Tag Archives: liberal

Let’s not forget Wikileaks snitch Adrian Lamo, saboteur Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Swedish Woman in Red Anna Ardin

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While we’re praising Wikileaks and its impact on our revolutionary times, let’s call out those who betrayed the cause, they’re already erasing their tracks on Wikipedia. First there’s hackster-confidant Adrian Lamo who turned in Bradley Manning; there’s fired Wikileaks volunteer Daniel Domscheit-Berg who permanently dismantled the anonymous leak submission mechanism; there’s jilted neoliberal faketivist Anna Ardin who schemed to bring Julian Assange to an ultra-right prosecutor’s attention in Sweden; there’s de facto honeypot Sofia Wilen whose complicity is still a mystery; and there’s President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder who persist in persecuting whistleblowers, who’ve empaneled a grand jury against Assange and who consider Wikileaks a terrorist enterprise.

War is the neo millennium Jobs Bill

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To laud this tragic now banality, Fort Carson has a job fair today, but those most suffering under the neo liberal economy need not apply. To attend the event held on post, potential job applicants for the military industrial sector, need what voter disenfranchisement projects push for election restrictions, a federal or state ID, vehicle registration and proof of insurance, for entry level non-union contractor labor that will barely support that.

Question for the Green Cities Coalition: How “green” is alcohol?

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My friend Lotus has a few words for the Green Cities Coalition, the so-far irrelevant activist hub which purports to speak for the region’s environmentalists. One of their number will be debating a fracking proponent on Thursday, where the public will see firsthand whether the GCC is a fighter or pushover against the local global warmers. But Lotus questions why the GCC always meets in bars, and I concur. From “Geeks Who Drink” to “Drinking Liberally”, maybe our city probably owes its paucity of effective activists to the delusion that they’re getting somewhere by drinking.

Here’s what Lotus sent in reply to their latest email invitation to “Happy Hour”:

To so called Green Cities Coalition,
 
Does the so called Green Cities Coalition have a contract with the local bars to promote, to advertise, alcohol? Is this a source of revenue for GCC? Is that why GCC puts such a sick and inaccurate phrase (Happy Hour) in the subject of your widely circulated emails?

I have never attended a Green Cities Coalition function thus far, and will do my best to avoid your organization, and to avoid promoting GCC so long as you continue to promote the use of alcohol, and especially the Orwellian double speak use of the word “happy hour” (sic). There is nothing happy about alcohol for a very large number of the users. According to the National Association for Children of Alcoholics about 43 percent of the U.S. population has been exposed to alcoholism in their families; and about one in eight adult drinkers in the US consumes alcohol problematically or alcoholically. (Which might explain in part why many of your members apparently need to meet in bars and promote alcohol.)

In my own life I have seen lots of relatives, employees, and friends and tons of strangers destroyed physically, mentally, and spiritually to one degree or another – often completely or almost completely destroyed – by alcohol. None of the people currently attending AA meetings is likely to be able to attend Green Cities Coalition functions either because your functions are so often held in bars, where alcohol is present, and because you so often promote alcohol. The same goes of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. So all of these people are excluded from all or most of your so called green functions.

Do a computer search for AA meetings in Colorado Springs, Denver, etc and you will see that there are thousands of AA meetings in these cities every week. Probably millions of people attempting to undo the damage that alcohol has done to them.

If Green Cities Coalition members are so addicted to alcohol that they are unable to have green functions without mixing them with alcohol, then please leave me off your email lists, and please stop calling yourselves green. Call yourselves black instead, which is often the color used to symbolize evil, for that is what alcohol is for millions of people.

I suggest you promote and consume green raw smoothies instead! If you do not know what these are, which is probably the case, then do a search. Why not promote the creation of a health food restaurant that serves green smoothies in competition with the hundreds of unhealthy bars in Colorado Springs? Stop promoting the bars (which serve not only alcohol but junk food) and start promoting health – green smoothies, health food restaurants.

Lotus

Hey Mike!

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After last week, it seemed this entry would be a pep talk for disheartened Colorado Springs Occupiers. Instead it seems it will need to be my own mind meandering around in an attempt to make sense of the new dynamic rising from the ashes of the original manifestation we had going here, which has surely been destroyed. It feels something like a kids cabin make of Lincoln Logs or something after he knocks it over to build something else.

It’s been over a week since the City shut our permit down and confiscated our ramshackle, wind-ragged tents down at Acacia Park. After a few days of curious and somewhat disconcerting quiet, Occupiers in Colorado Springs are reconnected, reinvigorated, and in many cases really pissed off. Yesterday a contingency of us made our way to the old Venetucci Farm south of CSprings to harass Colorado’s Gov. Hickenlooper at the groundbreaking ceremony for a solar garden project of the city’s publicly owned utilities company. About 20 Occupiers of Colorado Springs mic-checked the governor and briefly disrupted the speechifying before a group that was made largely of Occupy’s natural allies, raising the ire of some attendees, but most assuredly reminding Hickenlooper that he won’t be allowed to ignore the movement simply by leaving Denver.

Some Occupiers present , including i, were ambivalent about our project. Hickenlooper is something of a liberal darling, having supported projects like the SunShare solar garden in the past, and the crowd at the event was populated by many of Colorado Springs’s “liberal” elite. The business of interrupting at these proceedings is a little sticky, and may have cost some in support for Occupy among this crowd. On the other hand, some of the issues addressed by Occupy were aptly illustrated within the very brief span of our attendance. Jerry Forte, who wrangles close to $300,000 a year for himself without considering bonuses as CEO of Colorado Springs Utilities, spent a few smooth-talking minutes going on about how cool the city’s utility non-profit is, noting the great advance the two or three dozen solar panels undergoing installation at Venetucci Farm toward his goal of deriving 20% of city power from renewable resources by 2020 represents. Gee whiz! At today’s use rates, by 2020, the world’s inhabitants, especially in the U.S., will be stabbing one another over firewood if we can survive the toxic byproducts of the petroleum industry, or the potentially nuclear wars we are preparing for our next trick in the Middle East. Hmm–wonder what gas prices will look like if the Levant and its environs are sealed under a “sea of glass.”

Forte also sits on the board at the local branch of the United Way, where Bob Holmes’s Homeward Pikes Peak brought in around $650,000 last year, and still can’t figure out how to house or manage the low-ball ,(and variable), estimate of around 1,100 homeless residents in Colorado Springs. Hickenlooper, a million dollar winner in the American sweepstakes who loves to project an aw-shucks, up-by-the-bootstrap, populist kind of image came to his ability to start restaurant empires via the petroleum industry. He presides over a state that panders shamelessly to the U.S. military and its attendant industrial complex, both of which entities these days seem to be no more than acquisition arms of the energy and financial elite about which you may have heard Occupiers railing in recent months. Mike Hannigan of the Pikes Peak Community Foundation was there, and i’m sure he was butt-hurt by the Occupiers implication by their mere presence that his organization might be elitist or something. The CC student i spoke with on the way off the farm grounds was perplexed and hurt herself, expressing solidarity with Occupy, but begging that we not “do it again, ” referring to our admittedly rather obnoxious interruption. She will likely go on from CC to join the cultured pseudo-liberal aristocracy of our guilt-laden Western catechism spinning its wheels till the Apocalypse. Hannigan manages some $50m in assets, and to be sure the foundation does some good work, but all the back-slapping and genteel coffee-sipping over a couple of ultimately meaningless solar panels sure feels a lot like John Rockefeller’s habit of passing out dimes to street urchins late in his life.

