The US & Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today

If it is not enough to give Israel the free reign and financial aid to terrorize Palestianians and steal their lands at will, the US and Britain also try to disrupt and tear up the governance the Palestinians try to arrange for themselves.

For years they made demons out of Arafat and Fatah, but today the US & its allies are politically supporting Fatah by trying to force new Palestinian elections early and pumping money into Fatah and its leader Abbas, so that this group will be able to buy the new elections at will and destroy their opposition, Hamas. The US and Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today, though this in effect is nothing new, and this is just the most recent example of this. Our corporate government leaders no more support democracy in placxes like Palestine and Iraq, than they do in our own workplaces if we try to organize unions.

We can go back to the US’s coup against Allende where Washington DC installed Pinochet into power. We can go also to examine Algeria, where in 1991 the US and Europe supported a military coup after the elections were won by an Islamic coalition. Subsequently, several hundred thousand were slaughtered down, and repression there continues to this day. Hardly an incentive for Muslim groups looking for national independence and liberation to take a peaceful course of action, as opposed to crashing planes into the Pentagon and elsewhere.

We can also see today, the US and its allies pushing to keep an undemocratic and unpopular Lebanese government in power. One that opened the gates to a foreign power (Israel) to wage war once again inside Lebanon against the majority sector of that country’s population. We can see it in the US and European’s support for the fraudulent and unpopular president just installed in Mexico, that provoked the largest demonstrations in the history of that country. And we can see it in the longterm US and Brit support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, and the repressive Egyptian government, that has merely the sheerest of mirages of having any democratic trappings to it.

Everywhere we look, the US and its allies are supporting tyrants and thugs, but can anybody really claim that this is something new? But this latest example of the US and Britain trying to force new elections on the Palestinians, is a new low of sorts, I think. It is forcing upon the Palestinians the type of factional violence that the US and Britain have already forced upon Afghanistan and Iraq. Could the Nazis themselves have taken this strategy of fomenting inter factional fighting to a form more detrimental to its victims?

Laura Bush to help out the little African pickaninnies

Those Bushes! When they’re not helping out the infidels in Afghanistan and Iraq, they’re helping out the pickaninnies of Africa! This Thursday, according to the theorectical section of Parade Magazine (Intelligence Report- page 24, Dec. 10,2006), First Lady Laura is having a tea and ‘malaria summit’ at the White House. She’ll be asking good Christians to donate $10 a piece to buy a malaria net for the little African pickaniinnies, who she has become devoted to. The Bushes would be using some US taxpayer funds to help out, too, but this pork is designated to go to help improve conditions elsewhere for the Pentagon and their friends, the contractors.

I know. Some of you have gotten down on Laura. You ask just what is she doing married to a man like Dubya? But Hell, she might have saved the world even by staying in that marriage. Imagine if the President started to drink again while driving under the influence of Dick Cheney? Laura has him on the wagon, reading, and now she even has him helping out with getting the little African pickaninnies live healthier lives. She’s a credit to the South. A little more work with Dubya, and Laura might even get him to withdraw from Iraq! Because James Baker sure as hell ain’t.

We owe a lot to Laura. Let’s hope she keeps up the good work.

Lockheed and Bush are LunarTicks

I just love this new Bush plan to militarize green cheese! It’s all very Ray Bradbury even. Let’s put the Pentagon on the moon!
 
The way this is announced is to try to convince people that all their tax payer money is not going for warfare from way up high, but will just be an innocent little moon rock expedition. Of course, none of this will actually go as scheduled. By the time 2020 Space Odyssey roles around, the US will have a national debt of about a google’s google of dollars.

Is Human Rights Watch really all that NGO?

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is in the news pontificating again. They are like little tiny parkings ticket officers who spin around in their little 3-wheel vehicles, ticketing people in places like the Warsaw Ghetto and Nagasaki for not pumping coins properly into the human rights’ meters they are in charge of monitoring.

How do they do such a good job from their little office in New York City where they telescope the world looking for offenders? Where does their money come from? How even handed they are as they hand out parking violation summaries to both Big and Little. They are like that famous ‘American justice’ which is said to apply the vagrancy laws equally to both rich and poor. If either Hobo Joe or Bill Gates sleeps under the highway overpass, they both equally will be hauled off to jail for violating the law. Similarly, this is the HRW code of ethics.

If you visit their website, HRW will proudly inform you that it accepts no money from any government. Oh Wow! How impressive. They will also inform one that they are the biggest ‘human rights organization’ in the US of A. They have a staff of close to 250, and an operating budget of around $40,000,000. Look further, and you will see that they have ticketed offenders from BanglaDesh to Myanmar to the other side of the moon. And then strangely enough, you will find that there is nothing listed about how Iraq and Afghanistan being invaded by the US government is a human rights violation! A rather big one. I guess they don’t take political sides? lol. I don’t know about you, but I believe in proportionality when it comes to human rights and who violates them. HRW does not. Despite their pretense of going after everybody, the big human right’s offenders, like the US government and the Pentagon, mainly get a free walk.

This supposed neutrality in judgement that they push is like that of the Carter Center. Kind of suspect. If they accept no funds from the US government, then where does their money come from? From people like you and me their website will smilingly proclaim! uh… and from foundations. So who are these foundations? Well that seems to be HRW’s big secret. They just don’t really say. But i’m quite sure they’re ‘liberal’ foundations, though distinctly Americancentric ones. Snicker,snicker…. Democratic Party-minded foundations, shall we say. And last I heard, the Democratic Party was one of the 2 pillars of the US government. So much for the HRW’s claims to be without official US government backing. Let’s jiust say that it is unofficial support, then. From liberal Democrats like you and them.

So how does this supposed neutrality of pointing out supposed human rights violations work? If funding begins to decline because a bad thing or two was said about Israel, then denounce ‘equally’ the Palestinians. And that’s just what HRW is doing. Got to keep the staff employed. Got to get them liberal funds from liberal folk that liberally have supported Israel from inside the US back flowing. Let’s call our ability to talk out of both sides of our mounths, NEUTRALITY. Let’s parade ourselves as independent from the government. And let’s hide who those foundations are that give us the funds. I bet its not the Bradley Foundation, nor from the Walton family? Maybe Soros or Gates? People like you and me. chuckle.

