Tag Archives: Elderly

We will miss you Elizabeth

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Elizabeth poses with fellow arrestees the day after the 2007 St Patricks Day debacleWe will all miss Elizabeth. Despite the press, the city government , and The Gazette all dragging her name through the mud last year, me and my family will miss Elizabeth because she was a loving person who gave a lot of herself for, and to, others. This was the real Elizabeth, and not the fake ‘antiwar dissident’ that the killers amongst us wanted to be portrayed to the public.
 
The sad truth about Elizabeth’s last days amongst us, was that she ran a foul of our pathetic US Medical System, which quite frankly killed her with its negligent and defective ‘care’ as it does millions of other older people. Like Elizabeth, these elderly that this business kills, are our friends, neighbors, and family. It makes one weep that we have to endure such a destruction of life and spirit at this sad and reactionary moment in our country’s history.

Elizabeth knew what the world was about. She, earlier in life, had been a rather conservative though nominally liberal woman cruising through life. But somewhere, she began to question what she was seeing and living, and became a true American ‘dissident’.

She hated the racism she saw around her when she was a teacher and resident in Chicago. She hated the endless and stupid wars that our government pushes with a passion. She grew to despise the American Medical System’s uncaring and thoughtless approach to the sick and aging. She grew to want a fundamental change to the society that she had had to live with all her life, and she began to work with others constantly to see that things might begin to change.

Elizabeth was always welcome in our home, and she always welcomed us to hers. We knew her as one easily to anger, but one who was just as easy to forget and forgive. In fact, she was more likely to forgive others for their differences and bad habits than she was ever likely to bear an unnecessary grudge. That was the Elizabeth we knew and grew to love. We knew a loving and kind Elizabeth. We knew an Elizabeth who cared deeply about others.

Elizabeth and Tony at Peterson AFB

Thank you, Elizabeth, for your gifts to my daughter, who began to think of you as her adopted grandmother. In fact, you were just exactly that. And thank you for making the peace dog welcome always. This dog loved you, too. Yeah, she did. Ruf, ruf.

I remember the time when we went up to Palmer Park and I was poo-pooing your concern for this highly trained (yeah, right!) dog who was leaning out the open window. I was paying your words no attention as I rambled on about some other esoteric and stupid political point. Then lo-and-behold, Ms. Beastley did jump out of the window of our moving car and rolled over entirely once or twice after hitting the ground, then looked up stupidly at us, and then promptly proceeded to run after the squirrel! I will remember that moment between us for a lifetime, Elizabeth. You always saw what others refused to see.

My daughter will remember you for the doll you gave her, the one that has a striking likeness to you. She cherishes that doll that you so kindly gave to her. My daughter cried with the news of your death, and we are so glad that we visited you at least one more last time before you passed away so suddenly. My daughter was ready to try to get you to play a game of Risk with her. She knew you would be a good one to try to keep her from taking over the world.

At that last visit, I tried to cheer you up by saying how good you looked upon just then having escaped from the hospitals that had held you. However, you had this way of looking through others superficial chit-chat and reading the real truth in their minds. I saw it in your eyes then. I saw the despair on your face about what had been done to you by the surgeon, but by the time I realized what had been seen in your face I was already in the car.

Elizabeth advocated for health care for allMy only regret is that I did not return to inside your apartment and give you the big hug that you needed right then, even if it was to be a hug given right in front of your other 2 friends who were with you at the moment. I thought to myself, aw… you need the rest and less people around at this time, more than the hug. I was wrong once again.

Elizabeth, we will miss you. You were a good friend, and you talked the talk, and walked the walk. You were kind and had a heart of gold most of all. They tried to tear you down, but they never did, and that spirit is what we most will remember always about you. That, and the love you gave others. You made an impact on all our lives and without you around, we will find a big void.

If there is a heaven, I have no doubt that you have already spoken to Jesus and have begun to argue politics with him right as I write. Give him Hell, Elizabeth! Somebody needs to hold him and his dad accountable, and you are the one with the spirit to do it, too.

Our love…

No right to just die

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America throws its disregarded into places like Guantanamo and the neighborhood nursing home. There in these places there is no right to just die, because instead you must be fed!

The Torture Drawings the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See has drawings that focus on the insertion of the naso-gastric tube through the nostrils to force feed the POWs. The ‘medical’ becomes the monster. John McCain, how do you feel about that? Dick Cheney, how ’bout you, Tough Guy?

In America’s nursing homes not only must you eat, but you must show your happiness, too. There is no right to be depressed, nor a right to not eat. There the poor are honored to be given ‘positions’, where they help feed the very elderly…. the elderly who no longer want to eat.

Why not? Why don’t they want to eat? Is it a sign of their ‘illness’, or a sign that living a lifetime in America is just so depressing that one is simply just ready to check out? God Bless America.

The Rosa Parks Lone Rider Theory

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Rosa Parks photographed after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, posed with newspaper reporter“Rosa Parks did so act on her own!” I’m faced with this repudiation yet again, as J’s high school class revisits the civil rights movement. Their reading list includes Howard Zinn, but still the lesson plan is determined to press home the Parks as lone rider theory.

It makes a heroic story, to tell of lone brave Parks (she’s even painted as elderly, are you kidding me?), riding home from a tiring day at work, so tired that she becomes tired of being told to go to the back of the bus. She stands her ground, an example to us all, and changes history.

Yes it is inspiring, yes it feels empowering. But IS it empowering? Does it empower you to stand up to injustice in the face of harsh, legal if also physical, consequence? Have you yet? You’re no Rosa Parks I could confidently guess, and it’s not your fault.

