Hugo Chavez has message for Obama

Eduardo Galeano- Open veins of Latin America, 1998Hugo Chavez met Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas, and presented this gift to the American president: “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, Chavez held aloft Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” encouraging everyone to read it. Is there a common theme to the dark-skinned Chavez’s book recommendations? Chavez’ critics from the Venezuelan upper middle class think he’s no brighter than a monkey. His message, educate yourselves.

Eduardo GaleanoEduardo Galeano was interviewed by Amy Goodman on the day Barack Obama learned he had won the election. Galeano had this hope for the first US President of color: that he never forget that the White House, his new home, had been built by black slaves.

By the way, Galeano’s classic, with which Hugo Chavez hopes to bring Obama up to speed, was published in 1971.

When Obama won the 2008 election, Eduardo Galeano wrote this essay: I HOPE.

10 November 2008

Will Obama prove, at the helm of government, that his threats of war against Iran and Pakistan were only words, broadcast to seduce difficult ears during the election campaign?

I hope. And I hope he will not fall, even for a moment, for the temptation to repeat the exploits of George W. Bush. After all, Obama had the dignity to vote against the Iraq war, while the Democratic and Republican parties were applauding the announcement of this carnage.

In his campaign, the word most often repeated in his speeches was leadership. In his administration, will he continue to believe that his country has been chosen to save the world, a toxic idea that he shares with almost all his colleagues? Will he insist on the United States’ global leadership and its messianic mission to take command?

I hope the current crisis, which is shaking the imperial foundations, will serve at least to give the new administration a bath of realism and humility.

Will Obama accept that racism is normal when it is used against the countries that his country invades? Isn’t it racism to count the deaths of invaders in Iraq, one by one, and arrogantly ignore the many dead among the invaded population? Isn’t this world racist, where there are first-, second-, and third-class citizens, and the first-. second-, and third-class dead?

Obama’s victory was universally hailed as a battle won against racism. I hope he will assume, in his acts of government, this great responsibility.

Will the Obama government confirm, once again, that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are two names of the same party?

I hope the desire for change, which these elections have established, will be more than a promise and more than a hope. I hope the new government has the courage to break with the tradition of the one and only party, disguised as two parties which at the moment of truth do more or less the same thing while simulating a fight.

Will Obama fulfill his promise to shut down the evil Guantánamo prison?

I hope, and I hope he will end the evil blockade of Cuba.

Will Obama continue to believe that it is great to have a wall that prevents Mexicans from crossing the border, while money moves without anyone asking for its passport?

During the election campaign, Obama never honestly confronted the subject of immigration. I hope, now that he is no longer in danger of scaring voters away, he can and wants to break down this wall, much longer and more embarrassing than the Berlin Wall, and all the walls that violate people’s right to free movement.

Will Obama, who so enthusiastically supported the recent little gift of 750 billion dollars to bankers, govern, as usual, to socialize losses and privatize profits?

I’m afraid so, but I hope not.

Will Obama sign and comply with the Kyoto Protocol, or will he continue to give the privilege of impunity to the nation that is poisoning the planet the most? Will he govern for cars or for people? Can he change the murderous course of the lifestyle of the few who are risking the fate of all?

I’m afraid not, but I hope so.

Will Obama, the first black president in the history of the United States, realize the dream of Martin Luther King or the nightmare of Condoleezza Rice?

The White House, which is now his house, was built by black slaves. I hope he won’t forget it, ever.

MLK: Why I am Opposed to the War

Martin Luther King Jr“You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.”
 
Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967. Full text below.

The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject, nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I’m using as a subject from which to preach,

“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”

Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we’re always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.

Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.

Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]…have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud:

“Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say.

And so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.

This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is…a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years–especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted.

Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent.

Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement–we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor; when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark.

There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press!

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just something taking place, but it was a commission–a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of son-ship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come today to speak for them.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries.

Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as strange liberators.

Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation? And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the war costs. And even when France started despairing of its reckless action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu.

But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It’s a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally won’t tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. They are saying, unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around!” It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when

“every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind. And when I speak of love I’m not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of John: “Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State–they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue.

Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America,

“You’re too arrogant!

And if you don’t change your ways,

I will rise up and break the backbone of your power,

and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name.

Be still and know that I’m God.”

Now it isn’t easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job…means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, “Why do you have to go to jail so much?” And I’ve long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it–bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I’m not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing “We Shall Overcome” because Carlyle was right: “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: “Truth pressed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.” Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: “You shall reap what you sow.”

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it.

With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”

With this faith, we’ll sing it as we’re getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.

Mumbai ‘Jewish Center’ itself a center for promotion of Jewish terrorism and a few other thoughts

expel-the-muslimsJust what sort of ‘Jewish Center’ in Mumbai, India was attacked this Wednesday night and into Thursday?