HRW has just gotten through with condemning the way that Palestinans defend themselves from being slaughtered by Israel. See these 2 responses to that.

Would HRW have attacked MLK, too? by Jonathan Cook
and
HRW’s Shameful Press Release by Norman Finkelstein

US sinking into Somalia once again?

Incredible as it may seem, the US appears to be moving back into destabilizing the Horn of Africa once again. It’s like there are not enough problems in the Congo, Sudan/ Chad, Rwanda/ Burundi regions of conflict already for Bush, so the US must provoke reopening conflict in the Horn of Africa/ Somalia zone, too! See AFP article- Eritrea accuses US of masking invasion of Somalia with peacekeeping plan

The last 2 US administrations have absolutely destroyed the credibility of the UN as being a body that functions independently of the Pentagon. Most of the world does not see either NATO or the ‘UN peacekeepers’ as anything other than pure extensions of US militarism, and for good reason, too. UN cooperation with the US bombing and dismemberment of Yugosalvia, UN cooperation in the US destruction of the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, UN cooperation in accepting Israeli Apartheid and its terrorism of the Occupied Territories as norm, UN carrying out the continuation of the US invasion of Haiti, and UN acceptance and complicity of the US-Israeli destruction of Lebanon all have led to nobody still believing that this is a neutral world association anymore. Not that it ever seemed to be that so much, to the majority of the world outside Europe and the Anglophile countries.

It’s time to dump the UN and reestablish a new world body of nations totally outside the control of the US government. The current United Nations is a totally spent organization politically. Not even moving its adminstrative offices out of New York City could ever reestablish any of its credibility at this point. A better name for the UN in its current state would be the United Imperialist Nations (UIN). Except that even the word ‘united’ no longer can be considered to apply, as the imperialist countries continue to develop fissures in the post WW2 alliance amongst themselves.

As to the US via the UN in Somalia? What a disaster this appears to be in the making.

Gangster Capitalism

When we watch the likes of an Alan Dershowitz or a Donald Rumsfield pontificating on the US government’s supposed need to use torture, even as they in the same breath deny that torture is torture or that they are advocating and using it in US prisons and elsewhere…. well… it is a sign that gangster capitalism now reigns supreme.

Other signs can be seen in countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan…all puppet friends of the US government, btw, where mafiosos dump dead mutilated bodies daily into the streets victims of the continual drug turf wars. Well that too is another sign that today gangster capitalism is more the norm, than the exception. Too, we see gangster capitalism at work in the cases of Enron and HealthSouth. And remember the US Savings and Loan bailouts of a previous decade that opened the gates to the mafiosos? Billions hauled away by gangster capitalism’s thieves prowling the streets of our country. Gangster capitalism today has penetrated to the highest levels of our country’s political offices. It is not just a US problem. Go ask a Russian.

But the heart of gangster capitalism is ripping off the environment. It is easiest to rip off the commons, and that’s what nature is, the commons. The Pentagon is the leader in this type of gangster capitalism, as it mines, deploys toxins, explodes ordinance, and confiscates entire states and territories for its use everywhere around the planet. Gangster capitalism’s heart, if it has to be said, is a US military toxic waste dump. But the whole world has become that Pentagon dump now.

Here is a look, titled appropriately enough ‘Gangster Capitalism’, at how today’s capitalism is looting our environment. Check it out at Black Agenda Report.

Israel’s Targeted Assassinations leading to renewed Lebanese Civil War

‘Targeted Assassinations’ have become an integral part of official US policy and official Israel policy. Nowhere is this illustrated more than with Israel’s constant running after Hamas leaders to try to sniper them out. By sniper though, often times this means dropping bombs or shelling neighborhoods and murdering entire families of innocent people, and not just firing away at a single person using a rifle with scope attached.

The US leadership likes this Israeli Jewish terrorist mode so much, that it is now using the same tactic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and with the exact same consequences. As we have come to see, ‘collateral damage’ is often quite high. It should be clear, that what the Israeli and US governments refer to as targeted assassination’ in reality is nothing more than terrorism. It’s another semantics game like the Right also plays with the meaning of what constitutes torture. When the Right Wing US and Israeli governments do it, it supposedly does not constitute torture, or so say their apologists.

So what does this have to do with Lebanon? It is quite simple really. When state terrorism (targeted assassinations) becomes official policy, the victims almost always reply in kind. They too start targeting the leaders of the Right for ‘targeted assassinations’. Both sides, Right and Left, then usually enter into a prolonged sort of ‘dirty war’, where both sides employ terrorism against each other’s leaderships. Yesterday, Israel murdered Hamas leaders in Gaza, and today, Hezbollah murders a US-Israel allied, Christian Lebanese leader, Perre Gemayel. And as pointed out previously, this situation is actually being fomented and inflamed by the deployment of United Nations troops into Lebanon in order to save Israel from any consequences from beginning a bombing attack on Iran.

The European’s tolerance for Israel’s policy of ‘targeted assassination’ of Arab leaders it doesn’t want to deal with, PLUS the allowing of the US to turn UN ‘peacekeepers’ into agents of Bush’s foregin policy is throwing fuel onto the regionalization of the Iraq and Afghan fiascoes. The US government seems intent on turning the entire ME oil producing region into a zone of anarchy and chaos, where eventual control can ultimately only fall into Pentagon hands. It is a policy to drench in blood this entire area of the world in order to grab the energy supplies out of the ensuing chaos.

The United Nations preps the way in Lebanon for US/ Israeli war on Iran

Once again, like with Haiti, the UN is acting as just another arm of the Pentagon. In Haiti, the Bush Adminstration toppled the popular government of Aristide, and then moved UN troops in as occupation force in support of the group of US installed thugs. Now in Lebanon, once again the UN is being used as US spearhead for Bush’s foreign policy of aggression against yet 2 other countries, Iran and Syria.