I am not accusing Hannigan, Forte, or others of comparability with Rockefeller, who made his initial fortune by arson and murder. Consider this, though. No one seems interested in whether the numbers in the mix add up to anything substantive or not. None of the serious players mentioned above have ever questioned the 1,000% spread between some of the salaries involved at CS Utilities, and when and if they do it’s generally to argue that we have to pay such ridiculous amounts to attract the “best and the brightest,” even though recent history shows plainly enough that it’s painfully obvious huge salaries hardly translate into top performance. No one scratches his head over the disconnect between the high-minded goal of CS Utilities for 20% renewable energy within minutes of the utter collapse of projected petroleum reserves. And aren’t we Americans, including especially those of us with the clout big money wields, responsible for our own politics? Are we really a bastion of freedom and intelligent, realistically utilitarian process or is all that rhetoric just a roll of dimes to cover up our guilt every time we go down to Wal-Mart to perpetuate our slave economy, without which we have never lived? What’s the disparity between Forte’s salary and the annual income of the guy that made his spiffy shoes?

Occupiers love solar projects. But nothing’s ever about just one thing, and it seems to me it’s about as rarely mostly about the thing at the top of the presentation program. We Occupiers are often accused of stupidly purveying no solid agenda. it may be apparent that at least my Occupy agenda is complicated. The above connects Big Oil, Third World labor, charitable impulse, income disparity, under-girding Western guilt, competitive job markets, and spiritual malaise, among other things, including much that remains implied. Many Occupiers i have met personally are still perturbed at the scanty portion of the American Pie they find available on their own plate. We’ve brought this whole scenario upon ourselves, though, and the current program will remain fully unsustainable whether the polite society of charity in the Pikes Peak region dismisses us over our antics or not. That’s why Occupy in general will be not so easily dislodged from its place in history.

The bitch about saying all this is i really, really like most of the people i recognized at Venetucci Farms yesterday. I like Americans in general–but man, we’ve got problems, just like the homeless guys Bob Holmes and his philosophical brethren like to try to control all the time. When i talk to those guys in line at the soup kitchen, i tell them, “Man, ya really ought to leave that dope alone a little.” They know me, and they know i love them. Really. I do–and really, they know it. They know they’re fucked up, too. Sometimes i’ll tell the most torn down that they need to leave the dope alone completely, before it kills them. That’s what i’m saying about our society here in Colorado Springs, in Colorado, the U.S.A., and the whole world. I really don’t have a beef with the bankers, politicians, and half-assed, dime-roll charities of the world, or the foolish scrabblers grasping at the American Nightmare. They’re working a system designed by haphazard evolutionary processes to favor ruthless competition. But i am saying that we need to get serious about fixing all these interwoven problems that stem from deep down in human souls, because we’re running out of time. If we lose, and everything goes to Hell in a handbasket, if none of us learn a genuinely cooperative technique for living together with ourselves, and with the Earth before she rejects us, we Occupiers will be able to tell our kids we fought the deadly processes that brought us down with everything at our disposal. Even if it’s with our dying breaths. What will those of us that insist on competing our species to death be telling theirs?

Occupy is not going away, here in Colorado Springs, or anywhere else. We’re planning more and escalating prodding at the fat, lazy system and its symbiotic remorae. We hope the World listens closely to what we’re saying and its members genuinely look inward to find that bit of truth that remains, concealed behind layers of self-deception and avarice. Because, sure, we’re pissed off about injustice–who wouldn’t be? But we also really like humans, and other living things, and we don’t want to see them all go away.

Colorado College closes doors on public lecture about Northcom, NORAD & the War on Drugs against Mexican people

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COLORADO COLLEGE- Today’s presentation by Brigadier General Daniel Hokanson, on the role of NORAD and NORTHCOM in the War on Drugs on the US-Mexico border was abruptly closed to the public, for reasons not made clear to community members who might have appeared to offer a critical reception. Was it something we said, or didn’t get to say, except through our signs held outside Worner Center? What’s wrong with NORTHCOM & PENTAGON OUT OF COLOMBIA & MEXICO? Who can argue with this arithmetic: CRIMINALIZED + MILITARIZED DRUG WAR = DEATH & TYRANNY? Although I suppose neolibs would deny DRUG WAR IS U.S. EXCUSE TO SUPPRESS REBELLION. Popular with students was: WAR ON DRUG IS AS BOGUS AS WAR ON POVERTY. We’d compare it to the so-called Global War on Terror, but at a neoliberal institution like CC, who knows how that would be interpreted. If I’d been able to ask any question at all, it would have been to the Political Science Department. Why hadn’t they invited a second speaker to offer a corresponding critique of US Latin American policy? Turnout for the talk was sparse, and the sponsoring faculty member expressed his bemusement at our diligence to protest what he thought had been scheduled under the radar. So we beat NORAD at its own game.

Report from the Right Front

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I will be the first to point out, right now here in this forum, that I have a Texas-sized ego. I think I’m a reasonably smart guy, and not unlike any writer, that I have some things to say that are so danged important that I’m gonna say them. I’ll also point out that some others in the conversation, possibly including you, gentle reader, have the same handicap. The entire discussion ought to be undertaken with a salt shaker within easy reach ’cause everything anyone has to say ought to be taken with a liberal helping.
 
This post is an attempt to unravel a bit of a Gordian knot that has tied itself around the politics of “Occupy” movements around the world, and particularly here in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.A. without hacking at it with f-bombs directed at the many possessors of equally large egos as mine, while openly acknowledging strong disagreements between some of us. Believe me, this is a difficult bit of unraveling and though I mean to avoid ad hominem attacks, I’ll not promise to eschew strong language. It’s also a bit of a news update, straight from the horse’s ass, so to speak. Sorry if it runs long or gets complicated; it’s a big hairy knot.

I am the guy that picked up the first no-camping ordinance violation in the city of Colorado Springs. I did this while participating in protests falling under the ill-defined aegis of a group called “Occupy Colorado Springs,” in solidarity with another ill-defined group called “Occupy Wall Street,” and other Occupiers all over the world. In case it’s unclear: there’s no such thing as Occupy Colorado Springs, (OCS). What happened is a few guys, boldly named at the top of the eponymous Facebook page like John Hancock at the bottom of that one famous page, finally got bent enough out of shape to do something about it so they set up a page, and a small camp down at Bijou and Tejon–Acacia Park. They were behind the Wall Street guys and liking what they were about, I came behind them.

