Socialism Only Solution For USA

KIETH OLBERMANN LATEST COMMENTS ABOUT THE JEWISH-INVASION BY THE JEWISH STATES US, UK AND FRANCE AGAINST LIBYA

2011-03-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

PROFESSOR WEBSTER TARPLEY SAYS THAT THE COUP DE ETAT AGAINST MUBARAK WAS FUNDED BY THE JEWISH LOBBY, ISRAEL, GEORGE SOROS AND CIA

2011-02-11T22:17:00.001-08:00

PART 1

PART 2

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THIS YEAR 2009 WILL BE A HELL FOR THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS

2008-12-31T21:25:00.001-08:00

shit only a few earning more than 100,000 a year are ok, but 2009 will be a hell for the majority who are earning 6 to 8 dollars an hour and that's the lucky ones who are employed

and i really don't see a light at the end of the tunnel but a big train shooting against our way, the opressed people in this damned country are like in the song "Bad Luck" by Social Distortion

SOCIAL DISTORTION - BAD LUCK

Some people like to gamble,

But you, you always lose.

Some people like to rock 'n' roll,

you're always singin' the blues.

You gotta nasty disposition.

No one really knows the reason why,

You gotta bad bad reputation.

Gonna hang your head down and cry...

You got bad, bad luck.

Bad, bad luck.

You got bad, bad luck.

Bad, bad luck.

Thirteen's my lucky number,

To you it means stay inside.

Black cat done crossed my path,

No reason to run and hide.

You're looking through a cracked mirror.

No one really knows the reason why.

Your enemies are gettin' nearer.

Gonna hang down your head and cry....

You got bad, bad luck.

Bad, bad luck.

You got bad, bad luck.

Bad, bad luck.

Some people go to church on Sundays,

others they pray at home.

You tell them that there ain't no God,

that they're better off Standin' alone.

You're always scratchin' at the eight ball,

No one really knows the reason why.

You get to the top and then you fall,

Gonna hang down your head and cry.

WHY IS THE UNITED STATES REALLY BROKE? GREAT ARTICLE BY CHALMERS JOHNSON !!

2008-12-31T10:11:00.001-08:00

http://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military

Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month’s stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation’s economic life

By Chalmers Johnson
The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room” — the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.
There are three broad aspects to the US debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defence” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the US. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — “military Keynesianism” (which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic). By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.

Fiscal disaster
It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defence budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defence-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defence spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defence budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyse this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defence spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: “A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s (always well publicised) basic budget total and double it” (1). Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defence budget is “black”,” meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand — including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defence, and the military-industrial complex — but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defence jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalised either department for ignoring the law. All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defence budget, as released on 7 February 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative (2) and Fred Kaplan, defence correspondent for Slate.org (3). They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4bn for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7bn for the “supplemental” budget to fight the global war on terrorism — that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4bn to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional “allowance” (a new term in defence budget documents) of $50bn to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This makes a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5bn.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the US military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4bn for the Department of Energy goes towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3bn in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03bn outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched US military, up from a mere $174m in 2003, when the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7bn, 50% of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4bn goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing from this compilation is $1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5bn to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6bn for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays. This brings US spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year, conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism
Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defence budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU’s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US. Moreover, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world’s fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we’re doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the US and enjoys the world’s second highest current account balance (China is number one). The US is number 163 — last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the UK that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.

It’s not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On 7 November 2007, the US Treasury announced that the national debt had breached _$9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the “debt ceiling” to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defence expenditures.

The top spenders
The world’s top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each currently budgets for its military establishment are:
Rank
Country
Military budget
1.
United States (FY 2008 budget)
$623bn
2.
China (2004)
$65bn
3.
Russia
$50bn
4.
France (2005)
$45bn
5.
United Kingdom
$42.8bn
6.
Japan (2007)
$41.75bn
7.
Germany (2003)
$35.1bn
8.
Italy (2003)
$28.2bn
9.
South Korea (2003)
$21.1bn
10.
India (2005 est.)
$19bn
World total military expenditures (2004 est)
$1,100bn
World total (minus the US)
$500bn

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration’s policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology, and have now become so entrenched in our democratic political system that they are starting to wreak havoc. This is military Keynesianism — the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the cold war. During the late 1940s, the US was haunted by economic anxieties. The great depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of the second world war. With peace and demobilisation, there was a pervasive fear that the depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR’s European satellites, the US sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated 14 April 1950 and signed by President Harry S Truman on 30 September 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the US pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: “One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living” ().

With this understanding, US strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment, as well as ward off a possible return of the depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of 6 February 1961: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience” — the military-industrial complex.
By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in US manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.

Higher spending, fewer jobs
On 1 May 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the economic and political forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. The US economy has had to cope with growing defence spending for more than 60 years. Baker found that, after 10 years of higher defence spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a scenario that involved lower defence spending.

Baker concluded: “It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment” (5).

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.
It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all US research talent was siphoned off into the military sector (6). It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Can we reverse the trend?
Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the US spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.

The pioneer in analysing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the US preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the cold war. Melman wrote: “From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000bn on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life, by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.”

In an important exegesis on Melman’s relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes: “According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over _$7.29 trillion… The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock” (7).

The fact that we did not modernise or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools, an industry on which Melman was an authority, are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed “that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in US industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States’ machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the second world war. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry.”

Nothing has been done since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment — from medical machines like _proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world’s lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: “Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone” (8).

Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the US urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defence budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defence budget as a Keynesian jobs programme.

If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

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FUCKING ISRAELITES WHO SUPPORT THE STATE OF ISRAEL !! FUCK YOU ALL ZIONISTS TRYING TO TAKE OVER USA AND THE WORLD !!

2008-12-30T07:56:00.001-08:00

USA is fucked up, coz most americans don't care about their own country, and about the whole world !! we are doomed !! fuck this shit !!

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WATCH OUT !! THERE IS LOTS OF ZIONIST CENSORSHIP ON YOUTUBE !!

2008-12-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.davidduke.com/general/jew-watch-librarian-frank-weltner-defies-zionist-censorship-on-youtube_3392.html

A SPECIAL NOTE FROM FRANK WELTNER

After more than a month of hard work, I finally have good news that can finally be shared with you concerning our 160 video archive. This 25+ hour collection of informative videos in our Zionist News archive has been rescued intact and complete despite Zionist attempts to destroy them and our Freedom of Speech. Youtube seems to have cooperated totally with the Enemies of Freedom during this rude and anti-American scene of Zionist hatred and bigotry.

These people who censor persons not like themselves are extremely dangerous and anti-American. They and their subversive tribe own the NY Times, Washington Post, thousands of other newspapers, radio, and TV properties. They selfishly demand their Freedom of Speech be protected by all of us. However, their activities reflect that they are terrorists who are free to conspire inside our gates.

These terrorists of Zionist evil will defend a Zionist AIPAC supporter like Wolf Blitzer of CNN, yet, when it comes to non-Jewish reporters and journalists such as Frank Weltner and Jew Watch News, they are noticeably silent. They are the selfish and quite bigoted goons of Zionist racial hatred which their newspapers and TV news studios express almost daily against the far vaster majority of non-Jews in this world.

Fortunately, they have lost this round of hatred. We are presently restructuring and uploading our entire Zionist news collection… Evidently, our electronic and DVD backups proved more than adequate to insure our success. We promise we will never be silenced by their Zionist hate whether in Tel Aviv, Washington, or New York.

We are presently working on new videos which we shall display right here on a regular basis starting this week.

SPREAD THE WORD. TELL THE BLOGS YOU VISIT.

“I Will NEVER Be Silenced by Zionists and Their Communist Relatives Who Started and Ran the USSR. Right Now, They Are Repeating Here What they Did in Russia.” - Frank Weltner

http://www.jewwatch.com/

ANARCHISTS ARE CRAZY. ANARCHISM DOESN'T WORK, IT HAS NEVER WORKED, IT CANNOT WORK !!

2008-12-26T20:57:00.000-08:00

Anarchists often try to prove the veracity of their ideology by pointing out historical examples of anarchy in practice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities

I can't write about every single instance, but I can about a few.One example they use is Ireland in 650 to 1650. I don't know enough about Irish history, but let's assume there was no Irish state. But there were certainly different tribes and competing petty kingdoms who had various laws and customs - and fought each other. So while there was no state, there were certainly hearchies and law enforcement.

As for anarchism in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, it may have been destroyed by outside forces. But how do anarchists know that it would have lasted? What if some people start to abuse the system (which will inevitably happen)? What if some lunatic starts to shoot everyone? These are issues that anarchism doesn't address. Anarchism assume that everyone (or at least the workers and peasants) are good people, which simply isn't true.

Anarchists also consider America before the arrival of the Europeans as anarchistic. This is bollocks. There may have been no state, but the Native Americans were divided into competing petty tribes, with chieftains and shamans who exercised authority. So if anarchism is about getting rid off authorities and hierarchies, then pre-Columbian America is not their deal. And now I haven't even gone into the empires and city-states of the tribes of Central America...

I wonder when anarchists will point towards Somalia as an example.

There hasn't been one society that is anarchistic - according to the principles that anarchists put up - it's that simple. There haven't been states in their examples, but there has certainly been authorities and hierarchies. The only example anarchists can point towards is anachist Catalonia, but is has certain difficulties that I pointed out elsewhere.

You have to laugh at at the ludicrous claims of anarchists about the longevity of their fantasy worlds. They don't even come close to Marxist-Leninism which managed about 70 years before failing, let alone capitalism. Furthermore as technology moves forward and the need for widespread standards and regulation on matters will increase, the idea of small rag tag bands going their own merry way in all directions becomes ever less realistic. You may claim hunter gatherers were a long lasting anarchist society, who cares? You are welcome to that, anarchism is demonstrably unworkable in a modern technological society.

Anarchists believe in a magical transformation from Capitalism to Anarchism which will happen instantly after a series of general strikes or fighting but not participating in politics, abolishing wages, private property, military, and then everyone will live in peace and harmony with no incentive or disincentive to do any work, they hope this will happen world wide too simply because they don't want to get invaded simply because then they would have to start enforcing things.

Marx was no anarchist he completely was mad as hell at them. He even say the consquences of an "Anarchist" revolution in Spain and its fall.

i dont know why anarchism, libertarianism and individualist ideologies appeals so much to USA youth oppressed by capitalism. It's maybe cause USA as a whole is not too scientific rational society and lots of people think that quick fixes like anarchism will save USA from an economic catastrophe.

indeed, i don't know why there are so many anarchists in USA, when they should join rational, realists social-democrats or socialist parties with real political programs like Ralph Nader who is a realist, who has competed in US elections and gotten a big 3% of US voters.

there has to be some sort of mental problem in anarchists.

i would support Cynthia Mckinney, Ralph Nader or even Ron Paul as realist options instead of anarchism

Capitalism Steals Christmas

2008-12-23T07:41:00.001-08:00

http://www.socialist.net/capitalism-steals-christmas.htm

By Ben Peck
Friday, 01 December 2006

The capitalist system that flourished in the time of Dickens is still upon us, as are all of its ills and evils. Reminiscent of the popular festive tale A Christmas Carol, in 2006, over 150 years after Charles Dickens wrote the story reflecting the callousness of a society divided by class, we still find that ordinary working peoples everyday lives are subject to the whims of a minority of parasitic individuals. This has found expression most recently in the Farepak fiasco.
Farepak was a Christmas hamper company that many people used to help spread over the year the burden of an increasingly commercialised holiday period. Individuals or local clubs would make contributions when possible, usually to local Farepak agents. These savings could then be redeemed for Farepak hampers or as vouchers for many of the UK's biggest retailers such as Woolworth's, Argos and Sainsburys. On October 13th Farepak collapsed, wiping away the Christmas savings of over 150,000 people.

Sarahjane Kinsey, a mother of two, lost £700 in savings. She told the BBC:
"Sainsburys are saying they'll offer compensation...it's better than nothing, I guess. But it means we have to rely on their charity...for money that we've earned and saved."

People don't want to have to rely on charity. They want the dignity that comes with managing their own affairs, not having to accept hand-outs when they run into problems.

But whose fault is this problem? Sainsburys and Tesco have pledged donations, although in the case of Sainsburys in store credit only. Yet it is rumoured that it is these stores that are the cause of this present crisis. After the collapse of a company similar to Farepak, high street stores panicked and demanded their money up front. This changed Farepak's payment arrangements, which their bank, HBOS, would not accept. This pushed HBOS to call in Farepak's overdraft, ruining the company.

Here we see another example of working class people having to absorb the blunderings of capitalism. This time the ruling class are extremely embarrassed because it's not difficult to conclude that these people have been robbed of their Christmas, plain and simple. The mysterious "free" market is the culprit.
Now the representatives of the ruling class are running around like headless turkeys in search of a scapegoat. The MP for South Belfast, Alasdair McDonnell, has urged the government to "ruthlessly pursue" those responsible. And so it should. Yet scapegoating individuals conveniently diverts attention away from the real essence of the problem, that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Peoples' welfare is subordinate to maintaining profit.

Sir Clive Thompson, chief executive of Farepak, has been a popular target of recent weeks. Known as the 'Unreconstructed Thatcherite', he was dumped by his former company Rentokil with a £395,000 golden handshake and a £13M pension scheme some years ago. Sir Clive opposes the minimum wage that can 'price low-paid workers, such as cleaners and security guards, out of jobs' (cleaners and security guards having been big business for Rentokil incidentally). In turn Sir Clive has put the blame on HBOS because of their refusal to support Farepak's £1.5M funding shortfall.

Tories of Sir Clive's ilk, like MP for Wantage Ed Vaizey, have even tried to blunt the issue. Referring to Farepak customers savings he said:

"They're not considered financial products so the Financial Services Authority doesn't regulate them". So if one such company fails Farepak does not have to compensate its customers- and it won't.

This sums up the real attitude of the ruling class: absolute disregard. They split over secondary issues like referring to Sir Clive Thompson as the 21st century Sheriff of Nottingham or a "modern-day scrooge" as Anne Snelgrove, MP for south Swindon put it, yet fail to address the real issue. This is because it is not in their interests to point out the folly a system that they represent and grow fat off. On occasion the odd CEO might have to be sacrificed. But as long as the system remains in place these are acceptable losses.

In August HBOS announced half-year, pre-tax profits of £2.65 billion. Yet on principal they could not absorb Farepak's debt, a demonstration of capitalisms' short-sightedness. And all the while, as the BBC reported, HBOS approved Farepaks' continuing acceptance of payment from customers after it knew it was in trouble. Some reports estimate this cut Farepak's overdraft by £40M.
The Telegraph has found that Farepak families have been approached by loan sharks offering money at interest rates of 120%, while at this time hampers are still sitting in Farepak warehouses. And circling like vultures will be those legal cousins of the loan shark, credit card companies and providers of high interest loans, ready to pick at the carcass of a Christmas that for many people will be dead on arrival.

In Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the central character Ebenezer Scrooge was reformed overnight as three spirits visited him and appealed to his better nature. The conclusion to the tale is unsatisfactory. Whilst individual captains of capitalism in their autumn years, on occasion, seek to repent and make amends for their past wrongs, it is a drop in a bucket for ordinary people. For the likes of the Farepak families, they are now facing a threadbare Christmas and New Year. What a real indictment of the capitalist system! It is time it was put on the scrap heap.

The Ghosts of Capitalist Christmas

2008-12-23T07:31:00.000-08:00

By Charles Sullivan

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18785.htm

11/28/07 "ICH" - --- Everything about America is done to the max—super sized—including ourselves. Americans are fond of excess, fond of glitz and glitter, the bright beads and trinkets of capitalism; the symbols of conspicuous consumption. Millions of us live in McMansions, drive fast cars and hulking tanks and work at high stress glamorous jobs that provide enormous financial reward but leave us spiritually empty.

We tell ourselves that these events signal that we have arrived and achieved greatness worthy of respect and envy. They are a declaration that we have played the game and won; that we have acquired economic power that results in elevated socio-economic status and disproportional influence over the lives of the less successful; and those who have utterly failed or refused to participate.

We love to consume and waste with an appalling sense of entitlement. Our lives are enacted amid heaping mounds of swelling garbage and filth, while some of our fellow human beings pass lives of quiet desperation in cardboard boxes beneath our nation’s highway bridges, like beetles that move beneath the bark of trees: out of sight, out of mind, inconsequential—or so we think.

It’s a jungle out there where only the fittest survive. Those who cannot compete must not survive to reproduce; they must be expelled from the gene pool. Modern capitalism is economic Darwinism carried to the extreme.

America is a land of extraordinary contradictions. She has produced not only George Bush and Dick Cheney but also George Carlin, Upton Sinclair, Eugene Debs and Howard Zinn. This is a land of extremes; enigmatic even to itself. It is a place of posh surroundings with all of the amenities money can buy; but it is also a land of unknowable hardship and destitution that often exists in close proximity to stupendous wealth.

Just as the continent holds lush temperate rain forests, so it also harbors deserts where only the strong and well adapted survive the harsh conditions of heat and drought and oscillating cold.
Surely the national pastime must be shopping, which has acquired the stature of a genuine addiction; a disease on a par with alcoholism and played with the passion of a competitive sport. Witness the insanity of black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year where people are annually trampled at the doors of Wal-Mart in the quest for the latest incarnation of the X-Box. He with the most toys wins and the losers are trampled underfoot, ground into dust. Possessions matter more than people.

And we are a restless, fiercely competitive people—constantly on the move; a people that cannot countenance open spaces or unmanaged nature.

Hundreds of thousands of shopping centers and strip malls bear ample testimony to our excess, as do the mountains of debt that rise out of our spending habits like a newly spawned volcano swelling above a rising column of molten magma. Eventually they will become our gravestones—monuments to our lack of empathy and testaments to our unbridled greed and contempt for the earth.