The 15,000 UN troops that are being set up in Lebanon are not being sent there to protect Lebanon from attack by Israel. It is a little late for that, is it not? Quite the contrary. They are being deployed so as to neutralize a front where Iran and Syria, with their Lebanese Hezbollah allies, could resist military attack from Israel and the US, and try to strike back at Israel for bombing them. The UN, is effectively now just another NATO/ Pentagon/ Israeli military army in operation on the Lebanese regional front.

By this deployment, the UN is also actually fomenting and fueling new flareups of civil war within Lebanon. Kofi Annan, despite all his sweet talk, is basically making himself nothing more than a paid whore for George Bush, and paving the way for an new US-Israeli war, this time against against Iran and Syria. And Lebanon be damned.

It is unfortunate that the US and European antiwar communities still have so many delusions about the United Nations. There is nothing united about the world’s nations, and the UN ‘peace keeping units’ are now a totally captured body of troops being used by the US in its plan to reorganize its colonial control over the Middle East and world oil supplies. NATO in Afghanistan, Pentagon in Iraq, UN as ‘buffer’ in Lebanon, and Israel free to attack Iran on behalf of its US master. It’s a bad situation for those looking for a peaceful world and an end to this continual bloodshed. Don’t count on the UN ‘peacekeepers’ anymore. They are part of the problem, not any solution to it.

Army men

Just following ordersYou might call it unfair to label those who go into the military as from the bottom of the barrel, but even at the top of the Pentagon’s barrel the mental qualifications appear pretty damn loose.
 
Our military’s options in Iraq have been summarized as this: go long, go big, or go home. Explained, these choices mean either decrease the troop levels and dig in for a protracted occupation, or increase US forces to attempt a definitive coup, or withdraw and bring the boys home. Defense Department heads are said to be favoring a combination of the three.

Sorry boys, for breakfast you get either Lucky Charms, oatmeal or donuts. Not all three.

Who else but the idiot at the back of the classroom could conceive of this synthesis: go big AND long, THEN you can go home? We’re not talking Gomer Pyle or Forrest Gump. We’re talking Larry’s brother Daryl and his other brother Daryl, awoken on the wrong side of the bed, armed, on Viagra. Keep those boys away from the heavy equipment!

Addendum: Am I saying that all Army men are idiots? Of course not. But let them come forward! All non-idiot soldiers please speak up about the war, refuse to fight it, show us what you’ve got upstairs.

Addendum 2: At the protest today, a middle aged gentleman drove by slowly with his window down, frowning and giving us a protracted thumbs down. I shouted from the side of my mouth so the others wouldn’t hear: “IDIOT!” He nearly leapt out of his expensive SUV to yell back to me “FUCK YOU!”

Does supporting the war in Iraq automatically make you an idiot? Damn straight. What a stupid question.

Palmer Park, hidden treasure of Colorado Springs

Colorado Springs is blessed with having a spectacular natural setting, no doubt about that. I have now passed a little over 4 months of my life here and if I had to list one thing that the city has done well, it would be setting aside Palmer Park for the people’s use. It is defintely the city’s hidden treasure and my family and I use it on at least a weekly basis. Our dog is especially in love with the park (though not the official dog park there), and that’s part of what makes the park special. It is a special place for bikes and horses, too, and even the most incapacitated person can probably be wheeled down to the main scenic lookout for the big view.

Sure, there are other great parks here, but none is located so smack dab in the middle of the city. It is as central to Colorado Springs as Central Park is to New York City. What blows me away is that it hardly is mentioned in any tour guide and its main lookout is sometimes without a solitary visitor, even in the middle of the most pleasant afternoons. Out of state tourists and even other Colorado folk tend to head to Garden of the Gods, Pikes Peak, and the water falls, as most of them have not a clue that Palmer Park even exists and that it is someplace special. But there are many parts of the country where if such a park was available people would drive for hundreds of miles to visit it.

One of the things most lamentable about how our country has misdeveloped itself is how it has destroyed downtowns, central plazas, and people places of all kinds. So get out and use Palmer Park, for you are lucky to have it here. From where my family moved from, we didn’t have sidewalks in many neighborhoods, let alone a place like this park. Even now we discover new hiking trails every time we go there. There is variety at Palmer, if you go beyond what might first meet the eye.

Certainly, Palmer Park is a model for what every city needs to do. Every American city needs places to hike, not just more roads to drive on. Palmer Park is the crown jewel of Colorado’s interurban trail systems, but defintely not recognizzed as such. It has miles of safe hiking/walking trails that are something that’s a cross between city walks, and remote trails in the wilderness, yet still located in the heart of the city. Other cities would envy this city if only they new Palmer Park even existed. More than any other attribute of Colorado Springs, Palmer is what makes this city a more attractive place than Denver to live in. IMO, it’s definitely the heart of Colorado Springs, even if the Pentagon and Church have robbed much of its soul. It’s not downtown, it’s not speactacular like Garden of the Gods. It’s doesn’t have a lake in the center of it. It’s not high up like Pikes Peak.. It’s just Palmer Park, the best place in town for taking a walk.

Holy Hell! It’s Holy Huggables!

Blue eyes goatie and braidsI just got off the phone talking to the United States Marine Corp about their ‘Toys for Tots’ program. “How dare you try to shut up Jesus”, I told them. Damn, if they didn’t listen to the peace loving public and have decided to distribute the Talking Jesus dolls to kids this Christmas after all. If you are not sufficiently impoverished from paying war taxes to get one free from the Pentagon, well why not just order one online. I’m getting my daughter a free Takling Esther one myself. And there’s Talking Moses, too.
 
Sorry, Damned Satan dolls not available at this time. Order now! Holy Huggables!