There is no club membership, no charter, no bylaws, no nothing to define the Colorado Springs group that might in any way be construed to suggest the thing we are doing at Acacia Park is anything other than a gathering of a bunch of fully leaderless sovereign individuals that happen to share a common distaste at the state of human affairs extant in the world today. Anyone who has known me for any length of time, or has read any of the pages preceding this post will know that this is nothing new for me. I was and remain ecstatic at the development of public expression, both here and globally. I am a free actor in the business of protesting in general, and that involving the city’s no-camping ordinance in particular. I act as a sovereign, as a member of OCS whatever that means, as a citizen of the U.S.A., as a citizen of the World–a member of the human race, possessor of certain unalienable rights, whether those derive from God or not.

I decided to deliberately violate the city ordinance because I believe it exemplifies an aspect of the overall erosion of human rights here and across the globe that has precipitated such widespread uproar. I believe it directly attacks individuals’ right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it is both superfluous and fully unnecessary. It’s just a mean-spirited dig at the weakest among us, a tactic akin to schoolyard bullying, which I maintain is motivated by the same spirit that allows the holders of power at the Federal Reserve and other powerful international and national bodies to gleefully grind the majority of the world’s citizenry to dust for no more than sport. I meant all along from well before the advent of any Occupations to have this conversation at a level previously unattainable to me, and now we will–that is, I and whomever cares to jump in during the proceedings. I control only my own actions and expressions.

There are some protesters at Acacia Park that have strenuously objected to my camping as I did. They are pleased to maintain the fine relationship with CSPD and with the Mayor’s office that has developed, and happy to have avoided the head-bashing, tear-gassing removals that have troubled some other Occupy outposts. Fearing a narrowing of focus from the general Occupy platforms, they asked me, and truly in some instances pleaded with me to abandon my course. Some attempted to tell me. They are happy to compromise, capitulate, appease, to utilize terms previously utilized by those members opposed to my individual action. I am not. I promise, I love every one of the crazy fools involved with the action at our little street corner whether we agree on this matter or not. I’ll mention this one more time: I am just one dude. Anyone that agrees with me here is also behaving of his or her own accord.

Our Mayor Bach is an asshole. I promised to avoid ad hominem here, and I’ll point out that this is not an attack but an observation, and only my opinion. Publicly, falsely and slanderously maligning the very civilized protesters of OCS for urinating on sidewalks while simultaneously locking park rest rooms which had previously been available to all manner of dope-shooting freaks, and possibly authorizing the operation of park sprinkler systems to douse protesters in below freezing temperatures are asshole moves. In my opinion. Mayor Bach is in error, but he’s only acting as seems best to him in each moment, now also capitulating, and allowing protesters a right to their freedom of speech.

We already have a freedom to speak in our country. My violation of the camping ordinance addresses a deeper, more fundamental set of freedoms mentioned so briefly in Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration, and to be found in all the keening of literature throughout all of history–blowin’ in the wind, one might say. This is not a narrowing of focus, but rather a telescopic lens by which I hope we can examine questions of such grand scale and difficulty that centuries after a bunch of homeless guys floated across the Atlantic to Plymouth, we still haven’t grasped them. failing to address the camping ordinance presenting itself so conveniently will flippantly sidestep the most essential key to all of this whole set of global protesting. We’ve all seen protesters on the street corner a million times. We’ve always compromised. It’s never worked.

Anecdotally speaking, it appears the major objection raised by detractors of the Occupy movement is that there has been no firm expression of goals, manifestos, or demands. It seems to me that this is the natural outcome of the complexity of the problems at hand. Although there are certainly individuals involved in skulduggery at, say, the FED, my view is that we face the necessity to alter a fundamental flaw in our very basis for human interaction. I’ll leave you to read my thoughts on that elsewhere in this blog, if you desire, both previous to this post and to come. Right now the Occupy movement is just an acknowledgement of discomfort with the extraordinarily stubborn status quo across all political and national lines, and a frame work within which discussion may take place. Planning and legal definitions will have to wait for some 7 billion Occupiers to chime in. The difficulty of hashing out the minor disagreements among players here in Colorado Springs may be an indication of how much work is involved with the big picture. Be patient. Unless you like the status quo. Most of us don’t.

For anyone out of the loop, including friends across the U.S. and abroad, here’s a bit of fact: I was arrested 18 October, around 2am MST for deliberately violating a city no-camping ordinance. The arrest was executed by my friends, the extra-fine members of the “HOTT” team of the CSPD, as we had previously discussed, (those guys are just as much in jeopardy from “Wall Street” as any of us; they are our brothers). I was simply driven, sans violence of any kind, or even cuffs or hard feelings, to the Gold Hills police station. We did a little paperwork and the fellas drove me to a friend’s place where I claimed a bit of much-needed rest. The HOTT team and I were completely cooperative with one another, and remain so. They did their jobs, I did mine. I had to wrestle with the question until some family matters came up, but I will not be camping under that no-camping sign again until at least my court date, 8 Nov at 1:30p MST. I can not, nor will I attempt to speak to the actions of any other sovereign actors who may follow my example, other than to toss out my opinion should it seem germane to me.

I hope we can all have this conversation in a civilized manner. I hope the whole world shows up at the courthouse that day. I hope all my friends known and unknown that can’t make it will pray, or chant, or beam love on fairy wings–whatever their fancy. I’m gonna need it. I think we all need it, that day and every other.

–Reprinted from Hipgnosis

Chris Hedges speaks about MoveOn as if we all know it’s a reprehensible .org

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So the uninitiated are left to guess. “Reprehensible” is a mighty harsh condemnation. Is MOVE ON reprehensible for having arisen from the alarm against a Republican’s illegal war, but now it keeps silent about a Democrat’s? Are they reprehensible for trying, like the many pro-Dem grassroots networks, to co-op the anti Wall Street message? The good news is that Chris Hedges doesn’t think any of the liberal establishment will be able to commandeer OCCUPY WALL STREET, which he calls a movement too big to fail.
 
My own disgust is with MoveOn’s vanguard strategy to champion the issue of forgiving student loan debt. Not a terrible idea of course, but the call paints students who support OCCUPY WALL STREET to be only motivated by selfish reasons, creating a wedge between students and the working class. If student loan relief is something Obama can then champion, MoveOn sweeps them back into his orbit, and away from the radical occupiers.