The developers cannot relax until every inch of the earth is urbanized and paved and there is a McDonald’s and Wal-Mart on every street corner; a development in place of every orchard and farm. We cannot relax until everything wild and natural has been eradicated or imprisoned in zoos and admission is charged. Imagine a continent sized gated community for the well-heeled and the wealthy. The poor and destitute need not apply.

More than democracy, more than liberty, more than life—give us our shopping malls so that we can purchase happiness and fill our empty lives with possessions. Our senses are incessantly assaulted by merciless commercialism—we are programmed to consume and to be consumed by our programmers in the advertising industry whose job it is to plant the seeds of want in our all too receptive minds. Conspicuous consumption is the cornerstone of mature capitalism and no people in history have been more prominent consumers than we Americans—as measured by the girth of our waistlines and the girth of our mounting debt.

But as much as we are the products of Madison Avenue advertisers, we are also products of arrested psychological and spiritual development. We exhibit extreme pathologies because our lives are not rooted in nature and community; nor are they rooted in reality. Like spoiled adolescents, we have locked ourselves away with our box of toys and we call the world our own. We are a danger not only to ourselves but to the entire world. Quarantine should be drawn around us lest we infect the rest of the world with our madness.

Oblivious to the consequences of our own excess, our sphere of caring rarely extends beyond the self and our immediate families to the communities in which we are embedded that in turn spill into the great world beyond. We have erected psychological and physical barriers that isolate us from the rest of the world which have given rise to pathological visions of grandeur and exceptionalism. And, like a run-away virus, we are replicating our madness to the rest of the world which is, thanks to the disciples of Milton Friedman, seeking to emulate our example.
Better the world turn away and run for their lives as if we were infected with a new strain of pox or rabies. Better they should save themselves and let us perish, as will surely occur when we are consumed by the festering sewers of our swelling vanity.

We call ourselves a free people but we are prisoners of our own petty desires; prisoners of greed and excess and manufactured want; the products of capitalism taken to the extreme—replicating with the ease of cancer cells unrestrained by reason or empathy for others and for the earth. The world cannot tolerate another America . She cannot much longer sustain the one she already has. We have a carbon footprint vastly disproportional to our numbers and we are not only blotting out the sun; we are stamping out countless species of plants and animals and casting them into the abyss of eternal extinction. The ecological cost of our excess is incalculable.

We go on as if there are no consequences to what we do, ignoring the wolves baying at our door and the grim reaper peering at us through the curtain. We tell ourselves they are only apparitions of conspiracy theorists and alarmists, the ghosts of misplaced conscience.

Millions of Americans are experts at self-denial and delusional to the extreme, while others are realists and components of active resistance. But, cause and effect rarely enters our vocabulary. History, science and ethics are not our strengths—we prefer to go shopping or watching television, giving no thought to the kind of world we are leaving our children and their off spring, much less the offspring of other species. We hold that the universe turns on its axis and we are its center; but it is not so.

As a result of our excesses, terms such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak water’ have come into existence. Gluttony occurs on one end of the supply chain at the expense of the other; just as food webs are affected by events occurring at all parts of an ecological web the size of the world. One cannot pluck a flower without also troubling a star. All things are interconnected.

How easily we forget that commercial exuberance rests on the broken bodies of the exploited worker; it rests on the scrolls of flora and fauna that have been pushed out of existence because there isn’t enough room for them and us with all of our precious, energy consuming toys.

Thus we live in a world that is not enriched by our example but is diminished by us. Injustice is a byproduct of commercial exuberance as manifested by declarations of superiority through class warfare and other avenues of inequality. And it is felt in the dimly lit sweatshop somewhere in the belching slums of industrialized China , engulfed by the droning hum of sowing machines that never cease behind bolted doors; and guided by gnarled hands attaching Nike labels to athletic apparel destined for upscale Target and Macy’s stores in the US .

True, capitalism has made cheap products available to the voracious American consumer; but it has also given the world preemptive war and famine, global corporatism, pestilence and wage slavery; it has stoked the fires of mass extinction, global warming and ecological collapse—all of which have acquired an unstoppable momentum of their own with unimaginable consequences that extend indefinitely into an already uncertain future. There are consequences to everything we do, just as there are consequences to inaction.

Yet it is increasingly obvious that too few of us care enough to take action, as long as we are free to buy and to consume. We keep the consequences of gluttony out of sight and out of mind and pretend they aren’t there. But they are present and they matter.

And this brings me to the main point of my essay: it cannot go on. The age of exuberance—like the age of cheap oil—is mercifully drawing to a close. So I will say what was never meant to spoken aloud in the land of excess; and I will say it loud and clear so that it cannot be mistaken: Americans must dramatically simplify their lives to want less and learn more. We constitute less than five percent of the of the world’s population while usurping more than a quarter of her bounty. This is not acceptable—nor is it ethical.

No one has a moral right to take more than their fair share when that taking jeopardizes the chances of others of living a decent life, or makes nil their chances for survival—including other species.

Contrary to what one might think, we do not have to live like third world nations or like the hunters and gatherers of the past. But we must dramatically reduce our consumption and shrink our carbon footprint. Not only must we live within our own means but within the means of the planet to support us.

The majority of our food should be locally grown and mass transit must supplant the gluttonous and polluting automobile that proliferates on our nation’s highways. Moratoriums on development and urban sprawl must be enacted in order to protect critical habitat and rainwater recharge areas. Cities and towns must be redesigned and revitalized with sustainable industry. Goods and services, including work and jobs must again, as they were in the past, be rooted in vibrant, small scale local economies; and free trade agreements revoked.

Technological advances—no matter how boldly they are touted as saviors of humankind cannot increase the world’s carrying capacity and they cannot invoke justice. The latter is entirely up to us as sentient beings endowed with conscience. And this brings me to a second point: we must reduce the human population through adoption and cease to procreate for at least one generation—so that the earth can recover her carrying capacity. What better way to save the world, literally.

Simultaneously simplifying our lives by wanting less and reducing the human population will allow room for other people and other beings to share the bounty of the earth. And it will almost certainly have a beneficent rather than pathological social and psychological consequence: it will end our isolation and reconnect us to the rest of the world. We could finally realize our enormous potential to become world citizens and good neighbors worthy of respect and love.

Rather than an economy based upon savage greed and exploitation, let us create an economy based upon justice and equality, need rather than excess; a society that does not leave people behind but invites the full participation of everyone and recognizes that, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Let it be all inclusive and worthy of respect: where every woman, man, and child, every being of this earth is the same under the law and equally respected and valued—a great global community seeking harmony rather than competitive advantage.

In the end, equality is beholden to the system we choose. Did we ask that the world be run on the profits of greed, or the prophets of wisdom? Where was that democratic choice? The profits of greed have given us voracious greed, consuming everything in sight; but they didn’t give us a choice; they took away our freedom and made us into lesser beings. But, if we are to muster ourselves to call ourselves Human one last time, where the prophets of wisdom really did have something to say, where people and the planet are put before profits in the Golden Rule, and where we have one large collective foot standing on the profit of greed then maybe, maybe YES we will turn this thing around: http://www.planetization.org/.

Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and community activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of geopolitical West Virginia . He welcomes your comments at http://us.mc362.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=csullivan@phreego.com.

Institutionalized Glorification of our Greed and Gluttony

2008-12-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

Reflections of an Anti-Capitalist
By Jason Miller
11/23/07

Gluttony and greed kill more than the sword.
—Italian proverb

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.
~Charles Lamb, 1821

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=453

Another propaganda-driven greed-fest has nearly passed in the land of the corporatized and the home of the subservient. Obedient little wage slaves and consumers that most of us are (to varying degrees of course), we have once again dutifully greased the wheels of the monstrous capitalist machine and made our proper sacrifices at the altar of Mammon. Between our voracious inhalation of all manner of edibles to our obscene spree of rapacious spending using money eagerly fronted by the usurious kings of finance capital, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are celebratory days indeed for the moneyed elite comprising the allegedly non-existent ruling class in our “egalitarian” and “democratic” nation.

I celebrated Thanksgiving. However, I wasn’t bowing my head and expressing gratitude to the Calvinist God in which I am “supposed to” believe for the things for which I “should” be grateful. There was an interesting duality to my day as I contemplated that for which I feel a deep ingratitude and celebrated that which sparks my feelings of sincere gratitude.

The components of my “Thanklessgiving” included:
1. The trillions of OUR tax dollars OUR government spends each year attempting to attain global hegemony through nearly ubiquitous military bases, a nuclear arsenal large enough to obliterate the universe, and numerous ecocidal, genocidal invasions of ridiculously weaker nations which, fortunately, usually give us a bit of what we deserve by sending us home limping.

2. The US American Gulag, a penal system populated by over two million human beings. The “land of the free” has the largest number of incarcerated people in the world, even surpassing China, the most populous and allegedly most repressive nation in the world. Criminalizing select forms of self-medicating (those that predominate in the urban core Bantustans to which we have relegated much of our black population) has proven to be an efficient means of “legally” repressing black males. Meanwhile, alcohol, a drug which severely impairs judgment, lowers inhibitions, causes the bloody demise of over 16,000 innocents on our highways each year, and tends to increase the belligerence factor exponentially, remains quite legal and practically flows from the spigots of our homes. And we’re imprisoning people for the possession of marijuana?

3. Factory farms and the fast food industry that necessitated their genesis. Speciesism is a cancer that has long infected our collective thinking with the notion that we can selectively inflict wanton cruelty on non-human animals. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs (imagine the mass outrage if we began large-scale torture, mutilation, and consumption of family canines) yet we imprison them in such tight quarters for such extended periods that they go insane, treat sows as breeding machines, rip out their teeth without anesthetizing them, sometimes disembowel them with hooks through their anuses while they are alive, and at other times boil them to death while they are still conscious. Recently, the turkeys who suffered unimaginably painful lives and deaths (so their flesh could help expand the midriffs of scores of millions of human animals) experienced their own “thanksgiving” when their agonized existences finally came to an end. Instead of using the monster military (which We the Taxpayers have paid to create) as a means to murder untold millions of civilians who “are in the wrong place at the wrong time,” perhaps we would be better served to evacuate the human and non-human animals from the murderous slaughterhouses and thus finally facilitate the smart use of “smart bombs.”

4. The crypto-racism that continues to mar our sociocultural landscape like cesspools of toxic sludge. Aside from the aforementioned “War on Drugs” that targets black males and enables us to justify arming and supporting Latin American Right Wing dictators who foster an environment which allows our corporations to rape their nations, there is still a chasm of inequality between blacks and whites in terms of income, wealth, health, and education. The root causes of this gross injustice are myriad but include rampant covert racism (Jim Crow is not dead; he has simply gone incognito) and epidemic intergenerational poverty perpetuated by deplorable public education in predominately black schools and various other nearly insurmountable systemic impediments to climbing the socioeconomic ladder. And let’s not forget Lou Dobbs’ crusade against the Mexican migration to the US forced by neoliberal economic policies born of savage capitalism.

5. The War on Terror. A more appropriate name for this abomination would be “The War on Islamic People because many of their nations possess much of the oil that capitalism needs to continue fueling the engines of profit and endless growth and because many Muslims are furious that the Zionists stole Palestine.” I guess they went with the War on Terror because the true name is too cumbersome. If we stopped bankrolling the terrorist state of Israel, launching imperial invasions, installing and supporting ruthless regimes, and wielding our economic power like a cudgel, we would stop pissing off so many people and wouldn’t have the constant concern of angry victims employing asymmetric warfare against us.

6. The evisceration of our Constitution and steady march toward fascism. Bush’s signing statements, the Patriot Act and subsequent Orwellian legislation, the trend toward privatization of the military, the increasingly incestuous relationship between the public and private sectors, two consecutive stolen Presidential elections, Islamophobia, pathological nativism, and an ever-increasing obsession with militarism are the obvious symptoms of a nation plunging into an abyss not unlike that experienced by the Germans under the Nazi regime. While we are not there yet, we are certainly experiencing the prefigurements of “capitalism in decay.” Remember that Hitler and his cabal did not fully initiate the machinations of fascism overnight either.

7. The soul (and human and animal and Earth) murdering socioeconomic construct of capitalism. While it is true that selfishness, greed, narcissism, and the tendency to exploit are intrinsic to each human being, we choose to glorify, embrace, amplify and perpetuate a system that demands that we hone these characteristics like weapons in order to “succeed” within our malignant means of economic organization. Tragically, even those who recognize the infinite toxicity of such practices still need to employ them to some extent simply to survive.

8. The mainstream media and Madison Avenue. These entities are deeply complicit in crimes of the highest order, including the ongoing genocide in Iraq that has killed millions of people dating back to the Gulf War and the insatiable desire we US Americans have to acquire more “stuff” (also known as consumerism—a practice that is literally killing our planet). Crypto-fascist media outlets like Fox News and the endless stream of advertising blasted at us 24/7 serve the interests of our depraved moneyed elite well as they shepherd the masses to support and glorify the malevolent American Empire with sanguine enthusiasm.

9. The myth that “America doesn’t torture.” Sorry folks, but we have been doing it for quite some time. Abu Ghraib was no anomaly. MK-ULTRA was not about mind control. The CIA used the results of the horrifying abuse Dr. Ewen Cameron inflicted on his psychiatric patients to write Kubark, their manual on employing psychological torture. During the Vietnam War, the US employed Operation Phoenix, which included the routine use of torture and resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 Vietnamese. The School of Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning in Georgia has churned out over 60,000 Latin American Right Wing thugs trained to torture and murder any who dare challenge the sacred right of capitalists to rape and exploit our neighbors to the south, including saintly men like Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down for having the fortitude to stand up for the impoverished victims of US-sanctioned and financed death squads in El Salvador.

10. The existence of over one million homeless human beings in a nation awash in abundance. Our perverse system spends trillions of PUBLIC dollars on our leviathan killing apparatus yet we apply asinine palliatives, like the privately-funded Christian homeless shelter where I helped prepare and serve Thanksgiving dinner again this year, to feed and shelter our indigent and hungry brethren (many of whom are veterans who were brain-washed into serving in our imperial conquests and then kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage).

As I reveled in my role of ingrate to the Empire, I gave sincere thanks for:
1. Family and true friends.

2. Chandra

3. Patrice Greanville, the editor in chief of Cyrano’s Journal, who is also my friend, ally, and mentor.

4. My intellect, moral stamina and profound life experiences which have enabled me to shed my false consciousness and begin waging a sustained struggle against the many ravages of the cancer of capitalism and the American Empire.

5. The numerous anti-capitalist individuals, websites, publications, and groups with which I have become allied and affiliated.

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for providing us with the knowledge and tools to battle the exploitative, murderous abomination that is destroying the Earth.

7. Radicals throughout history, including Thomas Paine, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, MLK, Malcolm X, Archbishop Romero, and many others.

8. The numerous brilliant and intellectually courageous contributors to Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner.

9. The Earth, its infinite beauty, and its capacity to sustain life.

10. Groups like PETA and the Animal Liberation Front. While I don’t formally militate with a specific group, I am a passionate animal liberationist. Collectively, we horrifically torture and slaughter billions of animals each year. While too far ahead of the consciousness curve to effect sweeping changes to the prevailing paradigm, “terrorist groups” like the ALF serve the movement well and their efforts are laudable.

11. Hamas, for the social service work it does on behalf of its horribly oppressed people and for its relentless struggle against US/Israeli efforts to eradicate the Palestinians.

12. Hugo Chavez, for catalyzing and perpetuating the Bolivarian Revolution as an alternative to the deeply entrenched Washington Consensus and for the huge strides he has made towards egalitarianism in Venezuela.

13. Fidel Castro, despite his imperfections (which have been ridiculously over-exaggerated by both the capitalist propaganda networks and the reactionary Gusanos), has remained steadfast in his defiance against US and capitalist domination of the Western Hemisphere and has launched numerous invasions of other nations with his army of physicians. Small wonder he invokes such fear in the tiny, shriveled hearts of capitalists and petite-bourgeoisie the world over.

14. The Internet, for providing a means for people of conscience to connect, network, and strive to give the masses an education to supplant their capitalist mind-fuck. Underestimating the importance of winning hearts and minds would be a gross miscalculation indeed for those of us who want to evoke significant social and political change for the better.

Yes, our social indoctrination to immerse ourselves in the “traditional activities” of Thanksgiving and Black Friday is premised on filthy lies, the torture of hundreds of millions of innocent birds, a celebration of the initiation of the Native American Genocide, an unconscionable waste of resources, and the insatiable greed of those atop the capitalist hierarchy. More nauseating than eating too much turkey, isn’t it?

Yet that doesn’t mean that we can’t opt out of “the great American tradition,” use the time to experience gratitude for those aspects of our existence which are truly meaningful, and commit ourselves to the struggle against the beast that is devouring them.

Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free.

He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/.

You can reach him at http://us.mc362.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=JMiller@bestcyrano.com

Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day

2008-12-21T19:54:00.000-08:00

Washington, D.C.March 30, 1863

http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fast.htm

Senator James Harlan of Iowa, whose daughter later married President Lincoln's son Robert, introduced this Resolution in the Senate on March 2, 1863. The Resolution asked President Lincoln to proclaim a national day of prayer and fasting. The Resolution was adopted on March 3, and signed by Lincoln on March 30, one month before the fast day was observed.

By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

THANK GOD FOR OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN !!

2008-12-19T19:09:00.000-08:00

"As bad as Obama is, a rejection of Obama means falling into tyranny." -Paul Craig Roberts

http://socialism-only-solution-for-usa.blogspot.com/2008/12/thank-god-for-obama-and-joe-biden.html

That's right my friends !! The whole world would be beating the bullets, if it wasn't for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. So as bad, as corporate and as zionist as the Democratic Party is. Not voting for Obama would mean downright tyranny, imperialism and fascism for more 4 years under the Mccain-Palin ticket.