From Marine to Al Jazeera Journalist

Marines are crazy as a rule. Or so, that’s been my experience with them. But crazy can sometimes be good,too. Al Jazeera online is one of my favorite sources of information, so it’s particularly interesting to see this particular ex-marine go to becoming a journalist working for Al Jazeera. If you get a chance, see the documentary mentioned in this article from Mother Jones. It’s all about how the Pentagon keeps assassinating reporters, from the Yugoslav television stations they bombed, to the hotel in Baghdad they blew away at. Remember when they bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade? So many ‘accidents’. Go get The Education

New Orleans- the city George lost

New Orleans will go down as the American city that Dubya lost, and that will be his place in history, along with having blown the Middle East apart. Now that New Orleans slipped by the hurricane season, this Southern city has virtually disappeared from public view once again, as the press kept quiet during the elections. Too troubling for Americans to know that over $100 billion dollars later, the levee system there in Louisiana is still in shambles. On the scale of American corporate corruption, FEMA (a branch of the hilariously named Department of Homeland Security) ranks #3 top dog, right behind #1 Pentagon and #2, the US healthcare system. Here is what the New Orleans daily has to say about the partially constructed new levees.

Chinese spirit needed at American hospitals

Americans have sat by complacently over the last several decades, silently accepting the cannibalization of their medical care by the US private sector. What was once a system on the cutting edge of medicine, has become a system on the cutting edge of a world wide medical breakdown.
 
As numerous medicine resistant diseases crop up across the world, the US govenment has been cutting access to care to its most vulnerable residents. Neither of the 2 major corporate parties seems much to give a damn either. Despite their prattle about how they are defending national secuirty by spending trillions on Pentagon funded corporate welfare, they refuse to even discuss the main security threat to Americans, which is the spread of new epidemics of disease. It is real simple to figure out. Infectious diseases don’t recognize the INS nor The Wall. They will cross over, so if you leave foreign populations desitute and disease ridden those bugs will migrate. And if you leave America’s population inside the national boundaries without access to adequate medical care, then you really destroy national security.

China, too, has this problem of an essentially capitalist medical system now in place. It, too, turns people away trying to get simple care. It, too, does it because of inadequate national coverage and a fee for hire doctor approach to doling out medical treatment. But compare the response of some Chinese to this situation, to the typical American sit on the butt drive in the car out shopping attitude prevalent here in the US. Millions in the US suffer each year from the total inadequacy of our own capitalist medical delivery system, with almost nary a peep of protest. But at least at one hospital in China, they did protest

Racist Jew sweeps Christian America with blackface Borat

Sacha CohenHollywood has a long history of producing and distributing films with antiArab racist themes and imagery. Shall we just say, that they are quite embedded with the Pentagon on this dehumanizing of the current official US ‘enemy’, the Arab Muslim. Standard Hollywood ‘action’ tripe goes where some lower class All ‘Merican Black and White US heroes together, take down shady looking terrorist Middle Eastern types, who are out to kill good wholesome Christian babies to drink their blood. They don’t like our freedoms, it seems, but our buffoon heroes always win after some big bang bang. OK, how many times can you run the same crap before it gets old, right?
 
Enter racist Zionist Jew, Sacha Baron Cohen. He does the Muslim-face comedy routine of showing Christian Americans just how backward those Jew hating Muslims really are. Ha-Ha-Ha. It’s not the same old Black and White, buddy action figure, GI Joe stuff, at least. So the film, Borat, is sweeping America’s cinema land, including right here in Colorado Springs. ‘Borat’ being the backward Negro, oh sorry… I meant backward Muslim that Cohen portrays.

If this sort of schtick was done by a White actor portraying a Chinese man, or a Latino, or a Black person, we would have a media world in outrage at the blatant racism. But have a Jew portray Muslims as backward, comedic, imbecilic, and anti-woman, well then…. aw shucks, them Jews just can’t be racist, can they? Look what Hitler did to them. So they get a free pass from God for eternity, we Christian folk feel so damn guilty ’bout it we do. Let’s laugh along with the Jew about those Muslim retards in the boonies we are abombing right now. AntiMuslim racism just feels so damn good! We’re America!

Here is the prototypical Cohen routine if you have yet to see it, Throw the Jew down the well.

How the city council ‘Supports the Troops’ and their families- adding insult to injury

The Gazette today headlined their Sunday Metro section with an update about how a local family was doing with their lawsuit against the city. It is a case where a single dad was having a nervous breakdown and was breaking out the windows of his apartment in the nude, and his three children fled the apartment and called the police to get help for their dad. This was on May 2, 2003. And like so many of the cases where relatives have called the police in cases of this type, the help they asked for turned out to become their personal nightmare. The police came and murdered their dad.

Enter the sister of the dead single father, who took in the three children even though she was already caring for 8 of her own, PLUS caring for her mother who had a stroke shortly thereafter. She had a husband, but he was off in Iraq being paid to help destroy another people’s country. Still, despite all the work she already had piled up on here, she went out and sought justice for her murdered brother, and his now parentless children. She initiated a lawsuit against the City of Colorado Springs, whose police officers had so absolutely mishandled their work, work they are paid to do by our tax money.

Enter Mayor Lionel Rivera and the Colorado Springs city council. Rivera was elected just one month previous to this event. Rivera likes to pose himself as supporter of the troops. Here he had a chance to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk. What has he done for this military family and the 3 children now being raised by their aunt? Nada. He is in charge of the Colorado Springs police, and it was the police that murdered this man. Instead of assisting to right a terrible wrong, he has had the city fight the lawsuit on behalf of these children! And the entire city council has sat by, too.

Enter the settlement. The aunt, Carolyn Moore, decided that she had to settle rather than continue to fight for justice. She says that the settlement is an admssion of the police’s guilt, and she is right. What did the city of Mayor Lionel Rivera payout to the three now fatherless children? A grand total of $19,500! Well thank you Rivera! You know, as well as the entire city council does, that that amount for the wrongful death of one’s dad is an insult, and little more. Carolyn Moore says that it is not enough even to pay for the attorney fees. First, you head up the police force that caused the ‘injury’, and then you preside over the ‘insult’ of throwing peanuts out to the children. You think that quite generous, no doubt, since you have even tried to do less. And how gracious you are in helping out troubled families of our US soldeirs. Not. Instead, it is rather evident that you are merely a cheerleader for the corporations that make their profits off the misery that the Pentagon speads. When it comes to assisting the troops, we have to count you out.