Do you doubt that there haven’t been countless upstarts, individuals railing against repressive authority, who’ve spoken their piece, made their gesture, only to be humbled by arrest, jail, judges, fines, and the ridicule of the community? It happens all the time. They are marginalized, broken, and ultimately worn down.

Let me describe another kind of heroism. Working for civil rights activists as a stenographer, being in on the discussions about who would make the strongest test case, and picking the right moment mindful of the preparations needed to mobilize colleagues to rally to your defense; thus committing your act of civil disobedience with ready support. Is that any less heroic? I’d suggest it takes more bravery because you know you are launching a political act that will have legs. And it will require more from you than just anger or being tired.

Cindy Sheehan didn’t just march down to Crawford Texas and pitch her lone tent. She consulted with an incredible network of organizers to conceive the plan, Code Pink maven Medea Benjamin among them

Rosa Parks and the bus she rode in on launched a key maneuver for the civil rights movement, and that’s certainly not a lesson the establishment wants to teach its children. Teach them that history is made by individuals, unique, gifted iconoclasts, with whom you’d have to have delusions of grandeur to identify. “You Sir, are no Kennedy,” or Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks. It’s the monarchist belief that only special people are endowed to rule. No need for commoners to concern themselves, the aptitude for nobility is hereditary.

Don’t teach children that to change anything you have to take on the establishment with its own weapons. Idealistic youth don’t want to hear that you have to fight politicians with politics.

You don’t have to become the system to defeat it, but you have to inhabit the system and understand that it operates with the mechanisms of human nature. You must play the system, and no one, absolutely no one, has ever done it alone. Not even Eve.

Was Rosa Parks an iPod-wearing rebel-without-a-cause? Not hardly.

Policing by America’s Reich

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Last week it was news about a woman named Hope in New York, whose cousin had called the police because another cousin had sexually molested her. When the police came they ended up arresting the victim, taking her to jail, then assaulted her again with 7-8 heavy and thuggish cops jumping on her, stripping the clothes off her, and leaving her naked in a jail cell!
 
Just yesterday, millions of Americans saw police dump a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair onto the floor of the police station, like he was just so much trash. Where do these attitudes and policing methods come from? How did the cops get to think that this sort of stuff is normal in the US?

These attitudes come out of the airports, out of Guantanamo, out of the Colorado Springs city council, where similar policing attitudes and methods were glossed over when used against elderly St Pat’s Day paraders in the city last year.

I remember Elizabeth being hauled across the pavement just an hour or so after having given her a ride to be there. She could not walk to the area where we were to start the parade and I had had to ask a cop to let my car though the barricade just for her to get to the Bookmobile. Later, after being assaulted by the cops, she had to face the city bringing criminal charges against her in the aftermath… for supposedly being part of a plot to block the parade from going on!

These police attitudes come as the American Reich has begun an electrical arms race across the country, with Taser International being the Lockheed of police weaponry. Our city and county governments think nothing about now spreading these devices into the schools!

These attitudes come from Iraq and Afghanistan, where our bombers drop ordinance down onto children below, just as if they were so much trash. This is policing today, in the American Reich. This is a new system in place, that uses torture on POWs even as our own local city flies flags about American POWs once held in Vietnam from the flag masts of the downtown post office right here in The Springs.

The American Reich doesn’t see the incongruence in their idiotic national pride about being the supposed repository of all democracy as they police as they are now doing. They have become more thuggish in simple increments, and now do not see the distance downhill they have actually traveled.

We live in a scary place and in scary times, but unlike in New York with Hope and here in The Springs with Elizabeth, at least in Florida these cops who dumped the paralyzed man on the floor from his wheelchair are now facing some troubles of their own. Yet, there are many more places where those in charge are totally complicit in the Reich style policing. Foremost among these hot spots of official complicity, is the Congress of the US.

Dubya’s Show Trials

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The more elderly generation might well remember Stalin’s Show Trials, or the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-37. These show trials brought by the Soviet Communist Party leader of the time, Joseph Stalin, weakened the country right before Hitler’s onslaught. As a result, millions upon millions more of Soviet citizens died that didn’t have to. These show trials of Stalin destroyed patriotic unity when it was most needed.

The supposed reason Stalin gave for the trials was to protect Soviet communism and Soviet citizens, though, and today we have the preparation under way for Dubya’s Show Trials to supposedly protect Americans from ‘terrorism’. Unfortunately for us Americans, George W. Bush seems to be just as big a dunderhead as Stalin once was. Out of these show trials from Guantanamo will only come misery, so why doesn’t the US population begin to speak up?

Why didn’t the Soviet citizenry oppose the Moscow show trials? The answer is similar to why Americans have remained so quiet post 9/11. The Moscow show trials followed a huge national tragedy caused by Stalin’s attack on the peasantry, which became a 1932 famine that killed around 5,000,000+ people. The Moscow show trials then were actually Stalin’s attempt to deflect blame from himself for this previous catastrophe just a few years before.

Similarly, trying 6 men tortured illegally at Guantanamo to then put at least some of them to death, is Bush’s effort to deflect attention away from his foreign policies which are destroying the financial and social stability of the US Empire and the US population itself. And like the Moscow show trials before, these modern day show trials by the US government will lead to greater strife in the immediate years ahead. There will be new ‘terrorist’ attacks, precisely because the Bush Administration and their Democratic Party enablers have done so damn much, most if it idiotically not well thought out at all.

Dubya’s show trials might well be the preparatory event for a coming world holocaust that might well dwarf what the world went through in WW2. Time will tell. But certainly none of our nation feels any safer now than they did in the immediate days following 9/11/2001, and murdering POWs after torturing them at the Guantanamo Concentration Camp will change none of that.

