11 many Americans still continue to think. In reality, the ‘Christian’ warfare is far more due to the ‘Christian’ corporations worshiping their stock portfolios more than they do God. It’s the dollar that counts, but they combine it with God as cover. They combine it with their supposed patriotism, too. But they are not patriots, these ‘Christian’ corporations. They are money makers for the super-rich, and job givers to those who have few real Christian scruples.

This September 11 in Colorado Springs, peace activists will be going out to where these ‘Christian’ corporations congregate in their profit making/ war making. In Colorado Springs, that site is the corner of Fountain and South Academy Blvd. There, one can find Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and a host of other lesser known corporations, but war making/ blood sucking/ profit making vampire corporations none the less. They have non-descriptive names like GTEC, Alliant (largest maker of depleted uranium munitions in the world), Intecom, BAE Systems, etc. These are all concentrated in 2 buildings at this single intersection in our city.

Many people go by, yet simply do not notice the presence of these war profiteers! This September 11 we plan to change that, and will vigil at this intersection from 10AM in the morning to 4PM in the afternoon. Our signs will concentrate on three points.

Here are the Merchants of Death…
Kids, Not Bombs!
Disarm Lockheed’s WOMD Now!

We hope you participate and have your participation help keep you from becoming depressed later about the propaganda you are likely to see and hear through the US corporate media on 9/11. It’s your chance to tell the public passing by on this busy intersection, just who you think are the real war mongers out there in our world. It is truly the American corporations that make a killing with their constant killing that fits the bill as for who is being the bloodiest war mongers these days. They are All American, but you will be more so, simply if you protest the bloodshed that they are causing.

See you there on 9/11! Be there and send a message that you don’t want more war against other countries. Enough is enough!

Death comes for the American people

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grim-reaper.jpg
Protest the war. Promote economic and social justice. Scream to close Guantanamo. Offer your body to be burned and watch the buzzards feast off your tasty flesh. See them wait for the next sucker who will feed their greedy maws. We can fight every injustice that we see in our country, even in the world, and it won’t make a bit of difference. The true evil is that we have a government that is designed to be “of the people, by the people, for the people” to which the people matter not. We do not live in a representative democracy. Please stop thinking that we do.

The full frontal assaults on our civil liberties just keep coming. Finishing touches are being put on a bill that will give the power of life and death to George W. Bush, through Alberto Gonzales. In the past, federal judges determined whether death row prisoners were receiving “adequate counsel” during the appeals process. A provision in last year’s reauthorization of the Patriot Act gives that power to the Attorney General. What this really means is that Bush can fast track executions. He has the ability to shorten the time period given to death row inmates to appeal their cases to federal courts. Texas has been doing this for years. The Lone Star state loves to barbeque.

But who really cares about death row inmates? I certainly haven’t in the past. Nor prostitutes strangled on the side of the road. Nor drug dealers killed in squalid neighborhoods. That was them. I’m in a different, more deserving, more protected class.

In the past few years my eyes have been opened to the incredible unchecked power and flagrant dishonesty of our governmental institutions. From police brutality, to discrimination in hiring, to outright lying, to doctoring evidence, to unequal application of the law. All of these I have witnessed first hand. I can no longer turn up my nose at death row inmates. I am no longer convinced of their guilt. I no longer trust the “justice” system that put them behind bars.

I have become she. We have become they. If I were to be falsely accused of a crime, they could not find a jury of my peers. Nor yours. We would be at their mercy. And they would lick their chops in eager anticipation of the banquet being prepared for their enjoyment.

Much of what is being done escapes our notice. Collusion between the government, corporations and the media keeps most of us in the dark. But death comes for the American people. The grim reaper is waiting in the dark that is our national conscience. Only the light of revolution can save us now.

Got health insurance?

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Universal healthcare you say? Every civilized nation on earth has it except us? Well, take a look at the average American when compared to a French or Canadian counterpart. Fat, dumb and happy. Chubby hand reaching out….trying to find a Hot Pocket, or an open pocket. Gimme more, gimme more. Fill my yap. I deserve it. Don’t expect me to care for myself, or my family.