Even now, Rivera, you have the ability to right this wrong. Prove us wrong about how we have stated your character as being. And The Colorado Springs city council as a whole, has the ability to right this wrong, instead of hiding in Rivera’s shadows. I don’t think that one can easily put monetary amounts to compensate for the wrongful death of a family member. But certainly, the amount should be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and not just $19,500 for three aggrieved children to supposedly get, instead of being raised by their dad. Have you guys no shame? Do the right thing now, and move to have these children compensated in a more just manner for their unjust loss.

No doubt, our representatives are just hoping that this issue goes away. Luckily for the injured children, there is a decent reporter at The Gazette newspaper that has followed up on their actions of denying recompense for this murdered man’s family. Once again, I would like to think our local paper for doing the right thing and publishing this report. Write to the city council and the mayor and encourage them also to do right, instead of continuing on their current sinful path. And write to the papers and show concern for this family. They deserve your help.

Oaxaca and Iraq- The people have a right to self defense

Oaxaca and Iraq demonstrate that the people have a right to self defense against state terrorism. Today, the Mexican police were assaulting the students holding a radio station use in their self defense against the governmental death squads that have been terrorizing the population of Oaxaca. When captured and jailed, the protesters have been severely tortured. What would the mealy mouthed, American Christian pacifist communkity have them do during the military assault on them? Turn the other cheek? Not throw rocks to stave off the capture of the one piece of media available to the Oaxacan community; the university radio station? Not to set fire to barricades to hold the government thugs back from capturing the protesters, and then jailing and torturing them? The American ‘peace’ pacifists would lecture them about the supposed lessons of Gandhi and non-violence, no doubt, as if self defense was some sort of violence itself! The US pacifist community certainly live with a surreal mindset lacking in clarity and reality. And what would they have the Iraqis do as the Pentagon terrorizes that nation? Sit down in the streets and pray? With their constant prattle about the need to be ‘non-violent’ martyrs, the pacifist community tries to deny that people under attack have the right to resist, by any means necessary, as Malcolm X would have stated it.

The resistance of the Iraqi and Oaxacan communities are two examples of the need to RESIST oppression with self defense, and not just the silly pacifism of overly religious folk. It is not just church mice that bring about justice, but real people using real tactics to defend their rights, and not just always spouting Jesus-Gandhi talk. All the ‘peace and justice’ pacifism that bogs down our Left activism in the US, is a denial of solidarity with those folks under the gun. They are also our heros, and not just US Quakers and US Catholic nuns who might accept arrest here at home. Peace with justice can only come about through united resistance of all types, including armed resistance of some type or other.

I am not advocating picking up the gun and going after ‘them’. But what I am saying is that the message and tone of pacifism is a bunch of religious babble, in general. It does not help in building a US antiwar movement to only talk about Jesus, ‘nonviolence’, and Gandhi. The religious message is not our only one, and should not even be our dominant one. It hinders our ability to communicate with the US community at large to always emphasize only this liberal religious sermonizing about ‘peace’. An antiwar community is about much more than just ‘peace’.

I am overjoyed that there are peoples around the globe that are defending themselves against our government violence, and the violence of their death squad allies around the globe. They are doing it with rocks, molotov cocktails, guns, and bombs. They are doing it peacefully if they can, and not peacefully if that avenue is cut off to them. One just gets sick of Englsih speaking (principally) pacifists saying that that is wrong. Let’s tell the truth here. Much of Anglo pacifist sermonzing is pure bullshit. The people have a right to resist and defend themselves no matter what the pacifists in imperialist countries might say.

Let’s say it straight. We want this government organized, US imperialist army defeated. And it is because the US army is wrong in their battle on behalf of the imperial Super Rich in this PARTICULAR war, not just because all battles and all warfare is wrong to fight. It is not just pacifists that are anti US war making. Non-pacifists also hate this US governmental war making, too. Let’s open up the US antiwar community to those of our population that are not religiously motivated by pacifism and spouting non-violence all the time. A ‘peace’ movement that is only trying to convert folk to liberal religous faith is self limiting. There has got to be more message than that.

May the people of Iraq and Mexico push the forces of US hegemony aside, and build themselves a better world.

The United Nations is now a worthless organization

The United Nations is now a totally worthless organization. Why? Simply because it has been taken over by the Pentagon and thus has become an extension of imperial US foreign policy. Bush snaps his fingers, and the UN enters into Haiti as Pentagon proxy army. The UN is not now a world decision making body, but merely a charade to cover up for US war crimes. Check out the latest US plan on Times Online to convert the UN ‘peacekeeper’ forces totally into an American foreign legion.

Liberal Democrats, your votes will not be counted

Election fever is once again in the air. All around us we see Liberal Democrats with their yard signs and bumperstickers as the delirium builds. And once again, they will try for change by promoting their Tweedle Dees against the others guys’ TweedleDumbs. If there any content to be found, it is simply in that the Democratic Party ‘loyal oppositionists’ seem to have rather more polite candidates, as opposed to the ruder ones the Republicans run. All the election paraphernalia is generally without differentiating slogans, or even differentiating colors. Yet this is somewhat deceptive, as the opposing religious brethen have convinced themselves that this is a battle of socialism versus fascism! Yes, that’s what it is in fantasy land America. Sad to say, but both sides just go on simply ignoring that it is the corporate world that funds both these 2 political parties, and that the corporate world is not about to give up the charade that having both these parties dominating the electoral game provides.

Both groupings have constructed a paranoid view of the other. The Republicans are going to steal the vote at the machines again, shouts the liberal Democratic Party cadre. Bush is a Fascist! And the Republicans swear that Al Gore and the now silent, Michael Moore, are socialist devils. And well, Al Franken is a Judas socialist devil we suppose. The Democrats side with the ‘Islamo Fascists’, you see (if you are a true believing dittohead). So, now it is in quite in vogue to fascist-bait these days, no matter what angle you come from. Perhaps this is an Israeli idealogical import? If you’re not with us, you are against us… sort of a Moses style, religious world view. Both the liberal and conservative American religions love this stuff!