Who’s your daddy?

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It is the mainstay of both standard American law and the afternoon talk show and TV judge programs. It is the sad and sick concentration on tracking down the biological dad and making him pay…. literally.

It is the cornerstone of a society that takes no real responsibility itself in taking care of its own children…’ Who’s the daddy? You’re going to have to pay!’

I wonder always at how sick we have become as a group when watching these sick shows that concentrate so much on opening the envelope with the official DNA analysis results of who’s the daddy? Men start to clap when the tests clear them, and women weep, too, if they have not succeeded in putting some man or other into officially sanctioned financial bondage.

And to listen to the sanctimonious talk show host, TV judge, or real judge dispensing that moral condemnation at the fingered ‘dead beat’. It’s sick to think of children being raised in such demented sickness passed off as being justice. Rich dad, rich kid. Poor dad, poor kid. Government demanding that the wallet be grabbed, even as the government itself takes about ZERO responsibility in doing what it should be doing for kids.

So little love going around… so much… ‘Who’s your daddy?’ Pity the children. Don’t they deserve not having The State doing this to their dads. Dads that have to be forced to pay are certainly not going to be happy and loving dads. Especially when there is no other involvement in the kids lives due to often times the government mandating that there be little or no involvement.

‘Who’s your daddy?’ asks the government. We need to get the government to stop forcing kids into poverty and to stop haranguing dads. We need a government that makes cities safe for children and that funds real education and not just the pretense of it. We need a government that covers all children with full health care benefits. We need a government that stops stealing from the kids to fund police, soldiers, and the industries that profit off war and excessive prisons. We need a government that cares for the people, children included, and that doesn’t just steal off them.

‘Who’s their daddies?’ I don’t care who they biologically are. I care about them all and it makes me sick to see a government treat the kids, sick, and elderly as bad as ours is doing and plans to continue doing. ‘Who’s the biological dad? You should be ashamed for wanting to know. It makes no difference, Uncle Sam.

Support ‘Our’ Troops?

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Let’s say it up front and bluntly. The often heard litany that we must support the troops is really Code for those who say we must continue to support the entire Pentagon-founded corporate welfare system that the rich use to appropriate all for themselves from the wealth of our national society.

In short, it is a phrase that effectively means that we should all support their robbing from the children, the elderly, the poor, the less fortunate, all to give profits to those who supply the uniformed with their weapons. Let the robbing hoods continue to be kings, so to speak.

Look at countries that have roving gangs of armed men, robbing from the children and women that are left half starved. Is today’s America really all that much different from that mindset? Our children, infirm, and elderly, too, often live in poverty while the people who join up in the lower ranks of this gigantic Military Welfare Complex are called heroes. More so when they come back dead where the bodies are always given a great and tearful ceremony to celebrate their heroedumb.

We can see herds of these types of ground level ‘heroes’ in Colorado Springs riding around on their motorcycles that cost what 3 smaller cars would cost, with flags gliding in the breeze. The message of their supposed patriotism? I survived, but I’m a great hero, too. Well you’re not, Chumps. You served a bad cause. But the true hero for the rich actually requires you to be totally dead, not just dead spiritually and morally numb.

We have gone from a society where a Henry Ford once wanted to create a group of compliant workers at his factories by paying them slightly better crumbs than the typical US worker of his time got. He figured they would become cheerleaders for his excessive profit making. Today, the corporate elites have used the government to create a similarly privileged class of early retired military complex chumps to do it. They’re proud to have ‘served’ to take our society’s moneys away from the weak to give to the better off.

Early Pension Life! The rest of you can rot in Social (in)Security Purgatory if you can manage to live that long? seems to be their mindset. Henry Ford’s theory updated in actual practice. Ex-military grunts now waving flags for more militarism, more looting, more of the cult of the uniformed heroes.

Support ‘our’ troops? How about supporting human needs instead? Now that would be true patriotism instead of supporting corporate and military welfare. These rich assholes and their flunky grunts have no shame. They not only want to loot America, but they want praise for themselves as they do it. They are not patriots, but merely criminal pirates that lead to our national insecurity state.

The ex-soldier should be treated right, but should not be allowed to become part of a societal elite above all others. Strangely enough, we often see a sleight of hand here. The lowest returning grunts are oftentimes not treated so well, even as the elites sing about them as being heroes. In fact, it is expensive to share the loot with these types, so many are just dumped back into the general population, and left to fend for themselves as the civilians have to do in a now depleted arena of life.

Health Care for all

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Hundreds of thousands of people a year in the US are injured in some way due to our crumbling and insane health care system’s defects. Thousands upon thousands die.

For-profit medicine just does not work contrary to what the pro business propaganda constantly tells us. We can do much, much better.

First step would be to declare health care a human right for all, and then to seek to make that a reality. Insurance companies have been perfectly happy to not deliver care to so many people that they should now just be totally removed from the equation. There is just absolutely nothing that they give to the delivery of medicine.

Health care for all is easy to bring about. Just remove the insurance companies entirely. The public doesn’t need them interfering with delivery of medical care in the US.

And when that is done, get these companies entirely out of providing retirement income to the elderly, too. The public sector could and would do it better too.

Why the US Lacks Full Health Care is a good article online at the California Nurses Association website.

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.

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.

‘Freedom Communications’ tap dances for wiretaps

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The Gazette rag today took time out from its campaigning to increase global warming and campaigning to kill off more species of life to laud El Paso County for using wiretaps. See page A3 of Sept 17 ‘DA defends wiretapping’.