Judging the New Yorker by its cover

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There are two qualities about the New Yorker I find irresistible though I’m loath to praise any part of the established press. No matter how suddenly forthright or honorable their editorial might appear, it’s only a feint. The Grey Lady NYT for example, has expressed accord with Wall Street’s recent invaders, but otherwise will spew at best neoliberal subterfuge. The WSJ will only ever be Murdoch pretending. But I have the suspicion that some artsy pretense prevents the New Yorker from bowing to the corporatist agenda. It’s the usual PUP on Israel of course, but too elitist for bourgeois self-deceit. That’s my theory. As a result the most disturbing investigative journalism leaks regularly through its pages. It competes with Harper’s among very few, but where the New Yorker has no peer is its cover art, which is often surprisingly subversive. The Oval Office Jihadist being a notorious example. Last week’s cover illustration was a nod to the Liberty Plaza demonstrators, showing Manhattan tourists being subjected to special use sidewalks akin to the restrictions NYC reserves for protesters. This week’s cover depicts Wall Street as sinister metropolis, literally an industrial behemoth, with the inhospitable accouterments of smog, smokestacks, cooling towers, and obelisk(!), looked over by a sphinx-like sacred bull with glowing eyes, nostrils and smoking horns, really if I had to guess, Mammon. Fitting that the bull signified indisputable power in the dawn of agrarian civilization, now its only symbolism is a brutish money-above-all-else juggernaut.

Another Lick

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Guess I’m on a roll, so–speaking of shit you find lying around outside: The Pikes Peak region is “semi-arid” and pretty sparse, so far as dinner plate items from Nature’s bounty are concerned. “Pioneers”, (which of course is proto-Orwellian for “conquerors”), had rather more game around til they killed it all for the sheer glee of it, so if your caught out now things can be even rougher. To top off the chicken thingy I used strictly ingredients found outside. Lying around.

Take and harvest a bunch of prickly pears–the fruit are nice and ripe at this very moment! Use a razor sharp knife, and don’t take more than half the fruit from a single plant. Thank whomever you like to Thank as you harvest, and be gentle. We caused our Moms enough grief as teens; we don’t need to carry on so with our Mother.

Find some other kind of berries or other fruit for variety, anything that’s not apt to poison you will do just fine, as will skipping it.

Hunt down some kinda wild mint. There are several varieties around. Keep track of your living stash and you can harvest till the Apocalypse. The shit’s like weeds, only tasty.

OK, wild honey. You really can, I promise, find bee trees by following bees. Look for a good field of flowers and be patient with the difficulty of the task. Even if it takes all summer, it’s worth it. WATCH OUT FOR BEARS! I’m not joking at all about that one. It’s even more important to exercise great care when harvesting, given the delicate position of bees, lately, and their crucial function to the current Manifestation. Also, they might sting you, but that’s minor. Use smoke to quiet their anger–if you are serious and find a good tree, it’s worthwhile to get hold of a smoker from an apiary supply^. Agave nectar would probably render a more “authentic” version of this, if such a thing exists, but you’ll have to figure out how to get it yourself, (let me know). This is strictly a thing of mine, but I can’t believe no indigenous gatherer ever worked it out before.

One thing–I used a little lemon juice, both for flavor, and for its marvelous preservative quality. It’s not necessary, by any means, but if you want the effect and if you really want to be a purist and go all native and shit, you’ll need to sort out a local source of citric acid. Or, duh–it dawns on me the pricklies probably suffice for that, too.

I used the other half of the jalapeno from the chicken thing, too, which I found in it’s natural environment at the bottom of a Whole Foods donation box. It’s awful tricky to find a wild pepper around here, but not impossible….

Pluck the fuzzies from the pears and seed them. You can blanche and peel them very much more easily, but the skin has half the flavor and even more of the nutrients. Besides, the plucking offers an excuse for sitting around a table with your family without an idiot box blaring inanities, though I recommend blaring some jammin’ tunes. Look me up on Facebook and I’ll post some for you.

Put all the ingredients except the honey in an appropriately sized saucepan, add a little water so it don’t burn while the juices are coming out, cover, and simmer til you get sick of simmering.

Add honey to taste and use for ice cream, a kind of chutney, or whatever. Mixes well with cream, too, if you’re not too aggressive about the process.

Best when built as a family project from top down, side-to-side, and suffused liberally con molto amore!

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Holmes Sweet Holmes

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For NMania1: Thanks for the Voice
And for Bob Holmes: I love you Bob, I swear. But you deserve this.
Don’t feel too sad–I deserve much worse.

Way back in May of this year, I promised this to a guy who “sold” me a free newspaper in Denver for a $1 suggested donation. He said he was a writer for the same paper, which addresses issues surrounding homelessness in the same city. He was interested in the state of those affairs in Colorado Springs, where I live, and, given that I’ve been in the free food biz for 26 years, and that I have, in fact been homeless myself, I had to think I was in a unique position to afford some perspective. I also posted an, (untitled ), bit on the same topic clear back on 12 April of 2010, wherein I promised a follow-up. Things have worked around to a moment where changes have taken place in both the homeless community of our town and in my schedule that render ripe the moment. A year and a half ago, I described a little of the circus-like scene in our town surrounding the homeless campers. Here’ a bit more flesh, spiced with perhaps a bit more vinegar. Don’t get all touchy, now.

Colorado Springs has always been pretty friendly to street-runners, at least since 1984 when I got here. I got to know my way around when I hit town as a 20 year old apprentice electician and found work for the–ahem–generous wage of $6.00 an hour. Within a year, I had fallen in with some folks at Calvary Chapel downtown in the same building occupied by our town’s token “liberal” free paper now. We gave away sandwiches and such, among some other, more ideologically driven activities. I’ve been in on this little pastime of mine in one capacity or another ever since, from various angles, and with variable motivation. (Spiritual vagaries aside, nothing is ever about just one thing). What I mean to point out is that I have been around long enough to have a little feel for the pulse of the thing, nothing more.

When I’d written about all this earlier in the orphaned posting noted above I mentioned some stuff I’ll not mention again, since you can go to that one to see, easily enough: http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/2010/04/so-colorado-springs-is-unusual-place-it.html . This follow up addresses the biggie. That’s right IT HASN’T WORKED.

I’m no prophet. God has yet to send me any memos. All I did earlier was interpret the writing on the wall that was there for anyone to see, in big scrawling, blocky letters. I think anyone looking could read them clearly enough, including Bob Holmes, if he hadn’t been in his customary, red-faced, squinty-eyed, self-imposed insensate condition. That doesn’t count for an honest mistake, Bob!

Now, here’s a little secret–sshhh! The camps are back. I can’t speak for the general level of brain power amongst drunken, whacked out homeless guys, but even the blankest screen among my favorite crowd has developed an ingrained self-preservatory wiliness. So you won’t see them sprawled along the highway like a middle class Somali neighborhood, like before. And I’m not gonna tell you where they are. The cops simply must know already, and my friends don’t need another three-ring fiasco. But, truckloads of enabling aside–I freakin’ told you, Bob!

I have an absolutely gigantic boatload of my own, patented bool-shyte to sling about all this, (imagine that), but here’s a little teaser before I have to go actually do something this morning. At this moment of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, (watch Wall street, now, y’all), we really ought to notice the shit we’ve been up to all these, say 10,000 years, isn’t working. Let’s switch to a genuinely loving thing.

Buon compleanno ad una nuova Rivoluzione. Viva l’Esercito dell’Amore!