We can thank the government and the educational system for creating a nation of uninformed cretins. We can thank the food industry for lining their pockets at the expense of good nutrition and health. We can thank the legal system for stealing Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs….leaving doctors to take the safest path. We can thank the pharmaceutical companies for corrupting our well-meaning doctors and putting profiteering ahead of health.

The truth is that most doctors are saps who care about the average American. I was married to one for many years. Never once did I see him hesitate to help an uninsured individual. He’s a fantastic surgeon who knows little about wellness. You’ve gotta cut to cure. You’ve got pain? Here is Vicodin. You’ve got inflammation? Let me give you a cortisone shot. Depression or anxiety? Zoloft and Paxil. Exercise? Massage? Acupuncture? Herbs? Good nutrition? Safety? Self discipline? Not on the radar. Medical education is driven by those that stand to gain. If there isn’t profit in a particular course of treatment, it is not part of the curriculum. The powers that be do not make money from whole grains, whole foods, supplements, Eastern medicine, helmets, exercise. Thus, our poor students learn nothing about wellness. And they are unaware of their lack.

Enter the greediest of parasites–attorneys. When managed care first came to the fore, every doc I know was willing to forego unnecessary tests, to save healthcare dollars. Dave had great confidence in his diagnostic powers. He knew what his patient needed and had the balls to refuse unneeded and expensive tests. In one year, when the average surgeon ordered several hundred MRIs, Dave ordered 11. Alas, it took only one lawsuit by a fat, diabetic smoker to change his opinion. “Did you order an MRI?” “No, it was unnecessary.” “Isn’t that the standard of care in the community?” “Yes, but it was unnecessary in this case.” Nevermind that an MRI would tell him nothing that he didn’t know. It was an Achille’s heel with a jury of uneducated peers. Now, my idealistic and caring husband has become jaded. Why on earth would he put himself, his family and his reputation on the line to save a few bucks for Centura? Especially when they are taking the “savings” to line the pockets of their top executives.

Let’s also talk about end-of-life issues. Many healthcare dollars are spent in the last two weeks of a terminal patient’s life. To say euthanasia is to belie one’s atheistic nature and to bring brimstone down upon one’s head. To suggest withholding care is to betray an uncaring attitude. Bullshit! Who wants to spend his last days unconscious, hooked up to IVs, soiling the sheets and dragging out the grieving process for loved ones? No one I know. But what doctor is brave enough to make the suggestion? Jack Kevorkian was imprisioned for honoring the requests of the dying. He was a revolutionary. He paid a great price. I won’t encourage Dave to take the same path, although I think it is a noble one.

Until the American public is willing and able to start looking out for their own health and well-being, until they are willing and able to educate themselves and their children, until people are willing to forego expensive testing, until they are willing to see a nurse, a midwife, a physical therapist or a physician’s assistant for their primary care, there will be no moving forward. Any presidential candidate promoting a universal healthcare plan best be prepared to confront not only the corporations who control our food supply and our education, but also the Unhealthy American and his cousin, the Greedy American. I will not support a candidate who doesn’t have the knowledge and integrity to speak truth.

Who is losing Pinon Canyon

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Banner at corner of Nevada and DaleI caught a quick glimpse of this picture just inside a recent Indy, the issue about Piñon Canyon expansion, and quickly closed the paper. The banners and rebar in front of Toons are falling to disrepair, so I cringed to see what attention they’d drawn.

It turns out we’re seen as “concrete support for the ranchers” against military expansion in the region. Great! But the article was sneakily double edged. It made the case that “Colorado Springs is losing the battle for Piñon Canyon.” Colorado Springs as in big business interests maybe, not Colorado Springs representing the people here. They don’t want military expansion. How can you lose a battle you aren’t trying to win?

Colorado Springs has always been run roughshod by the military and land developers, but leaving out that distinction, the article presumes to be speaking for all of us. And warning us that we are losing. Do I lose the Lotto every time I don’t play it? I do not.

What makes the suggestion more subversive is that the Army and Colorado Springs Inc are not losing. As subsequent news reports have shown, the Army juggernaut continues. The Colorado legislation vote to deny funding to land use studies is a setback, not a defeat. The Army faces its usual foes, a populace who persists against them. But the sides are unequally matched, like corporations versus individuals. People have finite resources, finite energies to mobilize in the effort. The Army knows this, their spokesman all but spells it out at town hall forums, clearly an eerie psych-ops move to demoralize the opposition. Y’all have lives to get back to. [Resistance is futile.]