In fact, this was the Chabad-Lubavitch center there, and not one of the many other Jewish centers in Mumbai. This group of sectarian Jews is Messianic and racist to the core, and is well connected historically to Kach, the Kahanes, and The Jewish Defense League, all of which were Jewish terrorist groupings and individuals. They are the core Right Wing group of the Jewish settlers that are stealing from and murdering Palestinians in their own lands. These Chabad-Lubavich racists have a long history of links to Jewish pro-terrorist activities in the New York City area, too, and have leading US political figures often times giving both covert and overt political support to them.

Chabad Votes For Racist This article gives a glimpse of the role of Chabad-Lubavich in the rabid Israeli settler community, where they are leading advocates of Israeli expansionism at the expense of the native Arab population. Their historical roots are with Jewish terrorists like Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down in cold blood and killed and wounded over 150 Muslim worshippers inside an Islamic holy site some 14+ years ago.

Yes, I know that little of this history is known by Americans, still the ‘terrorism’ is coming from all sides and the fact that the Hindu Indian government has increasingly promoted pogroms inside its own borders against Muslims (and Christians, too) should not go by unmentioned, and unnoticed. Neither should we be missing the connections to the US government’s own acts of terrorism against the Muslim community worldwide. We are seeing 9/11 enacted all over again, but this time on Indian soil and in not so extensive and dramatic a manner as planes colliding into buildings. Yet, the reasons here are much the same as before though in the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon.

The Mumbai Chabad-Lubavitch building was one of about 8 or 9 other targets chosen by this unknown group of people to terrorize. The other places, outside of the train station which might have been an accident when some of the armed men of the group were surprised, seemed to have mainly targeted the more elite, English speaking tourist and business class types (Mumbai being india’s financial equivalent of Wall Street, New York) plus a Bollywood elite cinema, Bollywood (Mumbai/ Bombay) being home of the Indian equivalent of Hollywood. What might have been the over all motive?

Sadly, the principal motive might have simply been to continue to create the panic of the type that the Bush Administration fought so hard to instill after 9/11 ….a panic that may ultimately be the factor that financially will sink The US Empire by self-bankrupt.

The current Indian government has signed onto allying itself with this US Empire and the elites of India became a target because of that. In some respects, this almost looks like India’s no-Thanksgiving Day of 9/11. In dirty wars of this sort, messages are always being sent back and forth, usually through acts of terror between one side and the other.

Amazing how quiet the US government is being about it all? Maybe the power elites here in the USA are hoping that nobody notices the similarities between what happened in New York City of 2001, and what happened in Mumbai 2008? Sh…. don’t look at our ‘success’? ‘Global War on Terrorism’? What humbug!

Monday OCT 20 election rescue mission

HELLO COLORADO SPRINGS- How is this for a busy Monday?
6AM-8:00AM -Sky Sox Stadium: welcome chorus for Sarah Palin
9AM – County Commission: public comment on Bob Balink abuses
12AM – Monday noon antiwar vigil (half-hour PEACE break!)
12:30AM-2PM – CC student EARLY VOTING MARCH downtown
Sky Sox Stadium Springs

incontinent and incompetentI can’t say I can remember a Monday I’ve anticipated more! If you like to engage in appropriate public displays of self-righteous behavior, you couldn’t ask for bigger assholes to target.

Sarah Palin and Bob Balink, no kidding, they are two sides of the same, one sided wooden nickel! A BUFFOONALO nickel?

Wouldn’t “ignorant, incompetent, mean-spirited, ethically-challenged and liar” fit both of them?

– 6AM (Sky Sox Stadium)
Wear white to make the supporters wearing red look bloody. The Colorado Women Against Palin are planning an action. Here are some ideas for suggested signs to welcome Sarah Palin, the GOP’s under-vetted KKK/secessionist/puritanic/greed/corruption/doofus candidate:
GO, SARAH, GO; HOME, SARAH, HOME!
ALASKANS PLEASE IMPEACH YOUR CORRUPT GOVERNOR!
RACIST BIGOT, YOU BETCHA!
SILENCE THE VIOLENCE
WE DON’T NEED THE KKK
I CAN SEE THE END OF YOUR POLITICAL CAREER FROM MY HOUSE
POLAR BEAR MOMS SAY NO TO PALIN
CORRUPTION IS NOT PATRIOTIC
McSHAME ON PALIN
LYING IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE
HEEL YOU MESSIANIC FREAK
PALIN: ELECT ME – I’LL SELL THE CONSTITUTION ON EBAY
TROOPERGATE ABUSE: BAD DOG SARAH

Check the Denver protest for more ideas.

– 9AM (El Paso County Commission meeting)
Suggested message to Clerk & Recorder Bob Balink, to challenge his every-election-year counter-democracy unfunny illegal pranks.
ARREST BOB BALINK FOR VOTER INTIMIDATION!
SUPPRESSING THE VOTE IS UNDEMOCRATIC

James Woolsey and Eleana Benador- 2 US sponsors of Middle East terrorism

The US government and Pentagon have a broad and wide number of propaganda outlets around the world that masquerade as private companies that are doing humanitarian work, public relations work, and news reporting.