The county had 11 times the # of wiretaps of Denver in 2005, but only 3 times that county’s amount this year. There just seems to be a great need to listen in on people by the police here according to the District Attorney and Gazette police whore (oh, I”m sorry, I meant reporter), Kim Nguyen. Why the big need, Kim? Terrorism?

Meth is terrorizing the community, so civil liberties needed to be shedded from the citizenry, so says the great freedom communicators at The Gazette. I wonder if they got cops over tapping their foots out at the airport, too? Meth, homos, pedos, and Muslims. We need them wiretaps, foot taps, and loads of baloney from the police and press. Otherwise we won’t feel secure, now would we?

And we need those wiretaps, too, so that elderly ‘ St Pat’s Day parade participants can be stopped in their tracks and then charged with blocking the parade!

Fencing in the Free Speech Movement with Uncivil Liberties

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Norman Finkelstein wrath of Israel
In Chicago, the Ditto-headed Right has fired noted scholar, Professor Norman Finkelstein, for being bothersome to Israel. In our very own Colorado they went after and got Professor Ward Churchill canned for being bothersome by his speaking the truth. But certainly things are better out at the University of California farm in Berkeley, are they not? Well, actually…

Here at the home of the original Free Speech Movement (Berkeley) that broke the McCarthy Era witch-hunt of the post WW2 times, the Ditto-headed Right has taken on the Left on their own home turf, and literally is fencing in today’s Free Speech Movement What the government and its ditto-headed agents won’t do to go to stop protest these days! Wall it all off…

Hey, here in Colorado Springs they will even drag elderly pro-Peace people across the pavement and then try to prosecute them later with criminal charges for blocking the road! They will wave stun guns and discharge them in menacing manner while dressed in storm trooper fatigues! They will actually apply choke holds on American Association of Retired People qualifying folk, too!

And in our nation’s capital, D.C., they will break up antiwar press conferences and bash the attending journalists and their cameras. Good thing nobody was there from al Jazeera, since they would have gotten murdered by some sort of air strike or sniper action by National Security robots.

Welcome to America the Not So Beautiful. Everyday is becoming a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade throughout our great land! Civil liberties have now been replaced with Uncivil Liberties, and it’s become a brave new world for our nation’s very few nonDitto-heads. Heil Bush! And Heil to our new leader to come, Hillary Giuliani!

We march in line, Oh America. Wallmarted is your charm.

Hung jury is defeat for police and city bosses

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In the end, the decision by the defense attorney to let the police and parade organizers do all the talking is what got a hung jury. In short, it was the witnesses for the prosecution that did all the blabbing contrary to what the reactionary daily paper, The Gazette, would have wanted to image to the public. Only Elizabeth Fineron testified as a defendant and her testimony was quiet and reasonable. The prosecution witnesses came off as a little too slick at times, and quite a bit incompetent at others.

The Gazette editorial staff have consistently tried to paint the St Pat’s Day Parade proPeace group as loud and belligerent, and pushy with their message. And they have projected that the message of peace somehow was an endangerment to the public by being allowed with all the allowed (and encouraged) pro military messages at the parade. In this they echoed the argument by city officials and their parade organizers that push the anti-social message that War somehow is patriotic, while peace activists are to be taken as being dangers to the community and violent.

The defense attorney argued that no blame should fall to the police, they were merely as confused as the defendants were from the general chaos coming from basically an incompetent group of organizers. But this message was a false one actually, that merely was a defense lawyer strategy not to take on the police directly inside the courtroom.

In reality, the police had all the power to use discretion and avoid the excessive use of force to police the parade, but just did not do so since they were so gung ho and ready to bop the ProPeace people on behalf of the organizer and his agents.

There was no miscommunication at all, and 2 of the jurors were apparently able to sense that this was the case and decided to stand firm and hang the jury. They saw that the blocked street was the conspiracy of parade organizers themselves, and not the proPeace walkers. The other 4 jurors were impervious to common sense and allowed their own fixed prejudices and desires to bop proPeace people on the head, too, to prevail with their votes to convict. Nothing much was going to change their minds.

In short,the prejudices both for always supporting the police whether Right or Wrong, and also for those who supported the right to have both military and proPeace groups together in this city parade seemed to stay fixed throughout the testimony. Four of the jurors would probably have convicted the defendants as being guilty of conspiracy to commit murder if they had been asked to do so by police and prosecutors. Two of the jurors had the ability to say to themselves, ‘Just hold on now…this could have been done totally different at this parade.’

This desire by city bosses to squelch anything other than proWar and military based commentary at their city St Pat’s Day event has now caused them to allow the police to get away with roughing up a group of mainly elderly and infirm parade participants, and has helped squander hundreds of thousands of municipal tax monies in trying to get away with it. Will they just keep thumping away with more waste for their crusade by going for a new trial of these innocent individuals? Will they argue again that these 7 people conspired together to deliberately and to intentionally block this sponsored city parade? Will they just continue to look and act vicious and stupid by taking this same action once again, bringing in the lawyers to thump heads after having the police do so?

One thing is for sure… If The idiot editorial staff of The Gazette has their way, that’s just exactly what city officials will try to do. They will waste yet more tax monies in an effort to convince the public that proPeace people are violent, and proWar people are peaceful. And we will sink into having yet another Alice in Wonderland style trial taking place inside the city.

What would Lockheed want with their monies influencing the local scene as Colorado Springs major employer? And what would the Bush led Pentagon want? The police are there to do the bidding of these folk and not so much to ensure public safety of parade participants themselves. They are perfectly ready to make examples of any that would try to step out of line from public promotion of militarism inside the City of Colorado Springs. They call that defending the public safety. Isn’t that right, Police Chief ‘Liars’ Myers?