Well here’s the thing. Most people are not with either of these 2 religious camps anymore. The great American agnostic majority is beginning to form, and they don’t like the fact that their votes don’t count. The Repubilcan Right wants a Christian Republic declared, but Bush doesn’t deliver. The Democratic Party liberal wants the US out of Iraq and a stop to the bankrupting of our country through the Pentagon welfare system. And the Democratic Party hierarchy says NAY. Or whatever the sound a donkey makes? The corporations funding both parties want neither a theocracy, nor a society without ample, Pentagon based corporate welfare. So Liberal Democrats, your vote won’t count, just like the Right Wing Christian votes will not be counted, neither. Neither one of your two world views is the core values of your respective corporate funded political parties.

So why continue getting religion, if your vote won’t count, Liberals? Howard Dean, DP chair, already told you that it don’t make a difference if the Democrats do win. You heard it from the donkey’s mouth! Your votes will not be counted, and it has nothing to do with the Diebold machines. It has nothing to do with gerrymandering voter registration lists. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has all to do with corporations not listening to consumers. When you vote Demcoratic Party, you are consuming a corproate ideological product. Consider it yet another mass produced hamburger taken in. So you don’t like the secret sauce and complain to management. They are laughing at you, not changing their product line.

Big liberals going to pressure the corporate board of Democratic Party Unlimited in Gall? I just visited the Progressive Democrats of America website, and they are calling for … get this!… that the Democrats should CENSURE Bush and Cheney! Not jail him, nor even impeach him. What backbone, what pressure they apply! These liberal nuns at PDA want Dean to demand a slapping of Dick and Dubya’s wrists with the rulers! Oh such torture! Bush and Cheney must be shaking in their combat boots. lol. Well, Liberals, the Republicans will shoot you down just like so many quail! OOps, your own party will do it for them, won’t they? Ask Dean. The answer is there already.

So please get off your butts, and stop campaigning. Your vote will not be counted. Try something else.

3 Fort Carson snipers die, no reason to cry

Probably one of the most disgusting lines of work the Pentagon arranges for ‘our troops’ to do, is the role of sniper. And three of these Fort Carson trained assassins just got blown up yesterday in Iraq, according to The Gazette headline today. The article had sort of a tearful quality to it, and this is part of the neo-con rehab for the reputation of snipers, torturers, and thugs of all stripes and varieities.
 
Cybersniper.com will give you even a musical rendition of this sniper rehab propaganda, and another sniper.com site had a collection going to help out US military snipers to get better equipment to shoot down Arabs with. Kind of a Toy for Tots thing, Bless their damned souls. But when most Americans think of snipers, they generally still think of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Charles Whitman, who shot down close to 50 people from the University Tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Let’s hope that people also remember that both got their training in the US Marine Corp, but they might not, I guess?

These three soldiers who just died in Iraq all trained as snipers at Fort Carson, but their dead bodies will head back to their hometowns, where no doubt the local press will talk about how proud their families are of them, how proud their local communities are of them, and how proud America is that they gave their lives in service to Bush and Cheney and the oil companies they represent. Hahaha, that last part is just untrue. The local press won’t mention that part of their ‘sevice’ for sure. My bad. They will be called hereoes, ‘sniper heroes’ even! Tears will wash ashore in remembrance of what fine men they were to choose this fine line of endeavour.

But the time to cry was when they joined the military and began to have the aspiration to train as long distance killers. They threw their lives away THEN, plain and simple. No reason to cry now. RIP, you three made the wrong turn in life. I’m crying for the orphan children of Iraq instead.

The No Child Left Behind by military recruiters opt out form

Tomorrow we’re meeting in front of William Palmer High School to urge students to fill out their opt-out forms.
 
The No-Child-Left-Behind Act had a provision that gave military recruiters access to all secondary school student records. The act also provided an opt-out clause which allowed individual students to exclude themselves from the information exchange. To do so, their parents have to file the proper request, each year, one copy with their school, a second copy with the Defense Department. Every school district in turn was expected to inform the students and their parents about this option.

In Palmer High School’s District 11, letters were recently sent to all families with the forms and instructions. Whether this qualifies as adequate notice, is subject to question. The letters were sent without fanfare two weeks before the deadline.

Other Colorado Springs districts have done nothing about notifying the parents. The deadline is October 13.

On October 13 every student record from every high school and junior high will be sent to the Pentagon. Not just name, address and phone number, but complete school records. Military recruiters want to be able to profile students to best tailor their approach. Certainly there are typical profiles for present enlistees and recruiters will be able to spot students susceptible to heading that way. Children getting into trouble perhaps, failing certain subjects, showing signs of problems at home, requiring certain medicines, are all green flags for recruiters. A recruiter’s tools could be special field trips, peer groups, free X-Boxes, access to the school premises and your telephone.

There are probably a good number of civil liberty reasons why you wouldn’t want the military to be handling your child’s school records. Right now what your school knows of your child’s medical record, or criminal justice record, or mental health record, or personal counseling, goes no further than the school yard. This information would now travel on laptops in the cars of Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines/Coast Guard recruiters as they court your children between stops at the pawn shop, the strip bar and their home on the wrong side of town.

Not to mention if they succeed with your child, they could get him killed.

An Inconvenient Truth; Al Gore in the Balance

This last Friday I headed over to see a herd of well-fed liberals that rodeoed themselves into the Unitarian Church for a free showing of the film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. The corral was packed and after we were informed that a pastor was on the way from Denver to moralize to us later, the film began to roll. Another showing of ‘Al Gore, the Intellectual Politican’ was under way. Hey, it kinda of reminded me of the repeated US`showing of ‘Jimmy Carter, Born Again Liberal Christian’, too. Holy Mackeral. Why buy a used car from the other guys, when we got such a sincere team over at Slick’s Used Cars Emporium?

My daughter was one of about 5 church-like kids dragged into the Unitarian Church that evening. And she lasted only 30 minutes, and then I had to go. She had to go that is, since I actually kind of wanted to stay. The film had a ‘Don’t Feed the Bears’ ambience to it, that made me feel like I was watching a Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo Bear rerun from my youth. Plus, it had that feel of those professional ‘Why You Need to Join Your Local Union’ stuff the AFL-CIO occasionally puts out. But my daughter was demanding that I rent her some obscure foreign film from over at Toons Video instead of staying and watching more of the freebee.