JESUS IS THE REASON FOR CHRISTMAS, NOT TURKEY, NOT PECAN PIES, NOT CHOCOLATES, NOT PARTIES !!

2008-12-15T19:48:00.000-08:00

Blessed are you poor -- for yours is the Kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now -- for you shall be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now -- for you shall laugh.
Blessed are you when men hate you and reject you and insult you and say you are evil, all because of the Son of Man. Be glad when that happens and dance for joy, because a great reward is kept for you in heaven -- for their ancestors did the very same things to the Prophets.

How terrible for you who are rich now -- you have had your easy life.
How terrible for you who laugh now -- for you shall mourn and weep.
How terrible when all men speak well of you -- for their ancestors said the very same things about the false prophets.
But I tell you who hear me:
Love your enemies.
Do good to those who hate you.
Bless those who curse you.
Pray for those who mistreat you.

If anyone strikes you on the one cheek, let him hit the other one also.
And if someone takes away your coat, let him have your shirt as well.
Give to everyone who begs from you.
And if someone takes what is yours, do not ask for it back again.
Do for others only what you would have others do for you.

If you love only the people who love you, why should you receive a blessing -- for even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, why should you receive a blessing -- even sinners do that.
No, love your enemies and do good to them. And lend expecting nothing back. And then you will have a great reward -- for you will be sons of the Most High God. For He is good to the ungrateful and to the wicked.
Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.

Judge not and you will not be judged.
Condemn not and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.

Give and it will be given to you -- for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.

One blind man cannot lead another. If he does they will both fall into a ditch.
Why do you see the speck that is in your brothers eye, but pay no attention to the log in your own eye.

Woman: How happy is the mother who bore you and nursed you.
Jesus: Rather, happy are those who hear the Word of God and obey it.

Who increased the food prices? Who raised the prices of all christmas foods? The Republican Party !!

2008-12-15T19:25:00.000-08:00

So, my friends, haven't you noticed that most hillbillies, most rednecks, most capitalist right-wing filthy bourgeoise don't really care about food prices? I mean haven't you noticed how Mccain and Palin got a whoppling 45% in the past 2008 elections, even after the fact that the Republican Party did 9-11, waged an illegal war that killed 1.2 million irakis (By the way, there are no legal wars, all wars are satanic and evil). And also Mccain and Palin were able to get almost 50% in elections despite the fact that when Bill Clinton left the presidency a lb. of turkey was like 68 cents, a lb. of chicken 59 cents, milk 2.50 a gallon, and specially christmas dinner was real cheap.

So if you are not rich, you don't have a right at all to have girlfriends, for girls to look at you, to party, go out and have fun

2008-12-15T08:17:00.000-08:00

In this oligarchic society the only people who can have girlfriends, party, have fun and go out are bill clinton, al gore, dick cheney, alex rodriguez, brad pit, rahm emmanuel, donald trump etc. but for the majority life is a hell, and if u are not part of the oligarchy and own a luxury sports car, cell phones and have muscles, it is real hard for girls to look u !!

Face it my friends, you can have the body of your life and the life of your body in USA. However if you don't have nice cell phones, a shiny Mitsubishi Eclipse, BWM, new Honda Accura, Lexus, a Volksawgen Jetta, Volvo or Audi girls won't look at you. And you will die as a worthless piece of shit having contributted nothing worthwhile to this shithole, capitalist, boring society.

So i urge you all: To move out of USA while you can, before you get old and live an insipid, inane, empty life !!

Hasn't socialism been tried and failed? NO !! Latin American nations are welfare-capitalist systems on transition toward socialism of the XXI Century

2008-12-15T08:06:00.000-08:00

Alexis Vassiley

http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1603&Itemid=106

There are twin myths about Stalin's Russia: that this monstrous dictatorship was socialist, and that Stalin was the inevitable outcome of the revolution because it was led by Lenin's revolutionary Bolsheviks.

These myths were peddled in both the East and the West during the Cold War. What better way to convince Western workers that socialism wasn't worth fighting for, and for Stalin to justify his rule?

But Stalin's one-party state with its gulags had nothing to do with socialism. Stalin carried out a full-blown counter-revolution that abolished all the gains won by workers and peasants in the revolution of 1917.

Rather than proving that socialism has been tried and failed, the 1917 revolution shows that socialism is possible. It was the first time in history that workers had taken state power. Having overthrown the hated Tsarist regime in February, and then the capitalist Provisional Government in October, the working-class initiated incredible reforms.

Workers' control was instituted in factories. Land was given to the peasantry. Free nurseries, communal kitchens and laundries were set up. Divorce was available on demand. Homosexuality was taken out of the criminal code. Mass literacy campaigns were initiated and the right of self-determination was given to all Russia's oppressed nations.

The workers' state of "backward" Russia put the capitalist states in "civilised" Western Europe to shame and inspired millions the world over to try to repeat what Russian workers and peasants had done.

But to go on and build socialism, the revolution had to spread to more advanced capitalist countries. Socialism requires an abundance of resources. These were lacking in Russia, but economic conditions were ripe for socialism on a world scale.

Lenin argued that "we always staked our play on an international revolution." There were revolutions in Austria, Hungary and Germany in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and upsurges elsewhere. Ultimately these revolutions were unsuccessful and the German revolution's defeat sealed Russia's fate.

The Bolsheviks had always expected that if the revolution were smashed it would be by foreign armies and domestic reaction. Indeed, 14 imperialist countries invaded Russia. Yet the Red Army won the Civil War against all odds. In the process, however, the working class was decimated, many of its best fighters died, and counter-revolution came from within.

A new bureaucratic class led by Stalin arose. By 1929 his grip on power was tight, and he reversed all of the revolution's gains. Workers and peasants were again exploited, this time, disgustingly, in the name of socialism.

The first five-year plan in 1928 set the seal on the revolution's defeat. Without a revolution in at least one Western country, Russia was drawn back into the competition of the world capitalist economy. Stalin declared, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years or we shall go under." Workers and peasants were to be super-exploited to meet this goal.

Lenin had rightly argued that "in one country it is impossible to achieve such a work as a socialist revolution." But under Stalin, internationalism and world revolution were replaced by their opposites - nationalism and imperialism - in the name of "socialism in one country". The distorted language of Marxism was used by a new ruling class to oppress the majority and the workers' state had become state capitalist.

Stalin's Russia was in no way a continuation of the revolutionary tradition. His obliteration of all traces of the revolution extended to physically liquidating the "old Bolsheviks". Stalin was responsible for the murder of 70 per cent of the members and candidates of the Central Committee, 80 per cent of whom had joined the party before 1921. Trotsky, who fought Stalin tooth and nail both inside the USSR and in exile after 1929, was eventually murdered in 1940.

Like all class societies, this new one and the satellites it set up after World War II (with the connivance of the West) bred resistance. There were workers' revolts in Eastern Europe in 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1980. And from 1989 to 1991 popular revolutions brought the whole monolith tumbling down.

In Hungary in 1956, for example, workers' councils like those of 1917 sprang up. If Russia was a workers' state, why would workers need to rise up against it in country after country, only to be put down by "socialist" tanks?

Clearly Russia wasn't socialist. But the Russian Revolution did put socialism on the agenda, and in its wake, world capitalism hung in the balance. The brief period of workers' rule showed that ordinary people can run the world and that exploitation, poverty and oppression are neither natural or necessary. This is why we should both draw inspiration from 1917 and be clear on the nature of the counter-revolution and Stalin's Russia.

In the words of the Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg: "In Russia, the problem [of building socialism] could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism."

ONLY A TRUE CHRISTIAN-REVOLUTION CAN SAVE USA FROM SATANIC CAPITALISM

2008-12-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

ONLY A TRUE CHRISTIAN-REVOLUTION COULD SAVE USA. IT'S NOT JUST A POLITICAL REVOLUTION THAT USA NEEDS. BUT A CHANGE, A REAL TRANSFORMATION OF US CITIZENS, A CHRISTIANIZATION OF US SOCIETY WHICH IS AN IMMORAL, SINFUL, EGOCENTRIC AND A *WORSHIPER*OF THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM, THE SYSTEM OF THE DEVIL, OF LUCIFER, OF SATAN.

THE GHOSTS OF CAPITALIST CHRISTMAS, AND THE EXCESSIVE EATING OF PECAN PIES, TURKEY, FIG-BARS, AND WEIGHT-GAIN IN THE AMERICAN MASSES !!

2008-12-14T11:11:00.001-08:00

By Charles Sullivan

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18785.htm

11/28/07 "ICH" - --- Everything about America is done to the max—super sized—including ourselves. Americans are fond of excess, fond of glitz and glitter, the bright beads and trinkets of capitalism; the symbols of conspicuous consumption. Millions of us live in McMansions, drive fast cars and hulking tanks and work at high stress glamorous jobs that provide enormous financial reward but leave us spiritually empty.

We tell ourselves that these events signal that we have arrived and achieved greatness worthy of respect and envy. They are a declaration that we have played the game and won; that we have acquired economic power that results in elevated socio-economic status and disproportional influence over the lives of the less successful; and those who have utterly failed or refused to participate.

We love to consume and waste with an appalling sense of entitlement. Our lives are enacted amid heaping mounds of swelling garbage and filth, while some of our fellow human beings pass lives of quiet desperation in cardboard boxes beneath our nation’s highway bridges, like beetles that move beneath the bark of trees: out of sight, out of mind, inconsequential—or so we think.

It’s a jungle out there where only the fittest survive. Those who cannot compete must not survive to reproduce; they must be expelled from the gene pool. Modern capitalism is economic Darwinism carried to the extreme.

America is a land of extraordinary contradictions. She has produced not only George Bush and Dick Cheney but also George Carlin, Upton Sinclair, Eugene Debs and Howard Zinn. This is a land of extremes; enigmatic even to itself. It is a place of posh surroundings with all of the amenities money can buy; but it is also a land of unknowable hardship and destitution that often exists in close proximity to stupendous wealth.

Just as the continent holds lush temperate rain forests, so it also harbors deserts where only the strong and well adapted survive the harsh conditions of heat and drought and oscillating cold.
Surely the national pastime must be shopping, which has acquired the stature of a genuine addiction; a disease on a par with alcoholism and played with the passion of a competitive sport. Witness the insanity of black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year where people are annually trampled at the doors of Wal-Mart in the quest for the latest incarnation of the X-Box. He with the most toys wins and the losers are trampled underfoot, ground into dust. Possessions matter more than people.

And we are a restless, fiercely competitive people—constantly on the move; a people that cannot countenance open spaces or unmanaged nature.

Hundreds of thousands of shopping centers and strip malls bear ample testimony to our excess, as do the mountains of debt that rise out of our spending habits like a newly spawned volcano swelling above a rising column of molten magma. Eventually they will become our gravestones—monuments to our lack of empathy and testaments to our unbridled greed and contempt for the earth.

The developers cannot relax until every inch of the earth is urbanized and paved and there is a McDonald’s and Wal-Mart on every street corner; a development in place of every orchard and farm. We cannot relax until everything wild and natural has been eradicated or imprisoned in zoos and admission is charged. Imagine a continent sized gated community for the well-heeled and the wealthy. The poor and destitute need not apply.

More than democracy, more than liberty, more than life—give us our shopping malls so that we can purchase happiness and fill our empty lives with possessions. Our senses are incessantly assaulted by merciless commercialism—we are programmed to consume and to be consumed by our programmers in the advertising industry whose job it is to plant the seeds of want in our all too receptive minds. Conspicuous consumption is the cornerstone of mature capitalism and no people in history have been more prominent consumers than we Americans—as measured by the girth of our waistlines and the girth of our mounting debt.

But as much as we are the products of Madison Avenue advertisers, we are also products of arrested psychological and spiritual development. We exhibit extreme pathologies because our lives are not rooted in nature and community; nor are they rooted in reality. Like spoiled adolescents, we have locked ourselves away with our box of toys and we call the world our own. We are a danger not only to ourselves but to the entire world. Quarantine should be drawn around us lest we infect the rest of the world with our madness.

Oblivious to the consequences of our own excess, our sphere of caring rarely extends beyond the self and our immediate families to the communities in which we are embedded that in turn spill into the great world beyond. We have erected psychological and physical barriers that isolate us from the rest of the world which have given rise to pathological visions of grandeur and exceptionalism. And, like a run-away virus, we are replicating our madness to the rest of the world which is, thanks to the disciples of Milton Friedman, seeking to emulate our example.
Better the world turn away and run for their lives as if we were infected with a new strain of pox or rabies. Better they should save themselves and let us perish, as will surely occur when we are consumed by the festering sewers of our swelling vanity.

We call ourselves a free people but we are prisoners of our own petty desires; prisoners of greed and excess and manufactured want; the products of capitalism taken to the extreme—replicating with the ease of cancer cells unrestrained by reason or empathy for others and for the earth. The world cannot tolerate another America . She cannot much longer sustain the one she already has. We have a carbon footprint vastly disproportional to our numbers and we are not only blotting out the sun; we are stamping out countless species of plants and animals and casting them into the abyss of eternal extinction. The ecological cost of our excess is incalculable.

We go on as if there are no consequences to what we do, ignoring the wolves baying at our door and the grim reaper peering at us through the curtain. We tell ourselves they are only apparitions of conspiracy theorists and alarmists, the ghosts of misplaced conscience.

Millions of Americans are experts at self-denial and delusional to the extreme, while others are realists and components of active resistance. But, cause and effect rarely enters our vocabulary. History, science and ethics are not our strengths—we prefer to go shopping or watching television, giving no thought to the kind of world we are leaving our children and their off spring, much less the offspring of other species. We hold that the universe turns on its axis and we are its center; but it is not so.

As a result of our excesses, terms such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak water’ have come into existence. Gluttony occurs on one end of the supply chain at the expense of the other; just as food webs are affected by events occurring at all parts of an ecological web the size of the world. One cannot pluck a flower without also troubling a star. All things are interconnected.

How easily we forget that commercial exuberance rests on the broken bodies of the exploited worker; it rests on the scrolls of flora and fauna that have been pushed out of existence because there isn’t enough room for them and us with all of our precious, energy consuming toys.

Thus we live in a world that is not enriched by our example but is diminished by us. Injustice is a byproduct of commercial exuberance as manifested by declarations of superiority through class warfare and other avenues of inequality. And it is felt in the dimly lit sweatshop somewhere in the belching slums of industrialized China , engulfed by the droning hum of sowing machines that never cease behind bolted doors; and guided by gnarled hands attaching Nike labels to athletic apparel destined for upscale Target and Macy’s stores in the US .

True, capitalism has made cheap products available to the voracious American consumer; but it has also given the world preemptive war and famine, global corporatism, pestilence and wage slavery; it has stoked the fires of mass extinction, global warming and ecological collapse—all of which have acquired an unstoppable momentum of their own with unimaginable consequences that extend indefinitely into an already uncertain future. There are consequences to everything we do, just as there are consequences to inaction.

Yet it is increasingly obvious that too few of us care enough to take action, as long as we are free to buy and to consume. We keep the consequences of gluttony out of sight and out of mind and pretend they aren’t there. But they are present and they matter.

And this brings me to the main point of my essay: it cannot go on. The age of exuberance—like the age of cheap oil—is mercifully drawing to a close. So I will say what was never meant to spoken aloud in the land of excess; and I will say it loud and clear so that it cannot be mistaken: Americans must dramatically simplify their lives to want less and learn more. We constitute less than five percent of the of the world’s population while usurping more than a quarter of her bounty. This is not acceptable—nor is it ethical.

No one has a moral right to take more than their fair share when that taking jeopardizes the chances of others of living a decent life, or makes nil their chances for survival—including other species.

Contrary to what one might think, we do not have to live like third world nations or like the hunters and gatherers of the past. But we must dramatically reduce our consumption and shrink our carbon footprint. Not only must we live within our own means but within the means of the planet to support us.

The majority of our food should be locally grown and mass transit must supplant the gluttonous and polluting automobile that proliferates on our nation’s highways. Moratoriums on development and urban sprawl must be enacted in order to protect critical habitat and rainwater recharge areas. Cities and towns must be redesigned and revitalized with sustainable industry. Goods and services, including work and jobs must again, as they were in the past, be rooted in vibrant, small scale local economies; and free trade agreements revoked.

Technological advances—no matter how boldly they are touted as saviors of humankind cannot increase the world’s carrying capacity and they cannot invoke justice. The latter is entirely up to us as sentient beings endowed with conscience. And this brings me to a second point: we must reduce the human population through adoption and cease to procreate for at least one generation—so that the earth can recover her carrying capacity. What better way to save the world, literally.

Simultaneously simplifying our lives by wanting less and reducing the human population will allow room for other people and other beings to share the bounty of the earth. And it will almost certainly have a beneficent rather than pathological social and psychological consequence: it will end our isolation and reconnect us to the rest of the world. We could finally realize our enormous potential to become world citizens and good neighbors worthy of respect and love.

Rather than an economy based upon savage greed and exploitation, let us create an economy based upon justice and equality, need rather than excess; a society that does not leave people behind but invites the full participation of everyone and recognizes that, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Let it be all inclusive and worthy of respect: where every woman, man, and child, every being of this earth is the same under the law and equally respected and valued—a great global community seeking harmony rather than competitive advantage.

In the end, equality is beholden to the system we choose. Did we ask that the world be run on the profits of greed, or the prophets of wisdom? Where was that democratic choice? The profits of greed have given us voracious greed, consuming everything in sight; but they didn’t give us a choice; they took away our freedom and made us into lesser beings. But, if we are to muster ourselves to call ourselves Human one last time, where the prophets of wisdom really did have something to say, where people and the planet are put before profits in the Golden Rule, and where we have one large collective foot standing on the profit of greed then maybe, maybe YES we will turn this thing around: http://www.planetization.org/.

Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and community activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of geopolitical West Virginia . He welcomes your comments at http://us.f362.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=csullivan@phreego.com.

THE ZIONIST CONTROL HYPOTHESIS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY ISRAELITES

2008-12-10T11:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.jamesrmaclean.com

The Zionist Control Hypothesis (ZCH)

The Zionist Control Hypothesis is a theory that claims that the the United States foreign policy towards the Middle East is shaped, or dictated, by a cabal of Jews. This theory argues that Jews living in the USA have acquired awesome power to make the US media and government do its bidding, all to the greater glory of Israel

The theory has many different shades of "strength," with Mearsheimer & Walt's version actually constituting one of the "weaker" forms. Since the authors of "The Israel Lobby" are fairly prominent scholars, their article has attracted a great deal of attention.

The ZCH has several corollaries to its claim that Zionists control US foreign policy. One is that Zionists also control the US media, which in fact goes far beyond a "pro-Israel slant": one may as well say the US capitalist media presents an historical narrative that is almost completely divorced from reality. It goes far beyond "spin" into the realm of profound mendacity.

Another is the corollary that opposition to the Zionist agenda is reliably and successfully tarred as "antisemitism," thereby putting the speaker beyond the pale of polite discussion. In some cases, the odium of "antisemitism" is proposed to explain the success of the Zionist agenda: people simply panic when they're accused of being antisemites, even if they happen to be Jewish themselves.[2] Again, there is a lot of truth to this corollary
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AMERICAN RIGHT-WING CAPITALISTS PISSED OFF AT A USSR CITIZEN WHO SAID THAT US CAPITALISM SUCKS

2008-12-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/1120/contents.html

In response to Valdas Anelauskas' letter of Sept. 15, I would recommend that the same winds of life that brought him here carry him someplace else. We're not perfect, the community isn't perfect, but I’m never going to apologize for loving my community and for investing in making it a good place to live.
There is much to celebrate and be proud of, and in that spirit we work hard to continually make Springfield-Eugene better. Without that spirit, nothing gets done. I choose to work toward healthier and educated children, parents with increasing skills, adults who accept and love one another, absence of racial boundaries, acceptance of diversity, and opportunities for young people in spite of past mistakes and difficult lives. When we each contribute as we can, and as so many do in this community, we move toward a better life for us all.
Celebrate? Indeed. Feel happy, proud? Absolutely! But only because I, like so many, am part of the solution. And when you are so pitiful that you can't find anything to be happy about, or to celebrate, or to love about where you live, then you are the problem, Change your attitude or leave. Laurie Adams, USA, 09/20/97The Register-Guard, Eugene, OR
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I read with interest your article on your expectations vs. your reality. I always enjoy learning about other people's points of view. Personally, I find you to be a "whiner." By this I mean that you have the expectation that a country or government's job is to provide you with happiness and then when you find that you are not happy, it is not your responsibility. I have lived in many countries and traveled extensively, as well, and I can assure you that there is no utopia out there. And all your complaining isn't going to make one. Utopia is not made by whining or complaining. In fact no good situation was created by complaining. Good situations are created by having an idea of what you want and creating that. Not by having an idea of what you don't want and then rebelling against it. That becomes a habit. And it has become your habit, thus your vocation. It would be interesting for me to read an article you wrote where you explain the beneficial contribution you made through a good idea you had. It isn't anyone's fault but your own that your reality does not equal your expectations. I'm not saying that America is the greatest place to live, or that you should leave. I'm just saying that your glass is half empty. Jonathan Good, USA, 04/27/96
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Sounds like a perfect match for Stalin's daughter. Some people are born to complain. Tom Jagiella, USA, 03/30/96
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Your article seems to be the work of a bigoted ideologue of the Left. I have known poverty. I have suffered under the social inequities of the American system more than perhaps you can imagine. But this country does not torture its children, like Brazil. It does not have the social policies of Iran. Our racism is an evil as evil as any, but it is not official policy as it is in Israel. Our constitution is full of stupidity (such as the right to bear arms) but it is at least a foundation for the rule of law over tyrannies that may arise from any corner. Imperfect, yet no less perfect than any other justice.
I have been active in the politics of my community, and we have done much here for ourselves. We do not whine about the two dimensional cliche of Amerikkka. My America is broad, diverse, great, small, fucked-up, brilliant, and stupid all in one. You cannot wish a child, or a people, or a nation well if you do not give that entity love and respect. And if you only wish it ill, than your ill will can only cause you bitterness.
What do I do about the problems of my land? I work with my hands. Marc Awodey, USA, 03/09/97
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I'm not real sure what you have seen or what you have done in America, but I would like you to realize just one extreme point. YOU ARE LIVING THERE AT THIS PRESENT TIME. If you would like to see negative in everything that you do and see that you will find it. It sounds to me personally like you have not had a chance to travel. Please take a look around and see why America is called the land of opportunity before you call it the land of negative impact to you and your lovely family.
I would like to just add a little note to say that 100 million of my fellow Americans are extremely happy with our country. At least we didn't move out of our country when it started to get rough. James Cully, USA, 03/09/97
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I happened to read some of your web-site, and I'm glad to see that quality comments on the web. Too many people publish mindless rubbish.
However, I do believe that many Americans, with good reason, would be provoked by your attitude about their country.
I cannot agree with your contempt of American values. Your desire to isolate yourself and your family from the society you live in, makes me suspect that your attitudes and opinions are not formed by the experience of an open mind, but rather by prejudice and rejection. Bjorn Kvisli, Japan, 05/29/96
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If US capitalism is so bad, why don't you go somewhere else? No one is forcing you to stay here. James R. McCown, USA, 07/06/96
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I read the first few paragraphs of your criticism before I had enough. I am an American of Lithuanian ancestry. Frankly, you sound more like a Russian than Lithuanian. Your attitude towards your American host disturbs me. You embarrass me as a Lithuanian. Joe Ames, USA, 04/06/96
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Your article "Expectations and reality" is an apology for your active role in helping the U.S. impose neoliberalism (laissez faire capitalism) on the Lithuanian workers.
You don't really care about liberating everyone from tyranny. If you did you'd be back in Lithuania right now struggling to throw the Yankees out and organizing with others to build a real democracy, the kind that represents the majority of the people, the workers!
Your environmentalism does not cover up your treachery against the workers in Lithuania. Your testimony is a self-serving tokenism that was designed to help you deal with your guilt trip.
In short, you're an enemy of the working class -- a lackey for the Yankee imperialists who wears the mask of humanitarianism. How much money did they pay you to do their inside dirty work??? Revolutionary worker, USA, 02/15/97
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After reading of your vitriolic hatred for America, we at BioLeft also agree that Valdas and his family were much happier living under a communist regime. You weren't employed by the Communist state by any chance were you? Ah, yes, capitalism does weed out the failures and deadwoods who having nothing to contribute to the well-being of their fellow Americans.
To assist you in getting out of this country and take your venom with you, we are constructing a link to your web page with encouragement from viewers to get you an airplane ticket(s) to the gulag of your choice. Bill, USA, 01/04/97
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After reading your comments on America in "Expectations and Reality" I must say that you have sadly missed the social experiment called America. It is very apparent that you would like America to be what your failed communist system tried. America will never be that.
I would suggest that you divorce your old self and take a long trip through heartland America. The people will show you what freedom is what hope is, and the price of each. Duane A. McCarrel, USA, 08/09/96
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Your mudslinging article regarding the "American condition" points to the unfortunate dilemma Lithuanians face after being "liberated" from an oppressive and backward culture. America has never believed in a "welfare state," nor should it. It renders citizens helpless, immovable. The fundamental premise of capitalism, more specifically, to seek opportunity, is what has enabled a viable economy and power to emerge. You have much more control over your life this way than waiting for handouts. You can't tell me that Vilnius is any "better" than New York City. The "horrors" you mention are horrors which exist everywhere. They're not even horrors, they're life! They exist at all times, uncensored and real. Your criticism smack of Soviet age propaganda, and remind me of the pathetic, naive and imagined ideas that you of strangled cultures come to America thinking. Do you really expect people to walk here on three legs?! Unfortunately, this was true of the emigrees who came to the U.S. after the second world war: no one was really interested in engaging America, its system and make it productive for their lives. They continue to live in Lithuanian ghettos in the U.S. and thus are as naive as you who come to find "paradise" in the U.S. and expect it to be handed to you. After all, the silly war in the Balkan countries is about hanging onto identities and inabilities to mesh cultures. This renders everyone isolated and hanging on to their identities. You're American now, so come to terms with it. It's really insulting and unpremised. I suggest you actively seek venues which are more positive in nature: revolution within an existing system is a challenge, and that should be what you address, rather than criticizing from afar with such judgmental practice so typical of Eastern Europe. Sophia A. Gruzdys, USA, 03/37/96
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You obviously care a great deal about the lack of humanity in this country. I agree that this exists, but things have become impossible in the last few decades, Where I live illegal immigration is a terrible problem. Everywhere, poverty is a problem. But unfortunately in this country the poorest people have the most children, causing what little resources they have to be spread even thinner. The people who are better off have to limit the size of their families because it costs too much to raise children, it interferes too much with job success, and they want to make sure they can provide properly for the children they have. The U.S. government has made it profitable for the needy to keep reproducing like farm animals because they are given additional money monthly for each new child. Perhaps welfare reform will change this, I don't know. I used to work in a lab and if you put too many rats in a cage they will attack and destroy each other. Uncontrolled reproduction of the unskilled and impoverished here has the same result. Iris, USA, 08/01/96
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You have made many valid observations. What you fail to see are the underlying causes of these problems. Just as communism fell in the old Soviet Union, our country has also suffered the ravages of the cold war. The world looked to the United States to stand in the forefront of the cold war struggle. The resulting effect has left our nation near fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Western Europe didn't take on the global responsibility that the U.S. did and could afford to spend a larger proportion of tax revenues on social programs and infrastructure.
A major problem with Americans is our general disregard of moral responsibility. You are wrong in your assumption that more social spending will cause more responsible behavior by our poor. I believe it has the opposite effect. People who rely on the government that much have a complacent attitude. They have more children than they can afford to take care of so that they can enjoy the spiritual richness of family life. Such men may leave their families to pursue personal freedom. People eschew lower paying jobs so they can "find themselves," which ultimately leaves them unproductive. Picture the upheaval of the '60s as the cause of all of this. The only casualties of the Vietnam War weren't on the battlefields. The war tore apart our moral fiber and cohesiveness as a nation.
You criticize the government for its military spending. It has been far greater than it is now. Ronald Reagan's defense budget was huge. But it served its purpose in wearing down the Soviets in a long war of endurance. Who in the world is going to rehabilitate the great United States; the benefactors of the Marshall Plan, the defenders of democracy? Unlike Hillary Clinton's healthcare crisis, when the government's fiscal problem becomes a crisis it will be too late to do anything about it. I'm expecting an economic collapse to come suddenly, without warning. I'm fearful for the well-being of our nation. I also think I understand the problem. Roger E. Henderson, USA, 06/08/97
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I too was not born in the United States. But, unlike you, I am not an ingrate. I might feel sorry for your intellectual vacuum but of what use would that be?
Your naive and utopian dreams are based on the sand of socialism. 75 years of human misery and enslavement in the USSR is proof enough for anyone. Capitalism is not perfect because man's inventions simply aren't. Open your eyes and your heart and you'll see that not everyone is capable of bettering their life and some don't even want to. Your "heartfelt" desires to improve the lot of man serve only to massage your massive ego.
You truly want to make the world a better place? Study history. Learn what truly has worked to benefit mankind the most and dump the theories. Tony Antonuccio, USA, 05/15/97
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As someone who has visited the former USSR many times, and seen an intelligent, educated, cultured people trapped by a failed system, I would think someone such as yourself would have learned the lesson against socialism. Guess not. Michael Asher, USA, 10/25/96
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I have read the articles you wrote and posted on your page and find that I must take issue with your constant referral to America as a capitalist democracy.
First, the Constitution of the United States established America as a Republic, not a Democracy. This is an important distinction. In a Republic, policy is made by officials who are elected democratically, and rights such as free speech and the ownership of private property are protected from violation by government action in all cases where the free exercise of those rights does not infringe the rights of other citizens.
In a Democracy, policy is set by popular vote; elected officials are only enforcers. The will of the majority is supreme; the rights of minorities and individuals are secondary.
American government has slowly but surely become less of a Republic and more of a Democracy over the past two centuries, as more and more laws have been passed restricting individual rights in certain activities, not because those actives violate anyone's Constitutional rights per se, but because they are viewed to be somehow wrong by the majority. Examples are drug prohibition laws and gun control laws, which punish people not for actually hurting anyone, but for possessing certain items which the majority of the people don't think they should possess. In a Democracy the rights of any individual can be abridged or revoked by the government if the majority wills it. In a Republic, individuals' rights are protected FROM EVERYONE. The trend toward Democracy in America is disturbing and dangerous. Once it becomes OK to violate individuals rights in some cases, only because they are not in line with the will of the majority, then everyone becomes a potential target for government oppression merely for not conforming to the dictates of the vox populi. America today is far more Democratic then it should be or was intended to be by the Founders.
Second, America is not truly capitalist at all. Under Capitalism all the means of production are in private hands and the government does not interfere with decisions made by individuals to buy or sell on the free market.
One hundred years ago America was almost capitalist. This was a period of unprecedented prosperity for all Americans. Even the poor immigrants in the big cities were much better off than they had been under the monarchies of Europe and the gap between rich and poor was much smaller than it is today. That was before anti-trust laws, labor laws, and other government policies curbing economic activity were enacted. Throughout the 20th century the government has gained unprecedented (by American standards) control over economic decisions. There is not a single industry that isn't regulated and controlled by voluminous laws and executive edicts. Those who work outside these regulations are punished by fines or imprisonment, even if there supposed crimes do not violate anyone's Constitutional rights in any way. Every law that is passed to control economic behavior is an extension of government power outside of the realm of protecting Constitutional rights and into the realm of enforcing the will of the majority. Thus, the slow death of Capitalism is a symptom of America's descent into Democracy. Indeed, the two are incompatible, as Capitalism requires that the individual's right to private property be inviolable, whereas Democracy says that anything goes, including the forcible expropriation of property by the government, as long as 51% of the people approve. The far-reaching and intrusive regulation of industry and commerce, without actual ownership of the means of production by the state, as we now have in America, is characteristic of Fascism, and creates the incentive, for those who have wealth, to buy politicians so as to influence government policy to their benefit. The result is collusion between the economic elite and the political elite to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Government interference with production and trade are anti-capitalist and create corruption among government officials. Another way America deviates from a Capitalist society is the enormous social welfare programs that have been established and administered by the government, by which the wealth and labor of productive individuals is forcibly expropriated (taxed) in order to support those who by chance or choice do not produce enough to support themselves. The government interferes with economic decisions by mitigating the potential financial harm caused by bad decision making. Like you, I to want to see a society where children are fed and the elderly and infirm are cared for. To this end I regularly donate to worthy private charities, as do most of my Capitalist friends. I have never been rich, yet I believe it is God's will that I should give aid to those in need, VOLUNTARILY. Forcing a man to behave as if he were moral does not a moral man make; it makes a slave. I CHOOSE to act according to what I know is right. What I object to is the forcible confiscation of the product of my labor, the primary means of which is the income tax. Whether it is used for good or evil does not change the fact that it been taken from me by force; it has been stolen. The establishment of a progressive income tax is the second plank of the Communist Manifesto, a decidedly un-Capitalist policy for a for a country which you refer to consistently as Capitalist.
Consider the grossly ineffectual and corrupt nature of attempts by the government to promote social welfare, as compared to the results produced by private charity. Before the government controlled education anyone who wanted to go to school had to pay their own way. Poor children could only attend church schools or other charity run schools. Today every citizen is forced to pay for schools whether they attend or, have children who attend, or not, and every child is not only guaranteed a free education, they are required to obtain one. Literacy rates in America are LOWER today then they were in the 1840s, before education was socialized. Children did not feel the need to bring guns and knives to school in order to protect themselves from other students. Pycho-active drugs (like ritalin) were not administered to students in order to try and force them to learn. (Public education is, I believe, the tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto) Private charities for the needy require that recipients get of drugs and encourage them to look forward to the day when they can support themselves. Those charities which are most effective find that the amount and number of donations is directly proportional to their success in alleviating the suffering of the poor. This is an effect of the free market. Charity workers jobs depend on their ability to reduce poverty. Government welfare programs have created a permanent under-class, who continue to receive payment regardless of their behavior or intentions, destroying the incentive of beneficiaries to get off the dole. It has also created an industry of bureaucrats whose jobs depend on the continued existence of poverty. I could site examples of the failure of government social welfare programs all day, but the point is that they exist as part of the status quo in America (Socialist institutions embedded in a country that you call Capitalist) and they DON'T WORK.
America is not nearly as capitalist as you seem to think. Socialist welfare policies and Fascist industrial and commercial policies are the order of the day. Do you know what party represents the union of the principles of Socialism and Fascism? The National Socialist German Workers Party, also known as the Nazi Party. While America may not be purely Democratic (thank God!), it is a Republic where the Democratic principle of the superiority of the will of the majority over the rights of the individual has gained much favor. As a result the twin evils of Socialism and Fascism have become the established order in America, though the individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution have not yet been completely destroyed. However, with each new law that is passed, with each new regulatory agency that is set up, America inches closer to the full expression of the union of Socialism and Fascism.
America today is a Republic in name only; I will concede to you that it has, in spirit, become primarily a Democracy. The Weimar Republic in Germany also accepted the idea that individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are subordinate to the will of the majority. The Fascist/Socialist Democracy that evolved led to the election of the man who most accurately and eloquently expressed the principles of such a society: Hitler. I have shown that America is not Capitalist, precisely because it has become Democratic. I strongly believe in the values of free speech and peaceful persuasion. I hope that you will read and understand my words, and that they will influence you to see what the ultimate result of voting for people like Ralph Nader will be; unless we uphold individual liberty to be our highest principle we will all become slaves to the state. James A Chappelow, USA, 12/08/97
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Sorry to hear about your bad experiences here in America. Yes, I too would get the hell out as soon as I could dig up the plane fare. This country isn't for you, it's for people with determination and the guts to make it work for them, not for people who want something for nothing and be taken care of in a socialist-run, dull, everybody-the-same, environment. I talk to quite a few people from Eastern Europe and have yet to meet someone who thinks they're worse off here.
If you're worried about crime, go buy yourself a handgun, forget about that socialist crap and join the rat race. Guarantee you'll like it after you buy your first new car, TV and home. You'll be enjoying the fruits of your labor, while sitting back and watching all the lazy poor people piss and moan about not having anything.
True, I am a conservative in my beliefs, somewhat right wing, capitalist I suppose, and fiercely believe in freedom and liberty for everyone, and I'm not ignorant to what goes on around me. There are many, many things wrong in this country, and in the rest of the world, due in no small part to the greed of a few and their lust for power over the many. Politicians around the world are rotten and are looking out for their own interests, not representing their people, people themselves are apathetic, mean, lazy and always looking for the easy way, and quick to criticize but not willing to do a damn thing to try and solve the problem. But to see only the negative side of this country and not see the good, hard working, doing-the-best-they-can Americans, the people I see every day, is very unfair. Now I realize this could be a bogus front for a left wing group or (?) in which case disregard all of the above, thanks but no thanks, but if you are as you say, I'm genuinely interested in what you think the 'solution' is. Apparently you've lived under communism, socialism, now capitalism, and still not happy with any.
I could go on and on, but why bother. I love it here and done very well in our rotten capitalist society. Hope you find what you are looking for somewhere. Bob Tadlock, USA, 11/10/97
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Your page is interesting, if for nothing else, but to see how a (once) communist cannot cope with a free society. Your statements seem to indicate that you would, as did the Soviet leaders from Stalin to Brezhnev and Kosygin, love to destroy the US. (Maybe you want to be a hero to your home folk buy making such exaggerated hate-mongering statements about your dreaded and hated enemy of the past?) You seem to so miss the Soviet Union and their way of giving you freedom and choices, the communist repressed opportunity to voice your opinion without fear of arrest, death or reprisal, the communist repressed opportunity to run for public office and have only one party (Communist) party to vote for, the communist repressed opportunity to worship as you wish. You do not see anything good about this country, as you are filled with old propaganda based hatred for the US and all it stands for (which many others love, as a fashion); you could have gone to any other country other than one you were already prejudiced against. Why didn't you? Maybe you would have been happier? But, then again, maybe you would only complain there too, or you came here on assignment to do exactly what you are now doing with your US bashing?
I have talked to many people from around the world, not just ones in a box or on the net or hate filled people, but ones who have lived in and not just visited various nations. It does not matter where you live, past or present, the world is getting to be a more violent place. Moreover, the world as a very bloody past and present (could you have dared written or reported about things in the USSR as here?). In the US they seem to love to say and report bad news as the mainly only news (but there is much more). What you would be used to in the USSR, is that data not being reported, those who oppose the system to be removed, and possibly disposed of permanently. In the US, the government does not have a Gulag to put the troublemakers nor summarily execute people those they don't agree with (would you dare write about the USSR when you were there, as you do about the US now? What do you think the consequences would have been?)
do not agree with all that goes on in the US (none of do), but if I lived anywhere and hated it and wanted to insure I was miserable, as your words show you are, I would too be most miserable.
You talk, in true old Soviet fashion, of the US history but fail to note what happened in your area from World War I, to the Lithuanian nationalist fighting from 1918 to 1920 and the wonderful time you apparently had from 1939 to 1945, let alone with the Stalin and later Soviet years; but that was not bloody to you, but blissful. Was there any excuse for the blood shed by the Soviets, that TAAS would never have reported? What about the arrests, imprisonment and executions by the Soviets, people turning in their own relatives and people disappearing night and day by the KGB and police to never be seen again? That does not happen here, maybe you think it should? Is that how you think crime here should be handled, including those who dare speak against the government? (Strange you want to boycott China, but hate "capitalism"; maybe that is because China is an age old enemy too?)
The biggest problem, that no European country could previoulsy understand, but I understand with influx of others from Mid east and other non-European nations are now beginning to notice, is the race problem in this nation. Now, unlike the Nazis and the Soviets, who both on large part tried to eliminate that problem with the like solutions, as the "Jewish problem", as it was called was dealt with; but we do not do that here in the US; but that was not bloody what happened to those people who were inconvienent there, was it. Even a woman with German TV I talked to said that the prisons and crime here are obviously a race related problem. Maybe, we should, by your statements, use the old Nazi/Communist approach and eliminate the "problem" with some final solution? That is not a good idea at all; I would much rather disagree than do a wholesale killing of those I disagree with, as is the above's historical approach.
Maybe, you would rather be in the USSR, where, according to a Romanian man I talked to, would get a banana only once a month? No, I do not think anyone, anywhere should live their life only for things or money. The Bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil; never has more truth been spoken or written. The real important things, next to God, are those you cannot buy with money, nor can any government bestow on you; the love and time with your wife and children, your health, taking time to talk to relatives, friends and neighbors, but also, unlike what you came from, not have to be afraid of what you say or do for fear of being arrested or killed and other such things. Things and money burn and really (should) count for nothing in the long run; they should, as best, be a means to an end, not the end itself, nor should pleasure for pleasure's sake.
Was the USSR a Christian nation, which you imply? If so, why did they establish the All-Union Institute of Scientific Atheism? That does not sound like being any religion but atheist, does it? Again, to attack the great demon, the US, by the old methods? I would imagine, if God would in an audible voice speak to us now, He would tell us that we have all gone astray, there is none righteous, no not one, none seek Him, as the Bible says. Sad, but true.
The US is, in fact, no longer, unfortunately, a Christian nation. That is the lethargy of the people.
While US bashing has long been a treat in the world, who do most countries look for for help? The US. Curious.
The US is not a nation of US, but we are of German, Danish, French, Belgian, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, African, Jewish, Arab and all other nation descent. We have many faces, not just one. We have ideologies that stretch from one end of the realm to the other. Many of us are proud of our hertiage, and many like myself, want to know more about our heritage in Europe, Asia, American Indian, Mid-East, Central and South America and so on.
The people here are not defined by the government. But, I would much rather have our form of government, as imperfect as it is than a totalitarian government, as you apparently long for, oppressing people even today. Look at world history, there is not one country that has not had wars, made mistakes, we are all people. Not one of us are perfect, not one.
I do not spend much time reading newspapers, or listening to TV, as it so much propaganda by those who would like to have you controlled by the only ones who can make it better-them.
I think if you came out of your state of hating this country and the people and got to know some of the people, your idea would change.
I would not recommend anyone, US born or immigrant, to "blend into the melting pot", as each person has something to contribute, if they will. But you can contribute nothing if you hate, as you seem to, not here or in your home country. Remember, the US is a "melting pot" of many nations, and not a people with no origin other than the US. Many of us want to learn about the other countries. My Romanian friend, who worked with the Romanian Communist government, is a wonderful person to talk to and to learn from, he has been in Russia, Romania, and several other satellite nations, plus Germany and others (he speaks 7 languages!). I have talked to many other people from other nations who live here too, and they enjoy it, but their mind set is not one of hatred and homesickness as it yours.
There are no perfect people here or elsewhere. As Jesus said, you who are without sin, cast the first stone. And you are throwing rocks all over. The Cold War is over, and No One really won, we all world-wide lost; the time for hating should be over, but do not think that those in the US, even with its problems, should roll over, any more than any family out there would if some one, any one, attacked their family, when they tried to help and the help was not appreciated but spit upon instead, as you have gleefully done. Darrell Jepson, USA, 12/19/97
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However, my views on the country of my birth, America, are radically different from yours (which I found on your homepage). I am disappointed to see that you have such a pessimistic outlook on your new home. Granted, there is much wrong with America and I applaud your efforts to live a simpler, purer life style, yet there is also much that is right with this country. The simple fact that you are allowed to live life in the manner in which you want to live it and post such messages is something you seem to take for granted -- this is something you and my relatives in Lithuania didn't have not too long ago. Yes, America committed atrocities in the past, yet it also saved the world from Hitler and stands as an example to the rest of the world that people of different backgrounds can come together and peacefully coexist, governing themselves. American democracy is an amazing thing -- and if the principles of America are being eroded by excessive capitalism, then this is something you and I need to fight against. Outright rejection serves no useful purpose. America is not a land of evil and violence, but an incredible experiment in which human rights and dignity are paramount. It is an experiment that is refined and fine-tuned every day -- in the history of the world there has been no other nation like America.
I write to you not to belittle you for your views, but to urge you to really, truly think about what you are saying. Yes, America is not perfect, but of all the countries and political systems around the world, this is the one I love and call home and the one which I believe most closely realizes its goals: to offer its citizens life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Gintaras K. Duda, USA, 11/19/97
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I read your articles thoughtfully and you express what so many Lithuanians and others express: disillusionment with the society around you. This is a real problem. Everyone in this world is either a part of the problem or a part of the solution. I am surprised that Lithuanians learned almost nothing from their suffering under Communist totalitarianism.
I like you, because you seem to have the courage to do something in a better direction. I agree with your general evaluation of the politico-economic systems on both sides of the ocean. Actually, the new word for "Communism" is "Democracy." More accurately, the word is "Demonocracy." Vilkas, USA, 02/08/97
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The US may not be the best country in your eyes, but you also only mentioned the bad parts. You shouldn't forget that this isn't a caste society. Even those that are born homeless could one day become president. I know it doesn't happen often, but the opportunity to become one those terrible oppressors is a dream that keeps this nation moving! You also keep mentioning that our welfare system is so terrible, but why should a poor woman sit at home and collect a check form the government just for having children? The children should be supported by their local community, not the Federal Government! You were wrong on one other count. While a college education is becoming harder to achieve for the middle class, it is available for almost everyone living below the poverty line. I have to agree with you that this country isn't perfect, but I think that before you start judging the US for what you view as evil-ness, you should really become familiar with our history. You think that we spend too much money on the military, but it has saved us enough times that it's worth it. Besides, the entire world sponges off the American Army in many ways. The US also helps many other countries that should be able to take care of themselves. Look at your precious Europe. Who was it that saved them in WWII? I believe it was the US!! If you want to see the real reason for our high taxes take a look at the financial records of that war. If you do you'll see that out of all the money that was lent to Europe for the war and the restoration only Finland paid us back! The American culture is not as lost as many people seem to think! You just look for it in all the wrong places. American culture isn't in the big cities, it's in the small towns (especially in the mid- west, the South, and the West). If you spent any time in a true rural town in any of these areas you would find a very rich culture that can never be matched in any other country in the world. The biggest difference is that the American culture is not flaunted. We may appear to be a social wasteland, but at least we still have our pride! Besides, think about where most great discoveries originate. The US places more stress on making things easier. Remember: Work smarter not harder! Becky VanDenheuvel, USA, 12/16/96
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I am very sorry that you feel the way you do about the USA. Sure, we have a lot of problems, but things are certainly a lot better here than in many other places. Please remember that no one forced you to become US citizens, and you are welcome to leave at any time if you do not like it. Mary, USA, 11/19/97
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While I abhor the "love it or leave it" mentality in general, it does have some valid applications. Applying it to you would be one such valid application. Let me explain.
In your overly simplistic slam of the United States, you reveal yourself for what you really are, a socialist. Yes, this society is sick, yes, there are problems with too much government, too much corrupt government, TOO MUCH SOCIALISM.
However, it seems that the ideals and principles that the founding fathers of this country laid down, that made this country great, ideals and principles that are now being abandoned and thus causing the problems we presently have, are too big for you. With one phrase, "Only in America is there the need for car camps for the homeless as here in Eugene" you reveal your socialist mindset. Like all socialists of your ilk, you refuse to accept personal responsibility for your own providence, expecting and demanding government to satisfy your every need. This is anathema to a free people!
The Declaration of Independence reveals the mind of the founding fathers of this great country concerning the role of government:
"We hold these truths to be SELF EVIDENT: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR with certain unalienable rights (NOT governments, Valdas!); that among these are life, liberty, and PERSUIT of happiness (NOT the government guarantee of happiness Valdas!); that, TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DRIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED."
Did you get that, Valdas? Did that soak into your shallow mind? The sole purpose of government is to SECURE, that is to GUARANTEE, human rights. This doesn't mean provide for your every need, it doesn't mean provide for your sustenance, tuck you into bed at night, wipe your widdle nose and widdle bun for you.
You have added nothing to this country by your move here, Valdas, rather you have added to the problems of it. YOU ARE ONE OF THE PROBLEMS.
There is one area you do seem to fit right into, Valdas. Being a Journalist you blend in with the majority of main stream journalism, "Yellow Dog Journalism" that is.
So, I conclude, in light of your being one of the problems, if you cannot find a constructive non- socialist way to benefit this country, "Love it or leave it!" A.K. Pritchard, USA, 05/04/96