The ranchers of southeast Colorado have risen to the alarm cry that the Army is about to crush their land with its tanks. Putting out the message that the Army is losing ground is an attempt to send the crowd home. It is military propaganda.

Feel Good Imperialism returns

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Now that Dubya is in free fall with all his toads, it’s time for Feel Good Imperialism to return. And who better to be the general for all the feel goody liberals that like imperialism with a smiley face, than Al Gore, Rock Star? Is this better than the New Life Church, or what? Gore plans to rock against warming, and you can bet there’s money to be made by all our newly ‘green’ corporations. I’m so excited for Mother!

Impeach! Goodbye Dems.

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Bush is claiming Executive Privilege in refusing to shed light on the possible nefarious dealing of his underlings. The press describes any investigation at an impasse “until one side or the other blinks.” Nonsense. Impeach!
 
Cheney surprises everyone by declaring that the Vice-Presidency is actually a fourth branch of government, out of reach of the checks and balances familiar to all. Congressmen want to joke about cutting off his funding, etc, meanwhile Cheney’s boys elude oversight. Impeach!

The Justice Department acting politically? Impeach! The Supreme Court behaving like cronies? Impeach.

Congress pretending to oppose endless war, yet refusing to cut off the funding? And eschewing that power, preferring false “impasses” to the option(s) above?

Apparently it’s the best they can do, at least that’s how the corporate media has it. But why let the corporations tell us what is or isn’t our prerogative? It’s time to impeach the lot of them. If the Democrats don’t want to do what they were elected to do, let’s leave them. And turn away from the TV.

It’s time for real bipartisanship. Real conservatives and real progressives need to bail from the two imposter parties and opt for representatives of their own. If big-oil interests can conspire with big-pharma, insurance, multi-national, communications and agri-biz to plunder America’s wealth, I’d hope from the people’s side, the Greens could join the Socialists could join the Libertarians could join the Reformers could join everyone else, Ross Perot’s upstarts perhaps. We can address our differences after we’ve wrestled the reins from the corporate greed parties. If even that will be possible. But we’re not going to see national health care, less war, or more equitable and just policies until we do.

And to those Democrats who fear that abandoning their so-called representatives will release them to the dark side, it shows what little faith you had in your candidates in the first place. The results are already in from last election: having a Democratic representative in Congress, unless it’s John Conyers, is like having no one at all. If the politician you elected really has firm intentions, he’ll have them without you. It’s time to nurture someone else, someone with potential, into power.

Have you seen Barack do anything? Hillary? You’ve seen Edwards capitulate to a fraudulent election. Gore too. You’ve seen Kucinich pretend that the Democratic tent was inclusive enough for voices against the war and that turned out to be a lie. The Dems have no one unsuited to do their bidding, and what a surprise, it’s not yours.

G8- Why the protest?

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AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Group of Eight are.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the Group of Eight are the wealthiest countries in the world, and basically they run the world. And the leader is the United States, and it’s actually the corporations within these countries that run it. It’s not the governments, because, after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations.

In our own country, we know that the next two final presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to raise something like half a billion dollars. And that’s not going to come from me and you. Primarily that’s going to come from the people who own and run our big corporations. They’re totally beholden to the government. So the G8 really is this group of countries that represent the biggest multinational corporations in the world and really serve at their behest.

All of commentary at… John Perkins (author of ‘The Secret History of American Empire;…’) interview by Amy Goodman Kind of an ‘Imperialism Made Simple’ for American university miseducated Bachelor Degree dunderheads, perhaps?

RU one of those credentialed? If so, write to us. You can be helped.

American companies busy at work killing the kids daily

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Protests at the G8 economic conference in Europe and Bush and Rice preaching the joys of capitalism to Putin as the Pentagon encircles Russia with new weapons. These are the headlines in the news this week and last.

Most all of us now understand how the US’s military-industrial complex kills children daily around the globe, since one has to be in obtuse and total denial to not know about this. But what about our other industrial giants? Aren’t they helping others out, and most especially helping out the world’s children to live better lives?