So how the Hell can I review a film when I watched only 30 minutes of it? Easily. I have been watching Al Gore for much longer than just the 90 minutes the film lasts. Here is Mr Environmental Guru as I have seen him over the years.

1) Supported Poppy Bush’s so-called Desert Strom that resulted in the deployment of Depleted Uranium radioctivity across the region. It also led to further environmental catastrophe as Hussein retaliated by incinerating the oil refineries of Kuwait.

2) As VP, he later went on to head up an Adminstration that deliberately targeted Yugoslavia’s civilian infrastructure through a US bombing campaign. As a result, the Danube was totally polluted with highly toxic waste. He also supported 8 years more of continued bombing of Iraq during that time, which certainly did not improve the ecology already destroyed by US warmaking he had supported even when a Republican had been directing the effort.

3) He supported the invasion of Afghanistan, which has left entire regions there decimated by so-called ‘bunker busting’ weaponry. Hardly a major ‘green’ effort on the part of Gore.

4) Gore has sat quiet as Israel bombed a civilian installation in Lebanon, which is a country invaded with total Bush support and complicity. Result?… a tidal wave of petro pollution that is the worst spill ever experienced in the Eastern Meidterranean. It will take decades to repair the damage, yet ‘Green’ Al Gore is silent.

5) Al Gore holds large number of shares in Occidental Oil, the company that polluted the Love Canal in New York State. It is also a company heavily invested in Colombia where Gore has helped have tons of isecticide dropped onto rural areas under the guise of waging a Clinton made ‘drug war’. The company sold off its holdings from the area after their drilling in U’wa tribal lands came up negative. Despite U’wa protests against this drilling, the Gore family held its shares in the company. Too bad the U’wa’s note to Gore was not part of the movie.

We could go on, but why should anyone believe Al Gore is doing anything other than image restructuring for himself, and the Democratic Party? If you are depending on him to be pro-environmental, then I got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. If you are depending on the Democratic Party to stop the Pentagon (which is the main danger to global environments), then you should have your head examined.

Iran will be next target and why does America’s Left continue to sleep?

Are we all asleep? The Bush Administration is planning to bomb Iran, and yet there is no effort to stop this. What in God’s name does it take to wake up an American Left? Let’s face it, most liberals have their thumbs stuck up their asses and their only plan is to just keep voting for the offal that runs under the Democratic Party banner, go to church, and pray. The Democratic Party supports Bush’s plans to attack Iran, therefore all the liberals once again have fallen into a trance behind their corporate misleadership on the question of stopping an attack on yet another country. It’s like Iran doesn’t even exist on their radar screens. Meanwhile, there are reports that the Pentagon is already moving into action once again.

Instead of moving with the times, the Colorado ‘peace movement’ contemplates its own navel this week. Are we to be out there mobilizing opposition to the planned bombing campaign against Iran? No, instead something called ‘Eyes Wide Open’ moves across the state this week. It involves a bunch of boots, and people both for the Iraq war and against it are encouraged to stare at these boots and what….? they will be encouraged to ‘reflect on the true cost of the Iraq war’! What a pile of crap! People should be encouraged to PROTEST the damn thing, but the good liberal church folk who come up with this sort of pseudo event impede the very organization of real protest events against the Pentagon, and substitute silliness instead. What next, an inaction to get us to ‘contemplate’ the evils of torture, instead of protesting the newly legalized and open use of it? Hey! Some people might not know that it hurts, I guess?

So what we have is a sleepy, milktoast American Left led by nuns, Quakers, and the Clintons and the Gores amongst us. Iran lookout! We can only ‘reflect’ here after you have been strafed, not before. Not all American Christians support Bush though. Some wait till he’s been bad, and then go ‘tsk,tsk,tsk’. They’ll be encouraging you to non-violently resist the new generation atomic weaponry their country’s military forces will be using on you. And they will be encouraging multi-faith reunions with any moderate Muslim clerics available, if not taken out already by Christian soldiers ahead of time. Let’s hold hands and pray together now. We will light the candles for you, as the troops put out your’s.

Wouldn’t it just be nice to actually have a more secular, and less Democratic Party controlled ‘peace movement’? Hey, let’s rename it an antiwar movement, too, while we’re at it. How about…whisper, whisper, whisper…. naming it ‘The Movement to Stop the US Military and to Dismantle the Damn Thing? 100%’. Take the idea to your church and/or atheist group. The idea is to protest a coming attack on another people ahead of time, and not just sit around with thumbs up the bum.

Here’s the response of the Christian pacifist to such a proposal as to confront head on the Right Wing militarist. whine…..”Oh, that’s not reaching out to others. They can change.”

To the Iranian Muslim, I apologize for the stupidity of the liberal Christians of America. They’re ready to turn their cheeks, even as you get yours slapped. Instead of an actual movement against the constant war, they just want a movement of the prayerful. They will get around to ‘defending’ you eventually. But first, you have to be crucified. Please don’t respond with a gun. They’ll be ‘reflecting’ on your behalf.

Hussein’s Kangeroo Court Time- days when law is littered

In the last couple of decades, the US Empire has developed a fondness for using show trials following its own violations of international law. The cardinal foundation of international law is that one nation does not have the right to militarily attack another. And of course we know, that the US has violated this maxim time after time. In fact, no other nation can even come close to the US’s sorry record on this account. I believe that even the Hungarians would certainly agree with this statement.

Our citizenry has become so numbed to the sheer number of times that our government continually violates this Principal Number One of international law, that the overwhelming majority of the US feels that it is not incongruent for our leaders to preach constantly about democracy, human rights, and basic humanity to others. In reality, violating the law, while preaching it, is the the central tenet of the advocation of a constant world war that both parties now are in total agreement on. American elites think by giving their constant world war a fancy name, the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, that that somehow absolves them from obeying the central tenets of international law itself. International law is seen as a nuisance,that needs to be buried in a grave somewhere along with those POWs murdered by US troops. If we recall right, the Germans at the height of their Third Reich did away entirely with courts and law, and just loaded their supposed enemies into cattle cars headed for concentration camps to be exterminated. Death penalty, no law. Period.