Medicine for profit is a world disaster in march

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Medicine for profit is a march down a blind alley and the reason why is quite simple to understand. ‘Care’ for an individual for an individual fee, is the ultimate non-holistic approach possible since health is so absolutely connected to the environment that people live in.

To treat the individual in an effective manner, doctors have to also treat the environment as well. But just go and try telling this to your average numbskull private-profit doc that the American medical schools turn out so in mass. These think-they-know-it-all degreed idiots are sure they know what’s best for you, but the medical machine they are part of never does jack shit to treat the environmental conditions that make people sick. Logically and scientifically it makes no sense. But that is medicine for profit for you, is it not?

Take as just one tiny example, the cathedrals where many of these doctors often practice in; the hospitals. The doctors often stroll in with their coats and ties on, while the patients and medical worker peons that the doctor boss around are most often passing their days in areas more nasty than your home toilet area. Most of these doctors are cynical bastards that almost entirely identify with the corporate structure they have melded and immersed themselves into. They say they care about the patients they take in for a fee, but the ‘care’ most often stops when the bucks stop. Or it never begins in the first place.

Don’t believe me? Then try going into an average doctors office without medical insurance cards in hand. What’s the first thing one gets asked when they show up half dead into the ER? It is always, ‘What’s your coverage?’ And if you got none, you most often will get sent packing. ‘Dumped’ is the word now used, and that’s not exactly treating the patients holistically. Not at all.

Truth is, the medical doctors are not allowed (nor allow themselves to even contemplate) to treat the environment. That is seen as the terrain of the corporations and their government alone. The average American doctor concedes that area without even a bleat of protest. But why? Public Health is certainly important in the treatment of disease, isn’t it?

Why treat the farm worker, say, after his exposure to deadly pesticides? Why not treat the environment to prevent the disease, Doc? No money in it for you? Why not treat the lack of food, the lack of clean drinking water, the lack of a decent living space, the lack of a decent wage, instead of just treating the now already sickened individual who comes to you with insurance card in hand, Doctor? Too scared to fight disease? Too bought off by the hundreds of thousands you are often making?

You are a fraud, corporate medicine and corporate model doctors. You turn all of us in your medical factories into dehumanized entities with only titles and employee numbers in hand, and not even our own humanity which you strip away from us bit by bit, same as you strip away the sick and elderly folk’s dignity. You turn us all into an Evil Empire that churns out your profits, and destroys people’s health. You destroy the environment same as your corporate cousins in agriculture, mining, and military goods production do, alsdo.

You are strip mining world health, not bettering it, all to make bucks. And the US doctors are all aboard this gigantic con game on society, hiding behind a facade of being all high tech and scientific. Instead, you business doctors are as nasty as an MRSA sore, a Vancomycin resistant diarrhea, a brain dead corpse in the ICU, a multi drug resistant TB, and all the other products of made by your corporate medical model and your human devolution as system into monster. All you hold now to bedazzle the crowd with, is some sort of future tech fix that is the pie in the sky you always promise. Meanwhile, you turn our environment into cesspool. You are turning all of us into ‘medical waste’, Corporate Doc.

Capitalism- the culture of disrespect to the individual

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One of the most comical aspects of those who defend capitalism, is their idiotic notion that anti-capitalists hate the rights of the individual, while capitalism is supposedly supportive of the dignity of the individual. How patently absurd!

Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian system where most of us get reduced down to a payroll number or code. And if you get sick, see what I mean exactly. Instead of having a name you will then have a patient ID number. Fall in, Number Not #1. Check the wrist band. Follow doctor’s orders, please. At work, do as you are told. We need you to work Tues. night shift, Number Whatever. Be on call on Thursday. Hold up you wrist , Patient #9.

All of our society works to dehumanize the individual. Many identify with this and if you try to assert your dignity as a human being, many other human beings will resent you for it, since they themselves have totally internalized their assigned lack of dignity as individuals under capitalism. How dare you do otherwise?! Who do you think you are?

Children at school, or elderly in the nursing home? Get used to musical chairs, musical beds. Take the Colorado Sap Test and be good. Chew your mush, I got no time. And to think that this is labelled the culture that frees the individual within each and everyone of us? Bizarro World thinking that our society is the epitome of freedom!

Capitalism enhances indiviualism they say! And then they talk of ‘collateral damage’. What a disrespectful to the individual and baldfacel lie. What nonsense. What a pile of total crap. Repeat it a billion times over, and perhaps you might buy it? Without the capitalist you have no freedom, and you have no dignity they chant like mantra. Of course, we all feel the absolute contrary. We see the lack of dignity given people daily in our lives. Capitalism tries to squash the dignity of people at every step. Only money is allowed to buy it. The dollar rules over the people everywhere. And yet they repeat otherwise.

I guess I am writing about this because today I saw the brute force of the police state against the dignity of the elderly. What is there much to say, when you see the police throw elderly, with physical handicaps, to the ground? I had a handicapped parking space permit in my car, while the police were assaulting the person who needed it, my friend and passenger in my car. Such utter and complete disrespect to the dignity of the individual, as they tore off this friend’s clothing by dragging her across the pavement without a thought in the world to the dignity they hoped to destroy. And to think that most in our society cling on to the fantasy, that only through supporting an authoritarian economic system can the individual be protected? What fools our delusions can make us. What cold blooded killers to dignity some become. I hate this culture of disrespect. The capitalist and his portfolio are the antihesis to human freedom.