I PROPOSE CRIMINALIZING THE REPUBLICAN ISRAELITE PARTY

2008-11-30T17:42:00.000-08:00

I was at Wal-Mart and the people looked worried, sad, depressed. Already the sadness is growing, there is a lot of offer of food but little demand, this will lead to a contradictory situation and under consumption

the system will grind to a halt, i saw lots of turkeys but people couldn't buy them even though they were at lower price because of post-thanxgiving sales. We are doomed, most people were not shopping a lot of food, people were under-consuming

but the question we all gotta ask ourselves is: Who destroyed the US economy? The republican party !! Who lowered the living standards of most americans? The republican party, and who destroyed the quality of life of the general american population? The Republican ISRAELITE Party

And we the poor people in USA, don't even have a right to be socialist, and read socialist literature, in this neoliberal hell

2008-11-29T15:27:00.001-08:00

Dear Friends: It seems to me that we the poor people of USA, the rejected, the oppressed victims of this neoliberal hell, don't even have a right to escape this meaningless existence by at least engaging in marxist literature. It looks like if we were born to conform to this satanic reality, or else we would be cast out. Because we don't count, we are animals in USA, tax and wage-slaves. Individuals, groups and societies who complain, protest, and riot, do it not because they wake up some day and say: "Let's start a riot and protest against this wild capitalist system." But because of a natural survival reaction that all living organisms have. So while we are here on earth our task and duty is to complain as much as we can, individually or collectively thru a socialist-marxist revolution, as the *only* solution for this plutocratic-capitalist imperialist system of USA.

.

Venezuelan Direct Democracy – The case of the Consejos Comunales

2008-11-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

I am not inventing stuff about Venezuela. All i say is backed by scientific, rational, moralist sources such as Noam Chomsky, alternative sites such as http://www.globalresearch.ca etc.