So one can see easily that elites in general, have little or no respect for the law they often preach to others. Law is seen merely as a codification of their own power, and outside of that, law is simply discarded when inconvenient to the powerful. Which leads to an most cogent recent example of that. I refer to the dismissal of the head judge of the kangeroo court ‘trying’ Saddam Hussein. He was seen as too polite to the guy the Pentagon is getting ready to execute, so they just said “you are terminated.” Our servile corporate press basically just treated the incident as if it was entirely normal and legal! This, much as they had already done with the unusual news of how Milosevic conveniently died, right smack in dab of when he was becoming an indelicate nuisance to American elites. Heck, who cared? Clinton and Wesley Clark maybe? They were going to execute him anyway, so why bother with completiing the trial. But Milosevic thought he was being poisoned. And I don’t find that a bizarre paranoia on his part at all.

So let’s ask another question on our minds right now. Is Osama alive or not? Does anybody really think that it has already been anything other than shoot now, and try him later? But even that seems to be too much for the top dogs to do in obeying some structure of law! How inconvenient a ‘trial’ in a kangeroo court would be for Rumsfield, say. So, Osama’s dead already, IMO. His body buried away in rubble. Only the illusion that he is still alive has lived. The Pentagon finds that illusion necessary to justify themselves for sure, but a show trial? No way. Osama was killed quite some time back it appears. He is dead, and only Pentagon prop-op resusrrects him from time to time. The US is judge, jury, and executioner, and then lies about the whole thing.

Our political bosses now state, over and over, that our government is beyond all legalities, and I think that is something we poltiical Americans need to thoroughly understand. After all, where is the legality of calling for a ‘constant war’ as they do? It’s time that Americans see their elites for what they really are, and not just follow them along as far as the Germans and Japanese once did with their elite misleadership gone wild. Of course most Americans will say that ‘our’ government is not anywhere near as barbarous as our WW2 opponents were. Oh yeah? Well I’m still thinking about how the US suffocated to death in metal containers, POWs ‘our’ troops captured as they successfully invaded Afghanistan. How is that different from the actions of the Nazis with sending their opponents away to the ovens? It’s time to quite dillydallying around thinking that we are dealing with ‘decent folk’ like ourselves when we deal with our elites. They are not like that at all. They hardly even consider their own poor folk human, let alone the rest of the world.

Something we should contemplate, as our government moves toward the possible use of nuclear weaponry against Iran in the coming days, is that they no longer feel the need to obey ANY laws even as they demand that we obey them all. They have legalized for themselves, murder, mayhem, and torture. Before they just did it to The Others in the shadows. Our elites have no plans to turn back from the road they have chosen to move upon. They are just making too damn much money for them to do otherwise. Hussein, long time servant of the US in his war upon Iran, did not understand where our US elites were heading. His fate for his misunderstanding will be? Well, it will most likely be death by Kangeroo Court ala Milosevic. And that is what passes for legality these days. International law has been trashed, and can be found only as litter in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti.

Senator McCain fake shining armor

Victim of Vietnamese 
Do we assume because John McCain suffered mistreatment at the hands of the Vietnamese, that he empathizes with victims of torture? By presenting a false alternative to Bush’s torture bill, McCain is showing he may just want payback.

 

I’m not so sure we should believe that McCain was grossly mistreated by the Vietnamese. When he was shot down he was assaulted by angry people that did physically attack him. He was already injured at that point from the fall of his aircraft though.

Why did they attack him when he came down? The answer seems rather obvious, but this assault hardly can be called torture. It was rage at the American criminal that had been napalming and bombing those ‘Gooks’ down below.

As to his later imprisonment? He claims he was beaten and kept in solitary at times. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have suffered these abuses and much worse within America’s own jails. Nobody talks about this even as it goes on massively today in US prisons. I think we all know that rape is an epidemic in US prisons, and is actively encouraged by authorities as a form of control and torture of prisoners. Has McCain ever opened his mouth about this? I think not. He certainly was never threatened with it at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’.

McCain’s debriefing by the US military was set to make it publicly appear as if the Vietnamese were torturing American POWs on a routine basis. The reason for this is that the US was systematically doing much worse to the Vietnamese they held, and a loud campaign of denunciation of supposed Vietnamese abuse of the few Americans they held was meant to take the spotlight off what the US military did in mass to its captives. Returning US GIs were encouraged to join into this campaign with their stories, many of which might well have been coached.

The Pentagon actively pushed US POWs to voice claims that they were grossly mistreated. It became a major industry on the propaganda front. To this day, it is an urban Right Wing myth that huge numbers of returning veterans were spit upon and assaulted by hippie protesters. And the campaign suoppsoedly to aid ‘America’s POw/MIA’ went on for decades, even when it became quite preposterous. No campaign for the victims of US atrocities in SE Asia was ever begun though.

Let’s face it, many people lie and then even begin to believe their own lies. During the first Gulf War, I can’t count the number of Right Wing Americans that claimed to know Kuwaitis. I think we need to take McCains’s claims of being tortured with a big grain… make that a big rock of salt. The verifiable evidence is slim that he was tortured, to say the least.

My father-in-law was tortured by police though. He later died from complications related to that torture. Remember the so-called ‘Operation Cooperation’? It launched the decades long so-called drug wars. My wife’s dad was caught up in the militarization of the US-Mexican Border, thrown in jail, and then tortured. Acid was dropped into his eyes.
As a result, he walked around half blind the rest of his life.

In contrast, McCain is running for president as a Right Wing Republican. I think he is just an asshole and not a torture victim at all. He looks just fine though a little heavy from fine dining.

McCain hardly seems like a torture victim. He’s just your typical Right Wing ex-US-soldier type that wants to be publicly hailed as a hero, even though his activities as an imperialist trooper were dispicable. I can think of a jillion other ‘victims’ of torture out there whose claims of abuse I would take much more seriously. His claims to be a ‘compassionate conservative’ aren’t much more believeable than Bush’s.