Vets have to battle nasty US medical system like the rest of us

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The bad conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center has brought many US soldiers from killing Iraqis into a new battle with their own US government. Now they and their families are not waving US flags so much as they discover what many of the elderly and sick amongst us already knew. The US government doesn’t give much a damn about Afghans, Iraqis, nor the majority of US citizens either.

Did the youngsters signing up for the US killing machine think they would get something special? Some sort of privileged status for themselves for being hired killers for Dubya, Cheney, or whomever might come along whenever as their top officers?

The whole military medical system has big nasty holes in it much as does the civilian medical system does, too. When you sign up and go abroad to fight people you haven’t a clue about you might want to think you are a big hero/ heroine, but you are not. You are somebody looking to get special treatment, that’s all. You want that spiffy uniform, the perks, the respect by the people in power and their suck ass supporters at the lower economic levels. But once you get hurt all that fades into the background. Now you become much more like the rest of us, and the rest of us have to deal with sorry, don’t give a damn, medical care. So tell any younger sisters and brothers, to deal with the real problems back home, before getting all psyched up to supposedly go solve the world’s problmes by high tech killing. Didn’t make any sense to begin with, but you let yourself get suckered, didn’ you?And now the chickens perhaps have come home to roost, right on top of your own lonesome shoulders?

When somebody tells you to jump off a cliff by joining up as hired killer, you don’t have to go along smirking and thinking how smart you are. Yes, many vets that previously played the fool have to eventually battle the nasty US for-private-don’t-give-a-damn- except-about profits medical system like the rest of us. You’ll not get quality care like the top dogs are sure to give themselves.

It was a dummy thing you did joining up, and we wish you now the best, just like we wish all of us the best in getting the decent medical care that is our human right…. one that our rulers ignore all the time. How many of the wounded vets wish they could frag the same people they signed up to blindly follow? After all, they fragged you did they not? If not yet, then you are one of the more fortunate. Thank your lucky stars up to now. Because the nasty sorry ass US medical system is more likely to kill you in the long run, far more likely than any ol’ Osama. That’s whether you or vet, or not? What you heroes going to do about it? When you fight back (if you do?), at least you’ll be on the right side this time.

America’s systematic abuse of its elderly

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Drove by another of those faceless, nameless, warehouses for America’s elderly the other day. Oh sure, they actually do have nondescript and meaningless names. My favorite idiotic name belongs to a warehouse for the elderly in Salem, Oregon called ‘Hidden Lakes’.

Hidden Lakes of Urine would be more to the point. I once even worked at a joint with about 1/3 rehab, 1/3 elderly, and 1/3 chronic psych patients that renamed itself ‘Squire Knights’, a name about as idiotic as its incoherent and non-workable mixture was. Administration really has no sense of the ironic at all.

Many of these sad places have human castoffs in their early sixties caring for even more castoff folk in their later seventies and early eighties. Youngsters do the grunt work. It used to be that Lawrence Welk reigned supreme in the halls at these forlorn joints. I’m scared that it will soon be Paul McCarthy and the Rolling Stones that will reverberate. A standing joke with my kid is where I accuse her that she will eventually throw me soon into the basurero, Spanish for the garbage can or nursing home. My mom threw my grandmother there, and my mom now fears that one of her sons will do the same with her. American life is deadly.

I hate these dank, Haldo filled places. Have you ever noticed that none of them ever seem to have much outside them either? Usually just an ugly parking lot, or a minimal pretense of rustic ambiance at best. Mainly its just army green garbage receptacles for soaked diapers full of pee and shit. Inside there is stale smell, and blank looks of hopelessness. It’s the killing fields of America, and immediately outside is just about as bad.

How sad it is that our elderly are turned into assembly line products for Medicare and insurance fraud, even when the fraud is not held as official. Wipe their asses and turn q2hours, and give a feed 3xdaily of gruel. That’s ‘life’ in the capitalist dead lanes of our country. It’s all very, very sad and unnecessary. I have tears in my eyes for America’s elderly. No crimes ttey ever might have committed deserve a punishment such as they so many ultimately get.

When are ‘the troops’ going to support the rest of America?

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Antiwar protesters repeatedly get told they are not supporting ‘the troops’. Yesterday, in fact, a woman screaming out “You Bastards!’ at our peace vigil from her car, claimed that we were not supporting her husband who was one of ‘the troops’ in Iraq. Our standard refrain has always been, ‘Support The Troops, Bring Them Back Home Now!’ But I have another reply on my mind, and that is simply to ask the pro-war hecklers when are ‘the troops’ going to support us Americans?’ What do I mean by this?

Simple. You ‘troops’ are part of a war machine that is bankrupting the funding of social programs for the elderly, children, and needy in our society. You are fighting a war that most Americans no longer want, and that will put our children into debt for a long time to come. Yet you and your families continue to want you to be considered heroes, when you sign up and join the war machine and go after the preferential benefits that are yours for joining the government imperialist team. And many of you even have the nerve to get angry at us peace activists that want money spent in better ways than in just killing foreigners for corporate profit! That takes a lotta damn gall!

Yes, when are ‘the troops’ going to start to support the American people themselves? We want you back home alive where you won’t be helping bankrupt us civilians through the love of Halliburton and your own pride. Putting on your damn uniforms does not make you heroes, a class above us tax paying commoners. You went into the military thinking that the military pseudo socialism was the way to help yourselves out, but you bargained with the Devil and he may well take your heart and soul and your very life, too, if you are not very, very careful. Reconsider what you are doing.

Troops, help the rest of us Americans out, and support stopping the Iraqi war and occupation. True patriotism supports less militarism, less imperialism, and less money spent on you the troops, to the detriment of America itself. Troops and families of troops, speak out now against this thuggery you have become part of, and we wish you the best back home alive for those in other folk’s lands.