Venezuelan Direct Democracy – The case of the Consejos Comunales

Author: Michael Albert and Adam Gill - ZNetSource (Text): ZNetSource (URL):
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19681

In 2004, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez created a movement named the consejos comunales (communal councils) aimed at creating more responsive local governance by handing local budgetary and legislative power to the councils. This movement was seen by Chavez as one of the most important of the five motors of the ‘Bolivarian Revolution' in that they should influence policy from the grassroots upwards. Great interest in the councils was evident between 2004 and 2007 in that thousands formed quickly and $5 Billion was given to them during this period. Communal banks are a pre-requisite to receiving funds from the government so as to avoid clientalistic relationships of dependency.
Local councils have the power to vote on issues directly affecting their community and have used this to make significant changes. Major improvements have included building social housing and repairing roads. The local councils are formed with 200-400 families with members aged 15 and above and have an executive council and representatives of groups within the community.
I asked Michael Albert if he might be able to offer his opinion on this movement in Venezuela.
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What do you feel the role of the Communal Councils is strategically and politically?
Well, I believe they are partly intended, in the present, to push forward the whole revolutionary process by increasing current participation, raising consciousness, etc.
But I also believe that for a great many folks in Venezuela, both inside and outside the government, the councils are the evolving infrastructure of a new polity. The idea is that people should govern their own lives, and in that context local councils are the proposed vehicle for doing it. As such, they are intended to become an alternative to rather than just being an adjunct to local governments of mayors and governors and the like.
Would you say the councils have created social change or more that their energies are being pulled in other directions?
I don't feel very equipped to answer this question, and I am not entirely sure, in any case, what you mean by "other directions." I can judge only from a very great difference and based on talks with only a limited number of people what the councils are up to.
My impression, and it is tentative, is that the councils are a vast and evolving experiment and project, by no means final in form and by no means fully up to speed, but coming along, though many problems still exist. First, for example, there is a population which - like our population in the U.S - has almost zero experience prior to this experiment with serious democracy much less participatory self management. So the councils and their members are learning in practice, and for many people that has ups and downs. But second, and less benign, there are obstacles as well having to do not only with past habits or current doubts, but also with real opposition, as in local governing and corporate elites not wanting this experiment to work.
Venezuela seems to me to be uniquely seeking a gigantic revolution in structures and relations - not just economically but also politically, socially, culturally - all non violently and even without much confrontation, none provoked by the agents of change. That is historically ambitious, to say the least.
So in one corner you have corporate media continuing, and corporate ownership in many realms, and governors and mayors and whatnot from the prior history of the country, all also still in place, nearly all still hoping to resurrect that prior history. In the other corner you have the Bolivarian activists, and Chavez, and a large proportion of the non elite population, instead trying to escape that past into something fundamentally new.
Venezuala is, in other words, a daily economic, political, social, and cultural cauldron of experiment and opposition - and thus a site of intense struggle. Or that is how I see Venezuela, at any rate, and in that context the local communal councils are partly a tool of the struggle but are also partly seeds of a new future being built in the present.
Should Communal Councils be free of political party influence?
This depends, I think, on what you mean by party influence. So, for example, it wouldn't make sense to say there should be no party influence. Imagine a council with people in it, of course. Some people are in one party, some people are in another party. The parties they are in influence those people's desires (and vice versa). The people then bring their desires to the councils, so through their members the parties influence the councils as well. That much is fine, in my view. It would make no sense to say that shouldn't occur.
So, for example, there are councils in communities that are very Bolivarian, and they have views and aims quite like those of the Bolivarian revolution. There are other councils in communities that are opposed to Bolivarian projects, and those councils reflect those opposition views. The parties are in part carriers of the views and the people form parties, in turn, influence the councils.
On the other hand, I think you might mean should parties as entities be able to themselves direct or otherwise impact councils, other than by the fact of their members indirectly doing so. Here I think the answer is no, they should not be able to do that.
Your question is a bit like asking, in the U.S., should local government (just imagine, for the sake of the discussion, that it was actually grassroots and participatory) be in any way at all subject to instruction or control by political parties (other than being impacted by the local members of the community who happen to be in parties)? Well, of course it shouldn't, and ditto for Venezuela. A party should impact councils simply by impacting the population that composes the councils, but not by some sort of collective or structural authority.
Do you think that party influence and political movements still operate as clients of central governments?
I am not sure I understand this question. In Venezuela, at present, the Bolivarian revolution is very much a manifestation of the ideas and will of President Chavez. We might prefer that the movement had bubbled up, instead, from the population, and that Chavez was merely one among many carriers of their intentions - but that isn't the case. In fact, Chavez is constantly trying to impact what the population thinks and wants, not just to hear from it. The government is not only administering Venezuela, as it is seeking to use state power as a tool to build social involvement and activism. It is very unusual, of course.
So in that context, the recently created revolutionary party Chavez is in is certainly affected greatly by him, as are the social movements whose members typically consider him a repository of valuable ideas and plans, as is the government. Again, this is arguably not an optimal picture, and it is certainly an unusual one - a president seeking to build movements that will replace authorities, including the old government structures, including himself - at least that's the current agenda - throughout the country - but that is what is happening, or so it seems to me, from my admittedly limited contact.
Can the Communal Councils in your opinion, become the only form of local government in Venezuela? What obstacles do you perceive to be happening now and possibly in the future?
I certainly think that is possible, and that that is the goal, not just conceivable, at least in many people's minds, including in the relevant political ministries. I sat in offices and heard them explain their hopes for these councils becoming the seat of governing power throughout the country, describing the 50,000 councils that were needed - with about 30,000 currently formed - and describing the gains in confidence and methods also needed within the councils, and explaining that yes, these would be above majors and governors and even the President. So, yes, having them be the primary locus of government power is the aim. Might that aim be swept aside as a goal? Sure, it might. But it also might come true as a reality.
As Communal Councils are the constitutional embodiment of popular power in Venezuela, do you think President Chávez would respect this power if the popular mandate was against one of his policies?
I don't have to guess. He already has. And so have the most left Bolivarian mayors, for that matter. In contrast, of course, the opposition simply ignores democratic desires unless they happen to match the opposition's agenda.
A very Bolivarian Mayor, in response to my asking a similar question, described a long interaction with the communal councils in his town, overturning what he thought was a local priority and imposing, on him, a different agenda. He also described turning over to the council full control over the local government budget, not just a little part of it, so now he has to act their permission for projects, rather than vice versa.
As far as Chavez is concerned, for the most part so far there is no precise test because the local councils are addressing local issues, and Chavez pretty much stays out of that. But I asked your question in a slightly different form - what would happen if the councils proposed an electoral change Chavez didn't want. The answer was that their will would override his. And I see no reason, so far, to doubt it, because Chavez has given in to plebiscites and votes - which are far less seriously participatory then something decided in the councils would be, so why wouldn't he give in to institutions he is struggling so hard to empower? We don't know, but that is my guess.
What is the potential for the Communal Councils power in the future?
I believe their potential is to become the infrastructure of government in a transformed Venezuela. Whether there would even be such things as Mayors, Governors, etc., still existing in that case, I don't know. You would certainly various organizations and structures for political tasks, but perhaps not those particular ones. But if they did continue to exist, they would be subordinate, as some already are.
Do you think that we as Westerners, could learn from the Communal Council experience and is direct democracy the only or best way forward in local and even national politics in tackling local and global issues like global climate change and economic crises?
This is a big question but yes, of course I believe we could learn a tremendous amount from Venezuela, both about the struggle and in particular one way - not the only way - to wage it, and also about the goals, of course.
I know your emphasis here is on the councils, and they are critically important, I very much agree, and they are also arguably the part of the Bolivarian project that is most solidly and fully conceived, even as they are also still developing - but I would say there is also much to learn in other realms of society, too, and that dealing with economics and ecology has much to do with those other realms, not just the political structures.
Is Venezuela in a sense more progressive than other countries in terms of representation or could it be viewed that it is more historically tied to relationships of reliance politically and indeed on its extractive economy?
Of course it is greatly focused on oil, but I don't see how that is contrary to being more progressive. Rather, the oil revenues have created room to move, and provided a degree of protection, ironically, against incursions, on the one hand, but, agreed, on the other hand, they also impose complicated problems. I don't know what you are referring to when you say reliance politically - unless you mean on world exchange and, in the past, on the U.S. Well, yes, that is a history that matters but Venezuela is doing incredible things on that score too, seeking to not only diversify its international relations, but even to establish new structures and norms outside typical market logic.
In terms of the development of communes in Venezuelan communities and proposed networks of community ownership (as mentioned in the April 13th Mission), would you say that collective ownership could be one of the best ways to consolidate Socialism?
Well, yes and no. Getting rid of private ownership is certainly one important thing to do. But if you mean having collective ownership as in some group owning a workplace instead of some set of stockholders owning it - say the workforce or the surrounding community being the new owners - then, no, I don't honestly think that has much to do with real socialism.
Yes, to escape from capitalism includes escaping from stockholders owning workplaces and industries. That much is true enough. But to decide more than that, it depends what the aim is. If we would be satisfied with a new economy that didn't have private owners but in which the behavior of collective owners was still mediated by market competition and still driven by seeking their own personal profit - then the change you note to groups owning could be called critical to that overall goal.
But that isn't my goal, and from talking to people in many different venues in Venezuela, I don't think it is the most advanced Bolivarian goal, either. Rather, I think they want, as I want, an economy that seeks to fulfil and develop its citizens rather than to pit them against each other and, even more, an economy that is classless rather than still class divided. This would take time to discuss more fully, but I would say that moving away from any idea of ownership at all is critical, yes, but so too is escaping the logic of market competition, and also escaping the logic of corporate divisions of labor.
When interviewing someone very active in trying to transform a major workplace, an aluminium factory, he expressed a very similar perspective, arguing that getting rid of the old capitalist owners was a nice step forward but what would really indicate success was redefining the structure of work which meant not only democratizing it, but changing the division of labor so everyone could fully participate, and then also changing remuneration and the ties among workplaces.
What are the pros and cons of direct democracy over representative democracy in your opinion?
First I don't think our choice is all of one or all of the other. Suppose we want to attain as much as possible, short of silly perfectionism that costs way too much in time and effort, that each person in society has an influence on decisions in proportion as they are affected by them. If that is our aim then we will choose a mix of political structures and methods to attain it. The method - representative or direct - isn't the principle, it is self-management that is the principle. My expectation is that with that mindset we would likely sometimes utilize overwhelmingly local direct council decision making, but other times we might utilize, as well, recallable representatives, and sometimes something in between.
The Venezuelan government officials I have talked to lean in their preference, I think, even further toward decisions always being taken at the base than I do. They make that pretty much a principle, whereas I think it is a method, often worthy, but sometimes not really viable.
Suppose, for example, to be crass about it, that it turns out that in a revolutionized Bolivarian Venezuela there are just a couple of hundred national political decisions a year to be made. Okay, if so, maybe every one of those national legislative or executive decisions could be voted on in local councils by all citizens. But what if there are 10,000 such decisions that address the whole country? Then it seems rather obvious that you can't have every citizen voting on each issue. So the question arises, how do you delegate, or do other things, to best convey self-managing say in such circumstances.
What I think is arguably most exciting about Venezuela so far is that it is not doctrinaire. They don't think that if something is written somewhere, in some text, that that makes it so. They instead test ideas, learn from the results and refine their view. My guess is they will learn pretty quickly that you can't have everyone making every decision, and then they will adapt their structures to maintain participation and what I hope will be self management, given that reality.
Are the people better qualified to make the ‘right' decision when in the West we are taught to trust in our ‘leaders'?
Expert knowledge matters. But it should not convey excess votes in deciding outcomes. Suppose you and two friends are deciding on a restaurant. If someone knows something relevant about a possible place to go, it matters. The knowledgeable party will put it into the discussion. But you don't then all say, okay, since you had that knowledge, you get to decide. Rather you all cooperatively decide in light of the knowledge.
Why shouldn't the same hold true in a country. It makes no sense to say we should all together make decisions about what to invest in, or about most other matters, without paying very close attention to expert information. But, even so, there is no reason to give experts who provide useful information the right to make decisions for us.
So the polarity between consulting good insights and distributing influence among those affected is simply false. We can do both, and we should.
There have been reports of opposition groups, mayors and governors hindering the process of changes that the Communal Councils have made and have been reluctant to hand power to them too. How many mayors will obstruct the power transfer over the coming years and what will the PSUV do to manage this situation do you feel?
It is more than just reports. It is of course what the opposition does, period, and it is also the approach of most mayors and governors, as far as I can determine. The exceptions are exemplary, but are still few. They are mayors and governors who are organizing and facilitating their own loss of power and loss of elite standing whereas the folks you talk about are trying to instead obstruct new ways to preserve old ways.
To guess what will be done, from outside, is limited to a few simple observations, I think. So we can reasonably predict that the truly Bolivarian elements will keep trying to amass popular support and movement activism including growth of the councils, until whatever mayors and governors remain opposed to the transformation are simply voted out. That is the aim, I think, non violent and largely non confrontational. But what happens if mayors of governors resist and try to subvert change even more aggressively, preventing elections or cheating, and so on? I don't know. But as long as Chavez is pursuing the Bolivarian agenda and is President, there are many tools a the disposal of change.
How, do you imagine the opposition will position itself as a movement if the only way to change local issues is in forming Communal Councils?
In some places it will, as it has already, form such councils and dominate them and try to use them to get outcomes it favors. That is a kind of struggle that is going to proceed for some time to come, even in best case scenarios, I think. But I think there is a bigger issue because I don't think the opposition can succeed in this type contest, in the long run. So the bigger aim they will have, if they are to persist, is to get Chavez out of office and if need be, as they have already tried, to do that by coup, or by external intervention, so as to prevent a democratic process from unfolding.
Will the electoral battles serve to break down the opposition through education or fuel the anti-Chávez sentiment?
I think without greatly increased U.S. intrusion, the opposition will steadily crumble. Honestly, I do not see them, perhaps I am wrong in this but it is my impression, as the real abiding problem for the Bolivarian revolution. Rather, the problem is the U.S., or the opposition as a vehicle for the U.S., on the one hand, and also, the possibility of devolution of the revolution from within (which might look superficially like the opposition growing, but it would really be the revolution losing its roots).
If communities of opposition Communal Councils grow and form opinions that are against the government, do you think that they too would be listened to and respected as equally as those who tow the party line?
That is the formulation that is in place, yes, true participation and true democracy, and I believe it would be followed, at least so far. But you have to be careful in what it means. If there is some council in some neighborhood or region which says we are entitled to own the oil below the ground here, or own the aluminium factory that sits here, or whatever, then no, that won't be abided, nor should it be, because it affects everyone and most everyone will be on the other side of the issue.
Take the mainstream media. It represents, I think, a relatively small sector of the population, yet it monopolizes the flow of information and entertainment. Some people think that democracy and participation means the elites who run media, own it, bias it, should be free to do what they choose. Well, that isn't my view - I think a democratic media isn't one that is overwhelmingly dominated by the will of a small percent of the population. In this case, I suspect, though I don't know, that the Bolivarian revolution doesn't for a minute think the reactionary and vile media manipulators who routinely lie to the population, deserve to control so much wealth and information. Rather, I suspect Chavez and his allies are so wedded to a non violent and a participatory approach, that they do not want to provoke even the appearance of any divergence from that path.
So the point is that so far, not only do opposition groups get heard, but they get heard disproportionately much more than they ought to, even when they demonstrably serve only narrow interests.
Is there a culture of follow me or have not?
I have no idea what you are asking with this question, sorry.
Some of the people I have interviewed in Venezuela feel that the national government is using Communal Councils and the proposed communes to do the jobs that they cannot persuade local mayors to do for them. Linked to this is that some people feel that the Communal Councils are a way that central government can ‘keep an eye on' movements in Venezuela.
This too I asked a lot of question about. The first point is odd and moot, I think. Asking the population of an area, and that is what the local councils are, to pursue some course that their mayor and governor are obstructing is not misusing the councils, but is, instead, simply overcoming autocracy. So that is okay. Using the councils to keep watch on things is a bit different. That could be horribly, a kind of foreshadowing of police intrusion. But there is, as I was constantly told, another side to the issue in a country where external intrusion is also possible. So reasonable people can disagree. I would not like to see this aspect utilized much, if at all, but others would say with free speech and free press and such oversight only looking for external coup planning, it is worth doing.
Do you feel that Communal Councils are a more secure form of local politics for the PSUV than mayors and is there a surveillance element to their role?
I think they are a vastly better form for local politics because I think they foreshadow real political self management. The councils are the local population. That the councils hear about a bad thing and try to fix it is okay. That they do it as a kind of assignment carried out for the national government, in my opinion, would not itself be a bad thing. Whatever this is happening, or to what extent, I don't know.
How can the Communal Councils overcome these obstacles especially due to the fact that although some mayors may wear red on the outside, they certainly do not act in line with the PSUV?
Ok Michael, thank you for your time and valuable insight into such an interesting and rich movement. I do however have just one final question; what do you believe is the future for the Communal Councils taking into account the benefits and also the obstacles facing the movement?
Adam Gill is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, UK. His research focuses on direct democracy in Venezuela, especially in the Communal Council movement.
mailto:amwgill@gmail.com
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I DON'T KNOW WHY THE FUCK ARE MOST AMERICAN CITIZENS SO CAPITALISTS SPECIALLY IN STATES LIKE TENNESSEE

2008-11-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

damn man, i don't know but US citizens, specially in right-wing states like Tennessee just don't care about politics, not even mainstream politics, instead most US citizens specially in these chauvinists, xenophobic nazi states think that by hating and blaming others they could indeed fix USA major racist, politico and economic problems.

I wish that American citizens were like Venezuelans who are smarter, more rational and less emotional. And who chosed to be architects of their own destiny by choosing the right political system which is SOCIALISM OF THE XXI CENTURY, instead of letting themselves to be robbed in war and peace by CAPITALIST BANKERS LIKE USA CITIZENS ARE BEING ROBBED RIGHT NOW WITH A 1 TRILLION DOLLARS BAILOUT SUCKED OUT OF USA CITIZENS POCKETS (TAXES)

I don't really foresee a positive change for USA. i am in Tennessee, and Obama got like 20% in this state. This state is ultra-fascist, there are not even socialist parties in this state (Go figure).

To tell you the truth, i don't really see a socialist system in the future for USA, but a fascist system real far to the right, more far-right and extremist than Bush and Reagan. or a complete desintegration of America, into 3-5 nations. There is too much egoism, depression, pessimism, apathy and hatred in this country.
and remember that hatred is the main trait of right-wing ideology.
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DON'T BLAME US CITIZENS FOR REJECTING AND HATING POLITICS !! BLAME WORKING + CHORES WHICH LEAD TO PHYSICAL TIREDNESS IN MOST US CITIZENS !!

2008-10-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

The real cause, the real root of why most US citizens reject politics and worrying about politics and what's happening within the US government is working and chores. That's right folks. Working and chores in this country destroys the most noblest souls. I myself feel destroyed physically and mentally by an excess of work, chores, domestic chores, and hassles. But indeed we must find a way to overthrow this capitalist system. But don't blame US citizens. US citizens are too exhausted, too overworked, so people in this country *deserve* some rest, not more worried than people already have

CAPITALISM IS DESTROYING US, AND THE ONLY SOLUTION IS 21ST CENTURY BOLIVARIAN SOCIALISM.

2008-10-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.marxist.net/statement/socialism.htm

THE ATTRACTIVE POWER of socialist ideas, for reasons outlined, has undoubtedly been weakened in recent years. But this will be the transitory effect of a passing conjuncture. Consciousness, especially of the newer generation of workers and youth, will be determined by current conditions and the events which will unfold.As struggles develop, the more active workers and youth will be impelled to search for an anti-capitalist programme -which can only be formulated in socialist terms.

Paradoxically, today there is a level of social tension, political protest, and youth rebellion unprecedented in the post-war period. The fragmented character of the movements to which this gives rise is primarily due to the political bankruptcy of the traditional mass organisations. But the struggles of different layers of workers, together with the phenomena of 'new social movements', are a response to the various symptoms of capitalist decline.

It is impossible to defend living standards and democratic rights, to halt the devastation of the environment, let alone end the various bloody conflicts internationally, without confronting the power of the capitalist class.Those who accept the market as an eternal form of social organisation are, in reality, condemning the majority of society to a future of increased social polarisation, mass impoverishment, and the reappearance of barbarous conditions of oppression and conflict.