Angela Merkel il culone intrombabile

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But Silvio Berlusconi might alternatively have used “strutto culo inchiavabile” to describe any other Euro usury kapo, like himself, or his mates Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron who paid a surprise visit to Tripoli yesterday to herald the victory of Neoliberal World Bank “Democracy” over Libyan sovereignty –or was it to say thanks in advance for the oil? News of Berlusconi’s wiretapped indiscretion via Twitter offered what online translators would not reveal, how to say “unf*ckable” in the languages of your upstream: infollable, onneukbare… his choice of words remain as yet censored in the German press. Wouldn’t it be curious to learn which cultures have no word for the concept? I’d have thought that would be American.

Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn is how much worse than Democrat Senator Michael Bennet?

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My Dem friends are protesting the Debt Ceiling Heist outside of 5th District Congressman Doug Lamborn’s office, even though today the relevant vote is in the Senate, and Senator Michael Bennet has an office downtown. Except he’s a Democrat. AS IF my colleagues think only the Republicans are screwing them on the debt crisis “deal!” Much as I object to being represented by the squeaky voiced pea-brain bigoted Lamborn, this Move-On crowd pretends their corporate party offers a veritable alternative. Senator Bennet is a pro-banking, pro-privatization, pro-military, frack-the-environment, blue dog centrist, who quite righty takes progressive liberals for schmucks.

Rupert Murdoch mistaken for Mr. Burns and pied by Jonnie “Marbles” Marbles

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Unseen, Rupert Murdoch Sr. receiving shaving cream pie to the face.“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat“
    –tweeted by activist/comedian Jonnie Marbles, immediately before pie-ing News Corp godfather Rupert Murdoch at UK parliamentary hearing. Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng reached over their bodyguard to strike Mr. Marbles, and curiously, hearing room cameras cut all direct images of the spectacle. Watching Murdoch deny knowledge or curiosity about NOTW wrongdoings, you wonder how word even reached him that his presence was requested at this parliamentary inquiry.

I’m thinking the PR coaching the Murdochs received is being overrated. Pretend to be a hands-off boss so not to expose your wrists to be slapped in cuffs? No one was buying Murdoch the Elder’s senility schtick, until the media began its spin, and wasn’t it amazing to gaze upon the breadth of media fealty shown to Rupert? Everyone wanted to distance themselves from Braveheart Marbles, because he purportedly threw audience sympathy to Murdoch. Right. The only ones fooled are those shills pretending. The world TV audience saw Murdoch for what they know he is, a blackmailer of world leaders, pursuing the ugliest of neoliberal war-making agendas.

Of course Rupert’s media was going to praise the Missus for her flying-clawing attack of the pie-wielding Marbles. It wasn’t intervention mind you, but retaliatory. I hope he can sue her. He’d already done the pie and was being subdued, she leaped over security to have at him.

Did Marbles spoil the show? Nonsense. He waited until the last of the softball questions, and took his turn. The parliamentarians may have been setting technical legal snares to trap the Murdochs at a later date, but certainly they could also have been asking, for example, did Murdoch wonder how the NOTW obtained confidential information, and was any ever withheld because it would lead others to question its illegal source. Also, did Murdoch ever use the threat of releasing confidential information to leverage government policy in his favor?

The big story for me was how the camera feed cleverly cut away from Marbles’ stunt. Ostensibly to capture the action suddenly coming from off-camera, but ultimately censoring the main scene. Where were the multitude of stills from that moment, of Elder Murdoch’s face filled with pie? Images abound now of the pie-wielder, caught effectively with egg-white on his face, but of Murdoch, not even a smudge, his splattered jacket whisked out of view before the frontal camera feed was let to resume.

How that sequence was managed for Murdoch tells a lot I think about the power he wields. Similar to the aftermath of the murdered girl’s violated voicemail. As the story broke, it wasn’t just messages erased, but internet caches of the early evidence, effaced even from hacktivists who know how to rescue unarchived data. Tracks of NOTW malfeasance erased by malfeasance at a much higher pay grade.

But I celebrate Jonnie Marbles, aka Jonathan May-Bowles, for daring something even the most powerful men in the world dare not, to humiliate Rupert Murdoch, on live TV with a world audience no less. It was a feat worthy of the shoe thrower, and no less deserved. I only hope the price Marples may have to pay, isn’t the fate of Sean Hoare, an earlier source of ire for Murdoch Elder.

I celebrate Jonnie Marbles’ last tweets before his deed:

I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.

RT @RachelvsPublic: Have you ever wondered what a verbal sudoku would be like to solve? This is it. #Hackgate #Yates

One gets the sense that they haven’t really done the required reading ahead of their presentation. Think they may fail this module #hackgate

It might be quicker if Baby Murdoch simply listed all of the things that he does know #hackgate

It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat

UPDATE: The Guardian gave Jonnie Marbles a chance to explain his stunt. He’s taking a beating in the comments, but here’s my favorite:

At last we have someone in this whole sorry mess who can own up and take responsibility for their own actions.

If the Murdochs had thrown a pie at Johnnie the article would read :

I never threw that pie. I was not in the position at the time to throw that pie.?

I don’t remember that pie, I throw 56,000 pies every day, how I am supposed to remember one individual pie??

If a pie was thrown, then someone I trusted must have thrown that pie.?

With hindsight I never threw the pie but if I had thrown the pie it was a mistake and I will apologise once all the facts are known about the pie and if I really threw it or not.?

This is the most humble pie day of my life.

Cheer up Johnnie.

The least of teargas effects are tears

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Teargas has become a misnomer of course.What’s being used so liberally to suppress demonstrations, to be graphically specific, is vomit-inducing PUKE-GAS. It’s a nausea agent, a respiratory inhibitor, and except when used by the paramilitary police-state, “teargas” is prohibited chemical warfare.

Lannan liberals ensure John Pilger’s THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE remains a documentary Americans won’t see

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John Pilger’s documentary THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE was due to make its US debut this week, before its Santa Fe venue, the Lannan Foundation, abruptly cancelled the event. Given less than two days notice, plane tickets cancelled on the personal direction of the foundation’s funder Patrick Lannan, with no explanation offered. Pilger details on Zcom his concern for what just days ago had been an enthusiastic venue. The Lannan organization still boasts it will be hosting Tariq Ali and Norman Finkelstein among others, so it’s hard to deduce where Pilger’s film crossed the line. My guess? Not just the role the US media plays in promoting war, but its bias toward you know who.

Here’s the trailer, available on johnpilger.com.

The War You Don’t See (trailer) from John Pilger on Vimeo.

Republicans already have a candidate for 2012: Barack Anwr Obama

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Looking for a challenger right of Barack Obama can only yield a caricature, irrelevant, bigot or panderer. If any candidate will offer a real alternative to the duplicity of Obama’s corporatist agenda, wouldn’t he or she have to come from the left? Yes the Democratic Party is just sheep clothing for the usual wolves, but I’m still hopeful about the actual Democratic voter, or should I say I’m in denial, that the average progressive liberal will not fall for Obama again.