George Monbiot has an excellent commentary about this issue titled (at least on their site), G8: Watch What They Do, Not What They Say. A` large part of his article discusses some big American companies involvement in helping kill Philippine children for their stockholders benefit. And how the US government itself steps in to ensure that this be the case.

This is not a situation limited to the Philippines and/ or breastfeeding. American corporations carry out economic policies that kill all around the globe. They are constantly working to sell coca cola, corn syrup, and other expensive food trash to children whose parents have little money. In Mexico and Central America, vending of fruit and licuados is rapidly in decline, while corn tortilla prices skyrocket. Meanwhile, the countryside is turned to desert by American pushed ag policies. Children perish in these conditions, and they are the conditions that US corporations push worldwide.

Yes, American companies are busy at work daily killing kids to make a better profit for themselves. Add that to the policies they push that degrade the world’s ecology, and the kids are in danger everywhere. There has got to be a better way than allowing the ‘free market’ to just run amok.

Will world agriculture production collapse?

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World agriculture is facing some dire straits ahead. While most scientists have been concentrating their worries about the ability of agriculture to keep up with the growing population consumption needs for some time, they were often worrying most about the spreading scarcity of fresh water, growing desertification of the planet, increasing soil degradation, global warming, peak oil’s effects on fertilizer supplies, etc. They had not been worrying so much about the death of honey bees.

That has now changed, since these bees are necessary for pollination of flowering plants and the bees are disappearing. We need the bees not just for honey, which alone is a relatively minor item, but we need them most for pollination of crops.

There is a lesson to be learned here, and that is simply that consequences of destructive economic activities are often not foreseen in advance. People calculate one thing, but ‘God’, so to speak, calculates another. Nature is not a controlled laboratory in a university lab somewhere, where reductionist thinking can lead only to reductionist results. So it is deadly to just rely on only a micro-management style, ‘environmental impact statement’ sort of plotting of economic planning in the future. That is precisely what our corporate government and the corporations themselves will try to do, and they will call it GREEN to do so. In fact it is not and is a formula for mass human suicide instead.

Let’s hope that the bees can rally and come back next season? But even if they do, we are hardly out of crisis state in the least. We are just beginning to enter into it. The corporate sector alone is not in any way capable of delivering the type of planning of future economic activity that is needed to forestall disaster worldwide. Temporary profit making, which is what the corporate world is all about, can only be destructive to the world environment we all live in. There is not even a seed of real change that can be accomplished when this mindset dominates. A radical shift is totally necessary in how things are done and made.

Kurt Vonnegut goes

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Kurt Vonnegut lectures at HarvardM and I just read Harrison Bergeron together two nights ago. I remembered the story from high school, where we also read Slaughterhouse Five to my father’s consternation. I like to think it was just the language he objected to.
 
My favorite essay of KV’s at In These Times was about governance guesswork.
 
Kurt Vonnegut could say it all and I don’t think he was through.

I just came across an excerpt someone posted from Jailbird:

“What could be so repulsive after all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man’s belief that each person could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well, young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or her simple needs? How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again–if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet’s wealth, disband their national armies and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people–everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.”

And this from an interview with Joel Bleifuss in 2003:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is “The Mask of Sanity ” by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

Call to arms, Broadmoor, 11am Thursday

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Click to see more banners over the Broadmoor
On Monday Citizens for Peace In Space greeted attendees of the week-long 23rd Annual Space Symposium held at the Broadmoor. It’s the annual gathering of the world’s leading war profiteers. The corporations who hold the contracts to put weapons in space are the same ones earning billions off the war in Iraq, with no end in sight. The air was so convivial even we were treated like regulars.
 
And there was also the regular escalation of counter-protest measures. This year they closed the sidewalk. We left to regroup.
 
UPDATE: The Broadmoor and CSPD police are enforcing a new permit ordinance whereby they can close the public sidewalk for the duration of the Space Arms Bazaar. Freedom from Speech by city permit? Come on Thursday to see if that’s constitutional!

Bill Sulzman got hold of the Special Event Permit, it reads: “This permit grants exclusive use of the sidewalks on the east side of Lake Circle, from the south of Lake Avenue, to the north at the edge of the parking garage during above listed dates/times.”