Stop the bloated war spending to help out the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the peoples of Haiti and Colombia, too. And most of all, to help out us, the people of America. America needs less of you ‘troops’ in prison guard, police, and military uniforms, not more. Patriots support more peace in the world, and less war. So do your part as you can. And try not to let the government dehumanize you, through the insane war the government has you fighting in.

Best wishes, from the antiwar community. But there is no way we are going to ‘support’ you by cheerleading the killing the government has you engaged in. Stop the constant wars. Our money for the people, not The Pentagon!

Private insurance leads to less security, not more

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If you are like most of us, you hate the insurance racket. It is like a giant cancer that is thoroughly capitalist in nature, yet is so destructive that it actually undermines and erodes the entire structure of the economic system that lets it proliferate. Everywhere, privatized insurance is eating away at any government social nets that have been established. It feeds on government social programs like a shark feeds on smaller fish.

Do you feel secure with the insurance companies ripping into your wallets on a monthly basis? I bet not. Most of what we pay for is so thoroughly hole ridden as to make our policies next to worthless. Lawyers and insurance companies go together, with insurance employed lawyers constantly creating bigger gaps in coverage that might make these companies have to pay out some small fraction of what they take in. This symbiotic relationship between these 2 groups is why we hate the corporate lawyers so much, yet find these crooks growing in number and influence by the second. Conservative, venal, vicious, arrogant, ignorant, and servile, these corporate lawyers fueled by insurance often fall later in their careers into government office, where they corrupt the government down into the sewer, too, alongside themselves and the insurance companies.

Wikipedia lists some interesting facts about the global insurance rip off. For example, that global insurance premiums have increased by more than 1/2 in just the last decade alone. Plus, that Japan and the US account for 1/2 of the insurance premiums paid in the world, though together our 2 countries only have 5% of world population! Do you feel all that secure now? Or less?

We have the worst medical system in the industrialized world and it’s the one disrupted the most by the insurance business. So if insurance is supposed to deliver security, it fails miserably to do so. Instead, the insurance business destroys overall social security, as it rips to shreds government and even religion based services to the community. That hospital might have a Catholic cross and pictures of nuns everywhere, but in truth, it is insurance agents running your medical care, not some benign (or not so benign) church.

Consider this too, that the $3.3 trillion global insurance business is quite connected to the directly financial sector, which is connected to those who would destroy government run social security everywhere, and replace it with private pension plans full of holes throughout. Private pensions, in fact, are nothing more than insurance plans for covering what will not exist anymore if the government run systems of caring for the elderly and infirm get totally closed down, as the super rich are constantly working to do.

Don’t mistake those hard working clerks everywhere in insurance selling offices for the crooks making the money, personally hidden away from your view. This is a business whose main work is simply in destroying the work of others out there actually helping deliver real services to those in need. The real owners are leeches on society, who drain off available funds to their own portfolios yachts,mansions, and golf club memberships. They are profiteers and pirates, not nuns, not government workers trying hard to deliver a service, not neighbors, family, and friends who might help you out in time of need. They are not providing you with a service, but rather ripping service you need away from you.

The insurance scams epitomize all that is going wrong with modern American society. Their leaders are running our government, and ruining it. They are the epitome of corruption, and today we are in a sea of that, largely because of their increasing influence on our daily affairs. It’s time to knock these companies way back down to size. It’s time for the public to make the laws, not insurance barons.

How well is the war in Iraq going?

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Finally there is unity! The war in Iraq is not going well for the United States so say the press, the politicians, Rumsfield, even. Oh the suffering amongst the British and Americans. They did not forsee the unfolding problems. If only the Iraqis would act normal!

It’s so bad they say, you think that the American government would be suing for peace? Cut in run, don’t cut and run? How do we get out of this unfolding disaster for our beloved country? So now we are awash in crocodile tears we are. Boohoohoo. Our poor suffering America. Yes, and the entire elite spectacle is so sickening it makes one want to vomit.

And, yes, this spectacle even includes our churchly ‘peace movement’. One group of kind people, the nuns. were rushing around Colorado last week to send canned goods to the soldiers and their families. And now, the CS pacifists are beginning a countdown. Tick-tock-tick-tock. Look what’s been done to our soldiers! We are nearing the magical 3,000 mark! Time to light some candles and pray.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Iraqis, too! Mention them at the press release for when the clock strikes 3. Don’t let it strike 4! We beg of you. One would open one’s mouth to say something to them about this sad approach, but for the fact that lighting a candle or two is a major ‘peace action’ for them. They’re in motion now! So better to remain mum so that at least the ten or fifteen of them get their pictures in The Gazette and Indy as concerned folk.

All this wailing and despair. Both Democrats and Republicans are creasing their brows with worry and cold sweat. We’ve lost Iraq they moan. It’s all going so wrong! It’s become like one big sorry soap opera. Oh the agony, and Oh the guilt. We tried to do good, but we failed. Why, oh why, oh why? Maybe it was them? Yes that’s it. The Arabs cannot be trained!

All this would be way comical if it weren’t so absolutely pathetic. First all, the start of wartime didn’t begin yesterday with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It didn’t begin with 9/11. It didn’t even begin with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. So where do all these stupid calculations begin? The liberal churchgoing peacenics would have it all start with the number ZERO, and would have our time of great despair calculated now at 3,000. It’s very Biblical to do it that way, but it is utter nonsense. US foreign policy effecting Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq have killed millions. ‘We’ lost less than 3,000 US soldiers in this time, and all America begins to cry like babies! Jesus H. Christ! Talk about being absolutely self-centered? YES, our society definitely takes the cake!