Colo. College guest Donald Gregg: the man who hired the man who killed Che

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He administered OPERATION PHOENIX during the Vietnam War, the CIA counterinsurgency operation which sought to pacify Vietnam with the targeted assassination of thousands of potential insurgents. For Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office, he coordinated the funding of the illegal US covert war against Central America, aka, the IRAN-CONTRA scandal. Yes, he supervised both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, each of CIA-state-sponsored-terrorism fame. But Colorado College introduced Donald P. Gregg only as former national security adviser and ambassador to Korea. And CC gave Gregg an honorary degree — with not a peep from the know-nothings they laud as their exemplary students.

I attended because I was insulted by the lecture’s title: “What do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jung Il have in common?” the speaker further slandered the father of modern Vietnam by indulging to associate another villain to the list, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi. But gracefully Gregg acquitted himself by explaining that Ho Chi Minh had been misjudged, and thus perhaps there is call to engage even our most despicable adversaries in dialog, lest we repeat our mistaken policies, as Gregg believes we are doing in Afghanistan.

Not much objectionable with that. Actually, you can read Gregg’s address, it’s virtually word for word the introduction he wrote for a 2009 study of the CIA’s unheralded successes in Vietnam. To his credit, Gregg does not echo the ongoing theme that Vietnam was winnable.

Relating his more recent expertise about Korea, Gregg offers that Kim Jong Il is more than your common loon. Rather, Il is of unusually high intelligence, underrated by the US, driven despotic by his isolation.

Or driven mad by our offense, I’d add. I’m surprised Kim Jong Il tolerates that we name our ambassador in Seoul as the Ambassador to Korea, rather than to South Korea. How dare US-occupied Korea assert to represent the national identity of Korea? As in Vietnam, it’s the north doing the heavy lifting toward inevitable unification.

Gregg nearly had me convinced he was reformed until he added a forth bogeyman for comparison, Iran.

Iran mustn’t get nukes, etc, etc, Ahmadinejad unpredictable, can’t be trusted, etc.

Ho Chi Minh had been demonized Gregg said, based on a wrong-headed anti-Communist domino-theory mindset, yet Gregg is perfectly willing to be stuck to Capitalism’s current mindset against Islam.

Gregg made such winning arguments for tolerance, respect, diplomacy, and the integrity of the best intelligence officers, but isn’t that precisely the neo-liberal spiel? The CC audience lapped it up.

Here was the closest most of us will ever get to someone connected to the murder of Che Fucking Guevara, icon of the world struggle against Western oppression. That’s explaining the obvious, but I’d add, Che’s heroic stature is no more diminished even if only known as a t-shirt image to this crowd.

School-of-the-Americas-trained Rodriguez knew the stature of the hero he was cutting down, to this day he brags about wearing Che’s watch as a keepsake. Rodriguez returned from this assignment with a piece of notebook paper wrapped around the tobacco left in Guevara’s pipe.

Donald Gregg didn’t kill Guevara, but we might have asked him how many youthful Viet Cong he killed or had tortured, etc, how many aspiring Nicaraguan freedom fighters, or Burmese victims, or boys and girls of yet to be named regions, of the CIA’s yet unrevealed adventures in extrajudicial preemptive death-dealings.

All of this may be blood under the bridge, except that the undercurrent of this elder statesman’s lecture tour is beating the drum for confrontation with Iran.

Van Jones is Obama in Greenface, what our president did for race, Jones wants for the environment, New Jack Shit

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? He’s Black AND he’s Green, and like his former boss Obama, he’s a neo-eco corporatist pushing… Cap-N-Trade! In Al Gore Nobel Prize circles, Van Jones is the environmental darling who was too hot –we’re to infer principled– for Obama’s centrist administration. In post-Hope America, Jones turns out to have been the spoonful of Aspartame that helped environmentalists swallow just the next neoliberal pill, another pitchman for the bankers whose “Green Collar” remedy for our climate -and economic woes- is to trust in big business –let free trade and deregulated profits deliver mankind! No surprise then Colorado College is foisting the so-called upstart to dazzle the impressionable on Thursday March 3rd at Shove Chapel, 7:30pm. And the asshole (his word, not mine) compounds his offense by presuming to greenwash the few terms American workers have to grasp the real issue, class struggle. The blue and white collars differentiate who works and who keeps the profit, and by the way, who’s made the decisions that led the machine to environmental collapse and who pays the price. Green Collar doesn’t describe a shirt, it’s a leash. Oh but JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and the IMF don’t want to take you out for walkies. Their collar is a yoke of servitude, painted color of the day.

I’m voting early, and I vote NO

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I’ll show you an absentee ballot. As the election looms, the Klieg lights intensify on the TP bogey-persons, TV talking heads harp about what a nail-biter this will be, pollsters dance with them that brought ’em, Michael Moore does his usual U-turn, to urge us to suck it up for the Dems, Medea Benjamin defends her eternal faith that activism “might” still move Obama, and ever multiple emails presume Obama’s options must be preserved at all costs, usually a donation. Again I anticipate hearing from a friend who monitors local precinct printouts and calls to whip his charges to the polls. I’ve lost count of how many Facebook prompts I’ve gotten to pledge to vote — but this time I’m going to make my ballot count. No amount of corporate-sponsored fear-based gap-closing civic-enthusiasm is going to coerce me to play this game. I will not support war, lack of health care, and class war unchallenged. The beasts unleashed by Citizens United will not buy my participation.

Neither the conservative assholes, nor the liberal bullshitters can have it.

They can have their tyranny, their obscene income disparity, their open war on nature and fellow-humankind. They can have their liberal pretense as the less bitter pill. It’s a dose of cancer either way. I would have a preference actually, if forced to choose between a quick execution and a slow death by hard labor, but I would rather resist than be compelled to voice it.

Silence is not consent, it’s none of the above.

What candidate have you got that’s going to make a difference? In Colorado we’ve got nothing but corporate energy, weapons systems cowboys. Our good-cop senate incumbent is a corporate, education-privatizing, warmongering Zionist who like Obama says he’s against all that. What you got?

Imagine if American election monitors insisted on dipping American fingers in purple dye to prevent vote fraud. The traditional media photo representing Iraqi or Afghan elections makes it obvious it’s really to provide graphic illustration of their buy-in to the election process.

We judge the democracy flag-planting in Iraq and Afghanistan based on election turnouts don’t we? Why shouldn’t that symbolic math apply here too? Would Americans vote if their purple fingers were paraded to demonstrate their faith in American Democracy? Fuck No.

Let the state media denounce it as voter apathy — they can call it what they want, I won’t be there.

Flotilla not a Love Boat, it was a lynch, says Netanyahu, describing beating of IDF soldiers, not deaths of aid workers

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What’s a lynch? I find it intriguing that Israel’s spin machine can drop an American pop culture reference like Love Boat, and simultaneously flub basic usage with “a lynch.” According to Israel, that describes what befell their crack-troop Mavi Marmara party-crashers. What does “a lynch” mean? Apparently someone feels at liberty to shorten Lynch Mob, or Lynching, to coin a new threat to Israel. But doesn’t it stretch credulity to imagine the IDF has never claimed to have been baited into an “ambush?”