Acceptance of the 'market' means acceptance of the domination of world production and trade by a small handful of big capitalist monopolies, the determination of social priorities by their drive for profits, and the 'organisation' of economic life by the anarchic market of capitalism. The only viable alternative to this remains the socialist planned economy, not on the Stalinist model, but on the basis of international planning and democratic workers' management and control.

On such a basis, science and technology could be applied to production in a balanced way, to meet human needs and for the harmonious development of society in the interests of the majority.Only on this basis will the fundamental contradictions of capitalism - private ownership of the means of production and the division of the world economy into ultimately antagonistic national economies - be overcome, thus eliminating the fundamental roots of oppression and conflict.

Our task, through intervention in struggle and a dialogue with the workers and youth, is to elaborate a socialist programme which will effectively provide a guide to action and re-establish the authority of genuine Marxism. Unless we are to capitulate to a barbarous capitalism we must fight for a socialist future.

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A soy protein pancake of 450 calories !!

2008-09-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

2 scoops of soy protein powder
1 cup of egg-beaters
5 packets of equal
vanilla
1 cup of water
A little bit of salt
1 scoop of whey protein powder
2 slices of fat free cheese

Directions: Mix all ingredients together. Cook at low fire. Put the fat-free cheese over the pancake when it's done. Enjoy !!

THE IMPORTANCE OF LENIN IN THE RUSSIA-GEORGIA CONFLICT

2008-08-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.marxist.com/war-in-south-ossetia.htm

In his book, Russia - From revolution to counterrevolution, written in 1996, Ted Grant summed up the approach of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the national question, which is worth quoting at length:

"Tsarist Russia was a prison house of nationalities. One of the key reasons for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution was its approach to the national question. Lenin realised that the only way a new socialist federation could be built was on the basis of complete equality of the national minorities that made up Russia. There could be no compulsion of one nation by another. A socialist republic could only be established on a voluntary basis, as a voluntary union of nationalities. As a consequence, the right of nations to self determination was enshrined on the banner of the party and the young Soviet republic, up to and including secession.

"Lenin stood for the unity of the peoples of the former Tsarist empire, but it had to be a voluntary unity. That is why he insisted from the very beginning on the right to self-determination. This idea which is frequently misinterpreted to mean a demand for separation is entirely incorrect. The Bolsheviks did not advocate separation, but defended the broadest possible extension of national self-determination, up to and including separation. No one has the right to oblige a people to live within the confines of a state when the majority do not wish to do so. But the right to self-determination no more implies the demand to separate than the right to divorce means the demand that all couples must separate, or that the right to abortion means that all pregnancies must be terminated."

But is also important to point out that:
"The right of self-determination was an important part of Lenin's programme, insofar as it demonstrated clearly to the oppressed workers and peasants (especially the latter) of Poland, Georgia, Latvia and the Ukraine that the Russian workers had no interest in oppressing them and would firmly defend their right to determine their own destiny. But this was only half of Lenin's programme on the national question. The other half was equally as important - the need to uphold the union of the proletariat above all national, linguistic or religious differences. As far as the Bolshevik Party was concerned, Lenin always opposed any tendency to divide the party (and the workers' movement in general) along national lines."

Lenin was opposed to any manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism. "I declare war to the death of Great Russian chauvinism", he wrote to Kamenev, and regarded this question as so important to determine his irrevocable break with Stalin when he was already terminally ill on the question of the shameful behaviour of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky against the opposition of the Georgian Communists' to their plans for the Federation. As Ted Grant explained:
"After the Revolution, Lenin hoped that there could be a voluntary and fraternal union of the peoples of the former Tsarist empire in the form of a Soviet Federation. To this end, he demanded that the nationalities be treated with extreme sensitivity. Every manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism was to be rooted out. As a matter of fact, for some time after October, the word ‘Russia' disappeared altogether from official documents. The official name of the homeland of October was simply ‘the Workers' State'."

Lenin's approach is the key to look for a way out from this nightmare. In the Caucasus and in the rest of the former Soviet Union.

For a new OctoberThe class struggle in all these countries, beginning with Russia, is now poisoned by the national question. Russian workers will not gain anything from the war in Georgia except an emboldened Putin and the mushrooming of neo-Nazi organisations, which will engage in violence against workers and youth from the Caucasus, and against Russian workers and their organisations in the future. Only the Marxists can provide a programme and a perspective for resolving the scars of the national question, which is dependent on the struggle of the working class and the establishment of a socialist federation of states in the former Soviet Union and internationally.

The socialist alternative may seem far-off and difficult. But the foundations for it were already laid in the past in practice by the October Revolution. This is an inspiration for the struggle against capitalism, imperialism and nationalism today. Otherwise, the capitalist present is horror without end.

Today the enemy of the Russian working class are their new capitalist masters. This is already visible in the powerful class hatred against the capitalists. The mood amongst workers is not different in other former Soviet republics, including Georgia, where there is a sharp class polarisation in society and oligarchs of the likes of Kakha Benkuidze, who made billions in the metal industry in the Urals during the privatisations and subsequently became a minister in Saakashvili's government, and famously promised "to privatise everything except his conscience."

Yet in Georgia there has recently been a reaction against Georgian oligarchs, with mass protests in Tblisi towards the end of last year, which were violently crushed by the Georgian state. At the moment in Georgia there will be confusion and shock at the war, and bitterness against Russia. But the class struggle will break through the hysteria. The nationalist demagogy of Saakashvili is a sign of his weakness. Without it he does not have a stable base of support. All bourgeois politicians and policies in Georgia are empty. The workers have no option but to fight back.

In fact, the rash of wars that scar the planet are not only a sign of reaction. These wars are also a sign of the crisis of the system on a global scale.

Globalisation means not only imperialism as an economic and military fact, but also the globalised crisis of capitalism and the potential for the workers to fight back against the ills of capitalism in every country. If Lenin was speaking to workers today, he would begin by hammering home the world crisis of capitalism, and making concrete the perspective of the world revolution, which has already begun in Latin America, and is finding an echo in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

But just as Lenin would underline that there are two Americas, the America of the capitalist and the America of the worker, he also explained at every opportunity that there are two Russias. Inequality has never reached such burning depths as at the present time. The Rublyovka district near Moscow has most billionaires per square kilometre in the world, just as the Russian Duma has more billionaires than any other parliament in the world. These fabulously rich live in effect in another country, with special police protection, like a court procession, when they travel on the roads, stopping the traffic. They have no contact with ordinary Russians, whose incomes are being eroded by inflation, or are being cut outright by the greed of the bosses. This was the case with the miners of Severouralsk.

After two decades of attacks the Russian workers are beginning to fight back. This may be temporarily cut across by the frenzy of Russia's military success. But the Kremlin's foreign policy holds nothing progressive for Russian workers, who have no choice but to fight against their capitalist masters both at home and abroad.

There is no way out for Russian and Georgian workers than to join forces together against imperialist meddling and their own exploiters. The only tradition that can unite all workers regardless for their nationality, language, colour and religion is that of Bolshevism and the tradition of October.

Long live proletarian solidarity!

For a new October!

For a socialist federation of the Caucasus and internationally!

So i ate too much rice today (No way !!) I am going back to my high protein diet !! Fooled by high-carb capitalism again !!

2008-07-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

Hello folks: I stress the importance of diet, because we as human species need to take care of what goes into our mouths. Well i was doing this high protein diet, and today i wanted to experiment by eating a bit of more carbs, shit man. And after i ate my big bowl of rice, i felt like if i drank a glass of rum or something. My head was spinning, i think from the insulin-spike !!

However it didn't have too much rice, just a bit more like 2 tablespoons more than i usually eat. I usually eat 1/3 cup of boiled rice. But today i had like 2/3 cups of it. Man, and to tell u the truth Dr. Atkins and the High-Protein diet philosophers are true indeed, and corporate health care doctors are very WRONG !!

My personal experience with Soy Protein

2008-06-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is my personal experience with soy protein. I have been eating for breakfast soy-protein pancakes made with the following ingredients:

SOY PROTEIN PANCAKE (46 grams of protein, 200 calories)

1/2 cup of egg-beaters
1/2 cup of water
1 scoop of soy-protein powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
3 packets of equal diet sugar
2 slices of fat-free cheese
Butter cooking spray

Mix all ingredients, and cook in a heated pan with cooking spray at low fire. When done on 1 side, flip over to the next side. After flipping over place the 2 slices of fat-free cheese on top of the pancake till they melt.

Ok i used to eat this every day for breakfast, it tasted real good, i loved it. but I don't know i felt like a little bloated some times, and I've read that soy protein decreases testosterone levels which lead to weight-gain.

Well here is my take on that. Some days i used to cook that soy protein pancake with 1 1/2 scoops of soy-protein powder, and i felt so puffy, bloated, that i think soy protein indeed causes some water retention and slowing down of the metabolism because of slower testosterone levels.

That's my personal experience with soy-protein powder

:-)

INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE: ONE THE BEST POLITICAL NEWS PAGES OF THE INTERNET !!

2008-06-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/intent.htm

Purpose and Intent of this website:

This website does not suggest that it contains the "truth". The truth is a combination of all information and all facts relating to a topic. It is therefore unachievable (in my opinion) for anyone to say "I know the truth."

If you came to this site in search of "the truth" you will be disappointed. That is also true of CNN, FOX , ABC etc. If you came to gather information you may find it a useful resource.

Gibran says in the "Prophet" Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."

That brings me to my first point:
John Adams said "Liberty can not be preserved without general knowledge among people" this statement points to the absolute necessity of an informed citizenry if our nation is to remain a functioning free society.

This means that each citizen has a civic responsibility to inform himself and share that information with others. The corporate media pumps information into our homes and does a great job of providing the information that our government wants us to know. It has in my opinion become the propaganda arm of government, and a great number of those who call themselves journalists are in fact nothing less than presstitutes.

Those who wish to inhibit free access to information are in my opinion a great danger to our nation. Why would any adult interfere with the right of fellow citizens to inform themselves?

There is a war going on for the minds of America, those waging this war are determined to control the American people by taking possession of our minds and by controlling our sources of information.

Truth is indefinable. Information is unlimited.

PUBLIC RELATIONS = PROPAGANDA

Question often asked by readers?

What are your sources?
Wire-services, international press, readers, etc, etc..... Exactly the same wire-services used by corporate media. The information contained in this web site is content that other U.S. news sources prefer not to provide to the American public.

Why do you believe that the public should trust you as a news source over more commercial sources?

I don't believe that readers should trust any source of information. Readers should gather information from alternate sources and use their own intellect and judgment of the content to form opinions.

My purpose on this website is to inform, to offer information.

Unlike corporate media, I believe that people are capable of making their own judgments, using their own intellectual ability rather than been led around by the nose by "reliable sources" who claim to offer the "truth".

What background do you have in journalism ?

None.
See Also: WHO AND WHAT IS INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE

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THE REAL THREAT IN THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE FASCIST ISRAEL ROGUE NAZI STATE !!

2008-06-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

The real threat in the area is Israel, and that's right. What US military and government needs to do is to change its fascist world view, and instead disarm and halt Israel's 300-NUCULAR BOMBS and imperialist ambitions in the region. To protect Palestines from Israel, and to divorce the US government from Jewish lobbies and from all lobbies.

All lobbying firms lobbying the US congress should be banned, specially corporate lobbies. US congressmen are there to respond to people lobbying firms

To reach an agreement with a one state solution and Jimmy Carter as mediator

"Give me liberty or give me death." -Patrick Henry

marxist-socialist

http://socialism-only-solution-for-usa.blogspot.com/ owner

We have two options: To elect Obama or Fall Into Tyranny

2008-06-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

By Paul Craig Roberts

16/06/08 "ICH" -- - -As articles by John Pilger ( http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=12983 ), Alexander Cockburn ( http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06132008.html ), and Uri Avnery ( http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery06092008.html ) make clear, by groveling before the Israel Lobby Obama has dispelled any hope that his presidency would make a difference.
Obama told the Lobby that in order to protect Israel he would use all the powers of the presidency to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. As in the case of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” the conclusion whether or not Iran is making a nuclear weapon will be determined by propaganda and not by fact. Therefore, there is no difference between Bush, McCain, Obama, and the Lobby with regard to the Middle East.
As Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, and a modern air force and missiles supplied by the US, the idea that Israel needs American protection from Iran is a fantasy. All Israel needs to do in order to be safe and to live in peace is to stop stealing the West Bank and to drop its designs on southern Lebanon. Obama is too smart not to know that US foreign policy has been Shanghaied by the Lobby not in order to protect innocent Israel but to enable Israel’s territorial expansion.
Obama has dispelled hope on the economic front as well. Obama has appointed two leading apologists for jobs offshoring as his economic advisors--Bill Clinton’s Treasury Robert Rubin and Rubin associate Jason Furman. These two are notorious for their justifications of policies that benefit Wall Street, CEOs, and large retailers at the expense of the economic well being and careers of millions of Americans.
As a result of offshoring, good jobs in America are disappearing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics job figures make it totally clear that the US economy has ceased creating net new middle class jobs in the private economy in the 21st century.
Stressing higher returns to shareholders, Wall Street pressures corporations to move their operations abroad. Wal-Mart tells its American suppliers to “meet the Chinese price” or else, a price that US firms can meet only by offshoring their operations to China.
Every job and product that is offshored increases the US trade deficit and lowers US GDP. It is a losing game for America that rewards the overpaid elite of Wall Street and corporate America, while dismantling the ladders of upward mobility.
By enlarging the trade deficit, offshoring erodes the reserve currency role of the dollar, the real basis of US power. Now that US imports exceed US industrial production, it is unlikely that the US trade deficit can be closed except by a sharp reduction in US consumption, which implies a drop in US living standards. If the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US government will not be able to finance its budget and trade deficits.
Where is the hope when Obama endorses a foreign policy that benefits only Israeli territorial expansion and an economic policy that benefits only multimillionaires and billionaires?
The answer is that Obama’s election would signify the electorate’s rejection of Bush and the Republicans. Considering the cowardice of the Democratic Congress and its reluctance to hold a criminal regime accountable, electoral defeat is the only accountability that the Bush Republicans are likely to experience.
It is not sufficient accountability, but at least it is some accountability.
If the Republicans win the election and escape accountability, the damage Republicans have done to the US Constitution, civil liberty, and a free society will be irreversible. The Bush Regime and its totalitarians have openly violated US law against spying on Americans without warrants and US and international laws against torture. The regime and its totalitarians have violated the Constitution that they are sworn to uphold. Bush’s attorney general Gonzales even asserted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the US Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.
When federal courts acted to stop the regime’s unconstitutional practices and abuse of prisoners, the Republicans passed legislation to overturn the court rulings. The Republican Party has shown beyond all doubt that it holds the US Constitution in total contempt. Today the Republican Party stands for unaccountable executive power.
To reelect such a party is to murder liberty in America.
The June 12 Supreme Court decision pulled America back from the abyss of tyranny. For years hundreds of innocent people have been held by the Bush regime without charges, a handful of which were set to be tried in a kangaroo military tribunal in which they could be convicted on the basis of secret evidence and confession extracted by torture.
The Court ruled 5-4 that detainees have the right to appeal to civilian courts for habeas corpus protection. The Bush Republicans claiming “extraordinary times” had created a gestapo system in which the government could accuse, without presenting any evidence, a person of being a threat and on that basis alone imprison him indefinitely. Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded the Republican Brownshirts that “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
Bush’s current attorney general, Michael Mukassey, said he would proceed with his kangaroo trials.
President Bush indicated that he was inclined to again seek to overturn the Court with a law.
Brownshirt Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said he would draft a constitutional amendment to restore the executive branch’s tyrannical power.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain said that the Supreme Court decision protecting habeas corpus “is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
The four Supreme Court justices (Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas) who voted for tyranny in America are all Republicans. They all came out of the Federalist Society, a highly subversive group of right-wing lawyers who are determined to elevate the powers of the executive branch above Congress and the Supreme Court.
The Republican Party has morphed into a Brownshirt Party. The party worships “energy in the executive.” If the Brownshirt Republicans are reelected, they only need one more Supreme Court appointment in order to destroy American liberty.
That is what is at stake in the November election. As bad as Obama is on important issues, his election will signal rejection of the tyranny to which the Republicans are committed.

What Can Israel Learn from Canada

2008-06-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20111.htm

17/06/08 "ICH" -- - THIS WEEK, the Prime Minister of Canada made a dramatic statement in Parliament: he apologized to the indigenous peoples of his country for the injustices done to them for generations by successive Canadian governments.