All this hysteria proceeds from the previous nonsense we have been spoon fed. Stuff about WOMD, protecting the sovereign country of Kuwait, helping establish democracy in the Middle East, and so on for ad nauseum. Can our elderly still remember all the nonsense about what a supposedly remarkable man was the Shah of iran? I date myself here, because I certainly can. Time Magazine, and all the usual rest of the pornographic US press, loved the guy! The Shah was the world master of running a state torture regime, like the one that America’s top criminals now copy so fanatically. Back then, it was claimed in the US that he was a man ahead of his time. Oh such a teacher that Donald and his ilk had! The Shah. Oh shit! Ask the British and they will show you how it started all way before even then.

And then, the unfortunate takedown. This modern day American hero, the Shah, fell. Tears. Where did ‘we’ go wrong? Where did this modern leader go wrong? We need to arm Osama and gang to the tune of multi-billions, and make the Soviets have their own Vietnam. Osama the freedom fighter! We need to cook up a war with Iran to show them we wouldn’t let them get away with thumping our patron saint, The Shah. So America and its buddies, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia armed Saddam Hussein. Killed a million plus.

Fast forward to now. Where did Bush go wrong, The chimp? Boohoohoo. It’s a bloodbath. And we get the ‘debate’ of the press corp buffoons. Stay the course, or cut and run? Yeah, but how ’bout we all just throw up? This is not a real debate our elites are engaging in, just a charade. A country that allowed its elites to destroy the lives of millions in this stretch of ME alone, deserves to go bankrupt. And we are! Boohoohoo. How we suffer they say! We approach 3,000 of our own dead, in the midst of this shower of blood we have constructed for others, and all the press propaganda brigade can talk about is American trauma! Nauseating. The real trauma for America will come when the bill arrives in the mail, Chumps.

Let’s face it. The war is going rather well. There have been 2 main goals for Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Lockheed, and President Cheney. Max out the profits that can be financed from the public treasury. And control the oil. These pied pipers of the Democratic and Republican politician rats are not going to ‘cut and run’. From what? They’re looking to extend the war, are they not? And for good reason. The war in Iraq is going well for them. Why not take it further? Why not make it permanent war? After all these decades of killing, the local peacenics can’t even get it together enough to get 100 people out to pray and light candles. The Iraq War is going well for the war machine. Three thousand? Oh get real, please.

The war in Iraq is going well; there is no anger in the air. Only religious pacifist good will. Feliz Navidad. When people get angry, they will not light candles and meditate. And without real anger, the bloodbath will go on.

Bigger jails or bigger hearts

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Nearly half a million people are now behind bars in the United States for nonviolent drug law violations, which is more than all of Western Europe — with a larger population — incarcerates for everything!

Our country also has the most religious denominations and has one of the highest rates for church attendance outside of the Muslim world.

What is wrong with this picture?

In the late 1980s the University of Colorado sponsored a survey seeking public opinion regarding building more prisons as a safety measure. The majority of respondents did not think more prisons would make them feel safer.

Many who reported they would feel safer with more prisons were employees or families of the police, sheriff and corrections departments. A conclusion could be that those working in criminal justice fields may have the most reasons to be fearful.

Are they afraid of traffic violators or DUI offenders, many of whom fill our jails, or is the fear predominately about nonviolent inmates who, upon release, may become violent?

Another conclusion could be one expressed by a local deputy sheriff who, several years ago, made this quip at a County Task Force meeting on Alternatives to Incarceration: “We are the only ones with job security around here!”

My El Paso County Criminal Justice education began at those meetings, where I learned:

· Various groups were protecting their turf and were adverse to using alternatives if someone else was providing them.

· No one in the task force seemed to know if there were any local use of electronic monitoring.

· Illegal drug use and mandatory minimum sentences were the main reasons prison expansion was accelerating.

This year my experience as a representative on the Justice Advisory Council has reinforced earlier observations.

I have also learned there is an overcrowding situation because of increased numbers of women behind bars (many for drug-related offenses), unfortunately indicating more children become social service statistics and likely future juvenile detainees.

There is general agreement, at least in one subcommittee, that jail alternatives such as PR bond release and electronic monitoring, along with behavioral and addiction counseling, could be utilized to a much greater degree for nonviolent offenders. Such modalities have proven successful and very cost effective in other jurisdictions.

And judges need to be better informed about available sentencing alternatives.

Common sense dictates that other solutions be tried if the $40 billion we have been spending annually in the United States to solve the drug problem remains unsuccessful. We need to stop protecting and enhancing a system that has failed over and over again.

It is time to bring about change. To do so, we must all become informed about city and county budgets and the percentage of our tax dollars being spent on criminal justice issues compared to quality of life matters that provide the following:

Health and wellness assistance for those unable to afford health insurance; free recreational opportunities in public parks and trails for residents and visitors; public transit to help our youth, elderly and disabled get to these important destinations and to help ex-inmates get to their jobs; and places to park and connect with a bus, lessening roadway congestion.

We must request the media provide complete and unbiased local government information in a timely fashion.

We must contact county commissioners as well as City Council members, giving them our perspectives on issues and ideas for solutions while demanding accountability.

We also need to contact our federal and state General Assembly members and seek changes to legislation that has contributed to our problems instead of improving the health, safety and welfare of all.

Finally, we must examine our own motivations toward and involvement with the less fortunate in our community and resolve to assist small groups and agencies that are helping people help themselves.

(Printed in YOUR TURN, THE INDEPENDENT, December 19, 2002)