Eleana Benador, a woman of mysterious background, heads up something called Benador Associates, which is a semi clandestine US governmental outlet for Bush Administration war propaganda. Richard Perle and James Woolsey are the neocon shadows lurking behind this woman and her supposed ‘public relations firm’.

‘It was Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Rosenthal, she said, who helped her start her client list—first by becoming clients, then by introducing her to others. Mr. Woolsey was reluctant to tout his relationship with Ms. Benador. He said he had signed on to do a few speaking engagements and that he last saw her nine months ago. “I like Eleana, but I really just know her as someone who was committed to getting into this business and to set up some speeches,” he said.’

That was a brief and chatty excerpt from
SHE’S RICHARD PERLE’S OYSTER
by JOE HAGAN
NEW YORK OBSERVER
April 7, 2003

Many know that James Woolsey is an often voiced proponent of a 4th World War to reshape the Middle East, an ex CIA head, and a Messianic Right Wing Christian that works tirelessly to advance US Christian ideological and political control over the entire world. He is corporate America melded to Christian America melded to US governmental/ military America. Who then is exactly Eleana Benador?

Eleana Benador sponsors herself as Educated Woman, but she herself is sponsored by others. She and her ‘agency’ appear to be a product of the long time CIA and Israeli collaboration inside and against the Arab World. See their launch of something they call the Arab Broadcast Forum.

If you examine the Benador Associates web site some, one will begin to notice the Right Wing Lebanese connections there. The Right Wing Lebanese community is one that is thoroughly integrated into Israel’s military and spy operations. The US and Israel both hope to control Lebanon’s government with the aid of these Lebanese allies who themselves are an increasingly small minority of Lebanon’s overall population.

These Right Wing Arab sources dredged together by the IDF through the many years, are a backbone for the spread of US neocon propaganda inside the Arab World itself. It gives ‘Arab face’ cover to the ideology. The US government is now sponsoring all sorts of info wars within and into the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Following is the type of info war that Benador Associates specializes in… Neo-Cons planted the Iran story This is an info war serving Colorado Springs’ Fort Carson, NORAD, the Air Force Academy, multiple military contracting firms and the Woolsey family’s personal agendas. Oh, and did I mention again that Susan Woolsey sits on the Colorado College Board of Directors? She’s the VP there, and the US VPs’ daughters and wife graduated from CC. That would be Dick Cheney’s family members.

James Woolsey and Eleana Benador…. 2 US governmental sponsors of terrorism throughout The Middle East. Benador Associates and Colorado College? Yes, there is a connection there in who comes to town to try to feed us misinformation.

Mr. Gates, why are we supposed to believe you?

You and your boss have lied to so many times, but we are expected to just say, OK, this time it’s Iran, so they must be telling the truth?

You picked up a few Iranians in sweeps where no one is convicted in any way an American or British court would accept (and that speaks volumes) without identifying any of them, nor 90% of the dead “militants” from the past 4 years, yet you assure us that each and every one of them was in fact a militant.

You shoot up a pilgrimage of Iranians who, you assure us, were a militant Messianic Cult, during a Shiite holiday where such pilgrimages are commonplace and have been for centuries.

You pick up some Iranian nationals during these same pilgrimages and without making any specific charges, you demand that we accept this as PROOF that the Iranian government is backing the militants in Iraq.

When are you going to stop lying to us, bring the American soldiers back home, resign your commission and take your Commander in Thief with you?

The latest, boy is it stupid

I was on the bus going to Memorial yesterday. there was a copy of the Omygodzette laying on the seat across from me, open to a section somewhat removed from the headlines… Mr Bush has demanded a cut in Medicare and a quarter trillion for the war.

In related news, the Decider has said the intelligence that Iraq was spiraling downward out of control is proof we need to stay and make it spiral a little faster.

Scores of Iraqis were killed by a car bomb in a marketplace in Baghdad.

Bushiites called it an atrocity, glad they can see that. But can they see that Americans killing scores of Iraqis in a bombing is just as much an atrocity?

Since the bomber pretty mangled himself beyond any hope of redemption, how much would you bet that he will be tentatively ID’ed as an Iranian?

If one group of Iraqis kills members of another group of Iraqis, that is baaaadddd .
Unless the Iraqis doing the killing are the ones supported by George. And the ones being killed are not supported by George.

They’re all foreign fighters anyway.
Our nigras wuz perfectly happy with segregation until all these here Outside Agitators started comin’ down here and stirring them up….

200-300 Iranian Messianic Cult Pilgrims killed with much smaller bombs (the explosives that push bullets down a tube pointed in the general direction of other humans) Goooooooddddd

Do these freaks actually believe that being killed by a bullet is somehow going to make the guys or their families feel better?

“It’s okay, they didn’t use nerve gas to kill him”