Every modern military with a propaganda office, when it suffers a setback, attributes it to an ambush. When the US and Israel do it, it’s an attack; when our dastardly adversaries do it, it’s an ambush. Let’s set aside that the night watch on the Mavi Marmara’s deck might have been defending themselves. For the moment the IDF version of events is the only one Israel is allowing.

Ambush, trap, beating, getting jumped, wouldn’t these be appropriate descriptions for what Israel is asserting its night-vision video depicts? To lynch someone -it’s a verb- implies a hanging, extrajudicial, usually perpetrated by a crowd against a lone victim, unarmed. So where does the IDF get “lynch?”

To my mind, the Israeli-accented tender of “lynch” is feigned bad English, stuttered -I hope in shame- as perpetrator blames victim, but stuttered conveniently, to make the accusation less preposterous. Isn’t a rape victim who is too well versed in the crime perpetrated against her, less convincing than a victim who fumbles to comprehend the outrage she suffered? Poor Israel, its soldiers stepped into a, a, a lynch.

Emitted from military spokespeople however, one projects a reflexive followup “-that’s the ticket.”

I’m guessing grasping a straws like “lynch” is played for sympathy. And while I deconstruct the false unfamiliarity of otherwise precisely crafted English: PM Netanyahu’s mention of “Love Boat” had a bumbling Bush “the internets” ring to it. Anyone old enough to know the television show about the enchanted cruise ship knows there’s not “a Love Boat” but The Love Boat.

If the newly nouned “lynch” is intended to define a hate crime unique to anti-Semites, the motive fits with Israel’s insistence that first genocide, now holocaust, can only apply to Jews. Such an implication is aided by Netanyahu’s suggestion that the lynch was “plotted.” Because common understanding of mob misbehavior precludes a premeditated plot. This may reflect a naive dismissal of the responsibility of authorities who manipulated the lynch mobs and witch hunts, but dictionaries seldom chronicle the injustice of the victors who write the history. Conventional wisdom holds that lynchings were improvisational.

Perhaps the English speaking viewers are meant to associate the implicit racism of the term. Ambush after all doesn’t conjure the slightest whiff of antisemitism. But here’s where Israel’s liberal arts wordsmiths may have outsmarted themselves. While it’s true that thousands of African Americans were lynched through our nation’s history, to the average American who dwells not very often on shameful pasts, the definition of lynching encompasses simply an execution in lieu a trial. Even an unfair trial, or kangaroo court, can be called a lynching. A lynch mob is an enraged crowd meting vigilante justice, hanging high what to them is an indisputable wrongdoer. The overwhelming number of lynching victims in America’s lawless west were hunted criminals. While xenophobia may always have skewed the mob’s judgment against Indian, Chinese, Mexican, or Black, a lynching was not by definition about racial prejudice.

If the beating of the Israeli commandos illustrated a hatred, was it racist? One is meant to assume the motive was anti-Semitic, but I wonder if Arab-Israelies serving in the IDF, or foreign nationals or mercenaries, don’t garner antagonism as vociferous. The historic prejudice decried by ADL and holocaust remembrance stalwarts has been against Jews, but the world today reviles Israeli arrogance. The US has become universal despised, but American tourists are still assured the world hates America, not its people. It’s what we’re told, if even if it is untrue. I do not know of course if Israelis are proffered the same polite assurance.

Did Israel mean that the Freedom Flotilla was an attempted lynching of Israel’s international reputation? In that case, Israel’s predictable militant reaction made such a hanging a matter of assisted suicide. If the Israeli national character suffers irreparably, who’s going to be to bame?

Presuming to paint its soldiers into a lynching scene, which character does Israel assert they played? Were the IDF the horse thieves? Bandying about the connotations of lynchings makes for an interesting turning of the tables. Were the convoy defenders the ones pronouncing hasty judgment upon their dark-of-night assailants? Or were Israel’s commandos declaring themselves judge and jury on the alleged arms smugglers?

In cases of breaking and entering, the home field advantage is accorded the right to self-defense. A SWAT team might make the argument that identifying itself as law enforcement preempts a homeowner’s recourse to armed resistance, based on the principle that an arresting officer’s safety is inviolate. Israel may assert it was policing its border, but unfortunately last Monday it was operating beyond its border. What protection can a law enforcement function claim if outside its jurisdiction?

It might be well and good to say Israel reserves the right to protect itself from enemies anywhere in the world, but it can’t pretend its badge should command universal obeisance.

The Mavi Marmara had declared her intention to run Israel’s blockade, but hadn’t yet attempted the crossing. In fact the Freedom Flotilla was moving away from the contentious area at the time of Israel’s attack.

Who then was the victim of this “lynch?”

I’ll tell you why it’s lynch and not lynching. Because Israel’s soldiers weren’t killed, they were beaten. Not to diminish what might have been their adversaries’ worst intentions, but the gantlet the IDF commandoes received was not a hanging specifically, and not very effective in terms of proving fatal. On the other hand, the outcome was the killing of an as yet undisclosed multitude of civilians, unarmed to an extent that the killings can be defined as executions, the entire result already adjudged to have been a massacre.

Israel’s invention of “lynch” is an utterance which I believe betrays the sign of shame the world longs to see from Israel. Even as the public revels in watching the Israeli hubris on self-destruct, empathy has us hoping to see Israel grasp for its lost humanity. To describe the events on the Turkish passenger ship as a “lynch” is to fail to summon the chutzpah to bear false witness, to accuse the dead of capital murder. Neither does Israel dare to raise the specter that summary executions were committed that night at all.

There is a term to describe

a) Israel’s taking the law into its own hands by pirating a ship belonging to another nation while it sailed in international waters,

b) Israel’s soldiers not being a police force but an ideology-deputized posse,

c) opting in a confused fervor to punish outlaws thought to have been caught red handed,

d) issuing on the spot death sentences.

It’s called a mass lynching.

Obama pushes Elena Kagan as rightist

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SCOTUS
Everything I need to know about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan I learned directly from President Obama. In his email to me yesterday, Obama explained that though Kagan hails from academia, she has an “openness to other viewpoints.” Uh, in the context of school, does “other” mean uneducated? And hasn’t sunlight shed on DC post-Bush revealed that “skill in working with others to build consensus” is code for: shows affinity for corruption? It means believe in change so long as it doesn’t upset the applecart.

By all accounts, Kagan is the kind of conservative I abhor. As Harvard dean, she’s an educator diametrically opposed to enlightened students and faculty. The Peter Principle in its absolutely most corrosive position of authority. Squelch the last tugs of intellectual idealism with moral bankruptcy.

Much as we like to hold its ivy covered walls in high regard, Harvard has served as breeding ground for an inordinate proportion of our nation’s greedy bastards. A conservative foil to such neoliberal ideologues as are Wall Street apprentices would be inhumanitarian indeed. I’ve no doubt Elena Kagan will be a Clarence Thomas of feminism, the Scalia of selflessness, the Roberts of empathy and the Alito of intellect.

Obama thought I might be impressed by an example of advocacy Kagan has shown, the anti-corporate bandwagon I suppose:

“choosing the Citizens United case as her first to argue before the Supreme Court, defending bipartisan campaign finance reform against special interests seeking to spend unlimited money to influence our elections”

Two points we can glean from this: Kagan argued against free speech, against the position of the ACLU in fact. And two, as an indication of her persuasive potential, she lost.

I’m rather disappointed that Obama.com misses the mark so widely with their emails. Considering they don’t just spam, but follow as well, I’m hurt that my profile doesn’t suggest that I’m unlikely to be receptive to reassurances of anyone’s centrism. If they’re tailoring their messaging at all, I’m simply insulted by the last argument that presumes I’m an idiot. I have enough respect for the security services, so I think they would know.

The resignation of Justice Stevens has drawn attention to there no longer being a Protestant on the Supreme Court, which might be problematic if you consider that moral issues are being decided by nine judges neither of whom share the average American’s religion. Kagan would make the court fully one third Jewish, to represent 1% of the population. Geographically the court is 100% from New York. Perhaps is is chiefly Kagan being a woman that prompts Obama to conclude:

ensuring a Court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before

Tea Partygoers may be embarrassing morons, but they know more than you

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Acacia Park, April 15, 2010TEABAG SPRINGS, CO- Acacia Park overfilled with angry white folks for their Tax Day protest, though talk of actual tax resistance was as unlikely as spilled tea. Instead our local teabags espoused Fox talking points about the illegitimacy of our current government, etc. Aside from the socialist herring, how right they are.

The teabags have that over liberals and progressives, they know both parties are irredeemable. Their bucket brigades may be ferrying accelerants, but at least they know the house is on fire.

Acacia Park, April 15, 2010
Following Rush Limbaugh’s tip for preemptive framing of racist-infiltrator provocateurs, these gentlemen prepared a sign, but set it aside when invariably it pointed to naught but the teabagger beside them.

Acacia Park, April 15, 2010
On their lunch hour, a clutch of Palmer High School students decided to march across the park with hastily drawn signs which read “We love Obama.” An angry woman (pictured) immediately blocked their way asking: “How old are you? Are you voters?” When they answered no, the woman told them, “If you’re not voters, you should leave.” But the students marched past her attempts to take their picture and proceeded bravely through the crowd. Their chant of the same refrain “We support Obama” were quickly drowned by the huskier Teabag shouts of “USA, USA.”

Acacia Park, April 15, 2010
As per the usual musical acts which have accompanied past Acacia Park Tea Rallies, the crowd assembles to what sounds like a Doobie Brothers medley, including Neil Diamond’s anthem “They’re coming to America,” chosen it would seem because “America” figures prominently, and not because it’s an homage to immigrants.

Bob Edwards asks “We still Top Dog?”

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Longtime neo-liberal shill and NPR war drummer Bob Edwards consults a soothsayer to placate his weekend audience’s fears about where their hopeful handbasket appears to be headed. To his question about the USA still being top dog, the economic clairvoyant’s answer is YES. Also, America has the psyche and bipolarity of a teenager, leaving us to infer also the same self-unawareness. But the big question was about President Obama’s apparent inability to change the course set for him. YEP. The tracks of Bush’s trainwreck read like your palm. Nothing to be done.

CS Indy turns to cruel IFES deceiver to voice cautionary best hope for Haiti

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IFESWhen it came to coverage of the Haiti earthquake disaster, the CS Indy left it to their Your Turn column, and by “your” they meant YOUR MASSAH. What caught my eye was the headline “Time for a new Haiti” accompanied by the excerpt blurb “Aristide’s return would be a disaster,” written by a pasty diplomat who had a personal hand in Haiti’s ongoing misery. Here is our allegedly progressive newsweekly giving the podium to IFES criminal Richard Soudriette instead of bundling him off to Port Au Prince for a well deserved drubbing.

Mr. Soudriette presided over the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) from 1988 to 2007, the period which saw two US coups in Haiti, where twice the democratically elected Bertrand Aristide was removed from office by our hands. Who better to have blown the whistle on the US interference than someone observing, even advising and conducting, the elections? That’s ignoring of course that the IFES is actually a private agency which does the CIA’s work, created in the 80s when Congress moved to limit the CIA’s official role destabilizing democracies. Through the IFES, through the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA continues its intelligence wars subverting foreign governments who threaten America’s corporate rule.

If you want to believe that enterprises like IFES might be serving some good, consider this: if democratic ideals were really being advanced, the US State Department would be proud to do the work. These aren’t subcontracted jobs that wouldn’t benefit from official diplomatic networks. The IFES and ilk are as disreputable cretins as ever wore stuffed shirts, designed to separate people from legitimate representation.

And don’t think all the pitchfork bearing victims of its election racketeering are overseas. The IFES has been an adversary of the American people as Americans have tried to rescue their elections from Diebold and the stolen votes of 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006.

When will traitorous, undemocratic Neocons like Richard Soudriette meet the wrath they have so richly courted? The Haitians are suffering, there are countless stories of Americans helping in the effort, instead the Indy gives people of Haiti more of the same malignant spin. How did Soudriette explain his expertise on Aristide? He didn’t:

“Unfortunately Aristide is hinting at a comeback despite his two failed terms. Aristide’s return to Haitian politics would be a disaster for the country. His many political allies in the U.S. and abroad would best serve Haiti’s interests by encouraging Aristide to permanently step aside from politics.”

Rather, Soudriette says, we need to back efforts to amend Haiti’s constitution to allow America’s man Preval serve additional terms. Oh, and give more responsibility to USAID, another CIA arm. Why is Soudriette spinning this message to Colorado Springs I wonder?

It’s not enough that Soudriette lent his villainy to Haiti’s disastrous last decades, now two years removed from the job, on the occasion of its most recent natural calamity, Soudriette resurfaces to damn the Haitian people with the same lies, lest they ever catch a break. That’s what makes this brand of conservative bureaucrat so damnable.

And why is the Indy propagating this venomous neo-liberal drivel? It could be highlighting the truly hopeful opportunities which locals have been taking to help the earthquake victims. Tired of watching the US military bureaucracy monopolize and bungle the aid efforts, a Springs surgical team enlisted a local businessman’s private turboprop to spend a week in Port Au Prince effecting miracles. Let’s hear about that story.

To pick up where we left off with scoundrel Soudriette, he of the many Haitian crony friends in DC, the careerist democracy-thief has moved to Colorado Springs, to lecture for El Pomar, and head the Center for Diplomacy and Democracy, which may be just another shell to which the CIA funnels funding. While stationed in DC for the IFES, Soudriette was also billing from an M Street address for the Conservation International Foundation. The good news is that apart from a CFDD franchise opened in Northern Iraq, no doubt to milk from Iraq reconstruction funds, the headquarters here appears to be merely a residence with a walkout on the golf course of the Country Club of Colorado.

Non profit front on the Country Club of Colorado golf course