This way, White Canada tries to make peace with the native nations, whose country their forefathers conquered and whose culture their rulers have tried to wipe out.
APOLOGIZING FOR past wrongs has become a part of modern political culture.
That is never an easy thing to do. Cynics might say: nothing to it. Just words. And words, after all, are a cheap commodity. But in fact, such acts have a profound significance. A human being - and even more so, a whole nation - always finds it hard to admit to iniquities performed and to atrocities committed. It means a rewriting of the historical narrative that forms the basis of their national cohesion. It necessitates a drastic change in the schoolbooks and in the national outlook. In general, governments are averse to this, because of the nationalistic demagogues and hate-mongers who infest every country.
The President of France has apologized on behalf of his people for the misdeeds of the Vichy regime, which turned Jews over to the Nazi exterminators. The Czech government has apologized to the Germans for the mass expulsion of the German population at the end of World War II. Germany, of course, has apologized to the Jews for the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust. Quite recently, the government of Australia has apologized to the Aborigines. And even in Israel, a feeble effort was made to heal a grievous domestic wound, when Ehud Barak apologized to the Oriental Jews for the discrimination they have suffered for many years.
But we face a much more difficult and complex problem. It concerns the roots of our national existence in Israel.
I BELIEVE that peace between us and the Palestinian people - a real peace, based on real conciliation - starts with an apology.
In my mind's eye I see the President of the State or the Prime Minister addressing a special extraordinary session of the Knesset and making a historic speech on the following lines:
MADAM SPEAKER, Honorable Knesset,
On behalf of the State of Israel and all its citizens, I address today the sons and daughters of the Palestinian people, wherever they are.
We recognize the fact that we have committed against you a historic injustice, and we humbly ask your forgiveness.
When the Zionist movement decided to establish a national home in this country, which we call Eretz Yisrael and you call Filastin, it had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people. Indeed, almost no one in the Zionist movement had ever been in the country before the first Zionist Congress in 1897, or even had any idea about the actual situation here.
The burning desire of the founding fathers of this movement was to save the Jews of Europe, where the dark clouds of hatred for the Jews were gathering. In Eastern Europe, pogroms were raging, and all over Europe there were signs of the process that would eventually lead to the terrible Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished.
This basic aim attached itself to the profound devotion of the Jews, throughout the generations, to the country in which the Bible, the defining text of our people, was written, and to the city of Jerusalem, towards which the Jews have turned for thousands of years in their prayers.
The Zionist founders who came to this country were pioneers who carried in their hearts the most lofty ideals. They believed in national liberation, freedom, justice and equality. We are proud of them. They certainly did not dream of committing an injustice of historic dimensions.
ALL THIS does not justify what happened afterwards. The creation of the Jewish national home in this country has involved a profound injustice to you, the people who lived here for generations.
We cannot ignore anymore the fact that in the war of 1948 - which is the War of Independence for us, and the Naqba for you - some 750 thousand Palestinians were compelled to leave their homes and lands. As for the precise circumstances of this tragedy I propose the establishment of a "Committee for Truth and Reconciliation"' composed of experts from your and from our side, whose conclusions will from then on be incorporated in the schoolbooks, yours and ours.
We cannot ignore anymore the fact that for 60 years of conflict and war, you have been prevented from realizing your natural right to independence in your own free national state, a right confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947, which also formed the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel.
For all this, we owe you an apology, and I express it hereby with all my heart.
The Bible tells us: "Whoso confesseth (his crimes) and forsakes them shall have mercy" (Proverbs 28:13). Clearly, confession does not suffice. We have also to forsake the wrongs we have done in the past.
It is impossible to turn the wheel of history back and restore the situation that existed in the country in 1947, much as Canada - or the United States, for that matter - cannot go back 200 years. We must build our common future on the joint desire to move forwards, to heal what can be healed and repair what can be repaired without inflicting new wounds, committing new injustices and causing more human tragedies.
I urge you to accept our apology in the spirit in which it is offered. Let us work together for a just, viable and practical solution of our century-old conflict - a solution that may not fulfill all justified aspirations nor right all wrongs, but which will allow both our peoples to live their lives in freedom, peace and prosperity.
This solution is clear for all to see. We all know what it is. It has emerged from our painful experiences, hammered out by the lessons of our sufferings, crystallized by the exertions of the best of our minds - yours as well as ours.
This solution means, simply: You have the same rights as we. We have the same rights as you: to live in a state of our own, under our own flag, governed by laws of our own making, ruled by a government freely elected by ourselves - hopefully a good one.
One of the fundamental commandments of our religion - as of yours and every other - was pronounced 2000 years ago by Rabbi Hillel: Do not unto others, what you do not want others to do to you.
This means in practice: your right to establish at once the free and sovereign State of Palestine in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which will be accepted as a full member of the United Nations.
The borders of June 4, 1967, will be restored. I hope that we can agree, in free negotiations, to minimal exchanges of territory beneficial to both sides.
Jerusalem, which is so dear to all of us, must be the capital of both our states - West Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, the capital of Israel, East Jerusalem, including al-Haram al-Sharif, which we call the Temple Mount, the capital of Palestine. What is Arab shall be yours, what is Jewish shall be ours. Let us work together to keep the city, as a living reality, open and united.
We shall evacuate the Israeli settlements, which have caused so much suffering and iniquities to you, and bring the settlers home, except from those small areas which will be joined to Israel in the framework of freely agreed swaps of territory. We shall also dismantle all the paraphernalia of the occupation, both physical and institutional.
We must approach with open hearts, compassion and common sense, the task of finding a just and viable solution for the terrible tragedy of the refugees and their decendants. Each refugee family must be granted a free choice between the various solutions: repatriation and resettlement in the State of Palestine, with generous assistance; staying where they are or emigration to any country of their choice, also with generous assistance; and yes - coming back to the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us. The refugees themselves must be a full partner in all our efforts.
I trust that our two states - Israel and Palestine, living side by side in this beloved but small country, will quickly come together on the human, social, economic, technological and cultural levels, creating a relationship that will not only guarantee our security, but also rapid development and prosperity for all.
Together we will work for peace and prosperity throughout our region, based on close relations with all the countries of the area.
Committed to peace and vowing to create a better future for our children and grandchildren, let us rise to our feet and bow our heads in memory of the countless victims of our conflict, Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians - a conflict that has lasted far too long.
SUCH A SPEECH is, to my mind, absolutely essential for opening a new chapter in the history of this country.
In decades of meeting with Palestinians of all walks of life, I have come to the conclusion that the emotional aspects of the conflict are no less - and perhaps even more - important than the political ones. A profound sense of injustice permeates the minds and actions of all Palestinians. Unconscious or half-conscious guilt feelings are troubling the souls of the Israelis, creating a deep conviction that Arabs will never make peace with us.
I do not know when such a speech will be possible. Many imponderable factors will have an impact on that. But I do know that without it, mere peace agreements, reached between haggling diplomats, will not suffice. As the Oslo agreements have shown, building an artificial island in a sea of stormy emotions just will not do.
THE PUBLIC apology by the Canadian Prime Minister is not the only thing we can learn from that North American country.
43 years ago, the Canadian government took an extraordinary step in order to make peace between the English-speaking majority and the French-speaking minority among their citizens. That relationship had remained an open wound from the time the British conquered French Canada some 250 years ago. It was decided to replace the Canadian national flag, which was based on the British "Union Jack", with a completely new national flag, featuring the maple leaf.
On this occasion, the Speaker of the Senate said: "The flag is the symbol of the nation's unity, for it, beyond any doubt, represents all the citizens of Canada without distinction of race, language, belief or opinion."
We can learn something from that, too.
www.gush-shalom.org

USA WILL DESINTEGRATE INTO 2 TO 4 SEPARATE NATION-STATES

2008-06-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

So where is it all heading? To a desperate place, unfortunately. It's a natural cycle of nation states. Following abundance comes greed, then corruption, then police state tyranny, then collapse. After the collapse there's rebirth, reconstruction and a new cycle of abundance until the whole thing repeats itself over and over again, one century after the next. Read your world history to hear this same story repeated over at least fifty empires that once existed on Earth. The American empire will be no different: It will drown in its own greed and corruption, collapsing into a state of moral and financial bankruptcy, and then will likely be reborn as a series of smaller nation-states like the Washington / Oregon / Idaho / Northern California region that has very different values and interests than, say, the Texas region.

During all this, there will be lots of social unrest, poverty, personal bankruptcy, police state arrests and perhaps even the widespread use of detection camps to indefinitely hold troublemakers who dare to protest or speak out against government corruption. This is what's coming for America, and the interesting part is that almost nobody in America seems to be able to anticipate this. Yet the writing is on the wall, and it's as obvious as the dot-com crash was before 2000.

I publicly predicted the dot-com crash starting in 1998, and urged everyone to get out of the market through 1999, 2000 and right up until the bursting of the dot-com bubble in early 2001. All this time, nobody listened. Virtually everyone was caught up in the insane illusion that we would all get rich by selling each other pieces of paper with increasingly large numbers written on them (those are the stock prices, you see). Almost everybody was swept up by Groupthink, believing that the laws of economics had changed forever. CNBC became the cheerleader of unbridled greed, and brainwashed idiots at the American Enterprise Institute were publishing books predicting a Dow of 36,000 that would create infinite wealth requiring no effort or productive work.

Meanwhile, I was urging everyone to sell their stocks, which of course made me look utterly insane given that everybody else in the world was telling people to keep buying -- including all the stock brokers and investment fund managers, who it turns out know almost nothing useful about finances or investments and are just as easily swept up by Groupthink as anything else. When the bubble finally burst, I was completely out of the market and lost nothing. But many people I knew lost big portions of their life savings.

Now, I told you that story to tell you this: What's coming in America's future is going to be far, far worse than the dot-com fiasco. Imagine the financial market breaking down, the U.S. government defaulting on its debt, the dollar going through massive hyperinflation, wiping out the value of the life savings of virtually all Americans. Think it can't happen here? That's what the Groupthink thinks. But it will happen here, and the massive corruption in our government is making sure of it. Whatever dollars you have in the bank will, in a few years, become virtually worthless. Hyperinflation is inevitable. Study the history of Germany following World War I to gain additional insight on this topic.

Sacrificing the future for today's profit

When the corporations run a nation, that nation has no real future, because corporations only think in terms of the next quarter, not the next generation. Corporations will naturally do whatever they can to maximize their profits right now, including poisoning the children with vaccines, poisoning the population with toxic food products, sacrificing the financial future of the nation for short-term gain, destroying the environment, ignoring the health care needs of the People, inciting war so they can sell more profitable weapons to war-torn countries around the world, and so on. Essentially, corporations will sell out the future for higher profits today, and that's exactly what they've done in America.

America has no real future. Not a good one, anyway. I give the nation anywhere from 5 to 25 years before it will self destruct under a mountain of debt, disease and corruption. You can thank the corporations and corrupt politicians for that. They've thrown away the dream of a nation that was once great and could actually be great again, if not for the greed.

My message to all U.S. citizens is to prepare yourself now for what's coming. Get out of debt. Get healthy. Invest in your education and learn some practical skills like gardening, bicycle repair or natural medicine. Own some productive land and learn how to use it. Be near a source of fresh water. When the oil runs out, and the fresh water tables are drained, and the financial system collapses, and the real estate bubble bursts, life is going to be a whole lot harder than it is today. Forget about shopping malls, must-see TV and the latest fashions. Most families are going to be struggling just to put food on the table.

This is all years away, of course. And until then, most people are going to continue the pursuit of even more debt and disease, oblivious to the future that awaits them. A great book to read on how that future might play out is The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. Or The Party's Over: Oil, War and The Fate of Industrial Societies.

THERE IS NO WAY THAT US IMPERIALISM COULD CONQUER IRAN

2008-06-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

There is no way the U.S. could hope to conquer Iran. Nor would the Iranian people rise up and overthrow their theocratic leaders--the same neoconservative fantasy that Bush war-mongers promised ahead of the Iraq invasion, and which they are re-cycling now to justify an attack on Iran. In fact, an attack on Iran, far from sparking a rebellion against the government there, would crush the new wave of reform that was evidenced in last week's local elections in Iran, which dealt a blow to the country's hardliners. Iran is a proud nation with a history reaching back thousands of years. If attacked, its people can be counted on to rally around their current rulers, and its war-hardened soldiers can be counted on to fight to the death to defend their country.

Moreover, while its military may be no match for America's, Iran has many asymmetrical options for retaliation. As the key player in Iraq, with close links to Iraq's Shia factions, Iran's military has trained and armed the Badr Brigades--the largest and best-armed faction in Iraq, and one which to date has stayed out of the fighting against US forces. Iran is also close to the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr, and could unleash his fanatical troops too, against US forces in Iraq. If this happens, count on American casualty rates leaping to or even surpassing Korea or Vietnam-era levels overnight.

Additionally, Iraq's intelligence services have connections with Shia groups in Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries, and can be expected to quickly organize cells to strike at economic and US military targets there.More seriously, of course, an attack on Iran will jack the price of oil to levels never seen before. Even if the US managed to militarily control the Straits of Hormuz, Iran's hundreds of stockpiled anti-ship missiles, which are buried in bunkers all along the Persian Gulf, would cause insurance rates to soar so high that no tanker could afford to sail that route, effectively cutting off over one quarter of the world's oil supply. Virtually all of the oil produced in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the Arab Emirates would be trapped in the ground. As well, the network of pipelines that bring oil from wellheads to refineries and to storage and pier facilities would be virtually indefensible against Iran-inspired sapper attacks.

Oil industry analysts have talked of oil leaping in price to $200 a barrel or more in the event of a US war with Iran, and given how panicked this country got when oil reached $80 a barrel recently, there's no need to go into detail explaining what $200/barrel oil would do to the U.S. economy--or to the global economy.

Of course, the biggest issue is that attacking Iran would be yet another war crime by this craven administration. No one can argue that Iran poses an imminent threat to anyone, least of all to the U.S.--the only legitimate grounds under the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory, for initiating a war. Attacking a country that poses no such threat is defined as the most heinous of war crimes: a Crime Against Peace.
If Bush and Cheney perpetrate this crime, the Congress should initiate immediate impeachment proceedings and should simultaneously pass legislation terminating funding for the war. The important thing now is for the American people to register their opposition to this war before it happens. Call your senators and your representative and let them know you don't want it to happen, and you want impeachment if it does. And add your name to the petition against war.

Finally, send this story to everyone you know, and urge them to do the same. At this point, with Democrats still cowering in their offices, only the American people can stop this madness.

HMMMMM. SOME UGLY TRUTHS ABOUT USA FOUNDATION AND INDEPENDENCE !!

2008-05-25T13:42:00.001-07:00

A Bit Of History

U.S.: "Empire of Liberty," Built Upon Three Holocausts
In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson bragged of a new "empire of liberty," i.e., a nation created essentially for the benefit of White male property and slave owners/speculators, who were to thrive in freedom, prosperity, and tranquility through expansion. Even before formal creation of the Republic, acquisition of Florida, Cuba, the West Indies, Mexico, the western frontier, and Canada were discussed so frequently there was an assumption that Providence intended it. George Washington talked in 1783 of "a rising empire." James Madison believed in "imperial republicanism" as he led the 1787 Constitutional convention behind locked doors to create a new and far more powerful national government. Note that a people's democracy was not intended by our "Founding Fathers" [See Tucker, Robert W. and David C. Hendrickson. (1990). Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. Oxford: Oxford University Press; William Appleman Williams. (1980). Empire As A Way Of Life. Oxford, especially chapters 2-4, and pp. 31, 43, 51, 59].

The ugliest truth is that our civilization is built on three unspeakable holocausts, each justified by a White racist ideology, causing the murder of millions, each committed with impunity:

(1) acquiring free land at gunpoint while systematically brutalizing hundreds of Indigenous cultures;

(2) acquiring free labor by force from ancient Indigenous cultures in Africa by violent removal of those who survived capture; and

(3) acquiring cheap resources, labor and markets through thousands of overt and covert interventions at gunpoint into more than 100 countries.

DISTURBIA (THE MOVIE): A FASCISTIC, CHAUVINISTIC, ANTI-FREEDOM, ANTI-DEMOCRACY, ANTI-PERSONAL FREEDOM, PRO-NSA, PRO-CIA MOVIE MADE BY JEWISH HOLLYWOOD

2008-05-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

The kid from Disturbia has all these gadgets and toys like camcorders, computers, and electronic stuff in his room, and spends his days watching his "evil" neighbors, i think that movie is pro-fascism movie, it tries to sell the idea that neighbors and specially private life is to be watched and observed. I think that Disturbia is a pro-CIA and pro-invasion of private life movie

i haven't read about Hitchcock or the makers of Disturbia, however. it sort of propagates the idea that personal life should be invaded and people must be watched and observed. Look how the kid from Disturbia spied on 2 kids watching sex movies, he even called their moms telling her mother that their sons are watching "evil" porn movies.

after watching that movie, i think i will think twice before doing any thing "evil" or not politically correct like watching XXX movies, having sex, because other neighbors might get modern gadgets and spy on me

i wanna get cut real fast, and real cut, like the soldiers of the movie 300 with Gerard Butler about ancient Sparta

2008-05-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

i wanna get cut real fast, and real cut, like the soldiers of the movie 300 with Gerard Butler about ancient Sparta. That's why i bought a stationary-bicycle (A pro-form). Here is a link to a picture of it, and a review of it:
http://affiliatefitness.affiliatecrew.com/images/AF/WorkoutWarehouse/Proform/PFEX1791.jpg
"Proform Crosstrainer 920s EKG exercise bike review"
ProForm 920S EKG Bike
At $179.00, you can't go wrong with this particular upright. As with most Proform exercise bikes, the quality is great considering the relatively cheap price.
What makes this exercise bike so great?
Most upright exercise bikes in this price range use crude resistance systems that make for a rough and loud workout. Who wants to use an uncomfortable exercise bike? I've been on a few of those, and beleive me, there not worth it.
The Proform 920S uses a smooth magnetic resistance system that gives you a nice smooth ride at the touch of a button. There's nothing worse than having to stop your workout to adjust the resistance. At $249.00, the Proform 920S provides professional quality without the huge price.
The Proform 920S is also equipped with the EKG grip pulse sensor in the handle bars. Simply put your hands around the handle bars and presto, you get your pulse. Quite handy to have since you don't have to do the manual method which is quite uncomfortable.

Here are just some of the benefits:
-4 pre programmed workouts for interesting workout variety and intensity levels

-EKG grip pulse sensor

-Magnetic resistance

-Large LCD window to monitor your heart rate, calories burned, speed etc...
The ProForm 920S EKG Bike is a great buy for $179.00. It's durable, reliable, accurate and quite. What more would you want in an upright exercise bike?

TRANSFORMERS: A TOTALLY INSULTING, RACIST, CHAUVINIST AND FASCISTIC MOVIE !! AN INSULT TO ANY INTELLIGENT PERSON !!

2008-05-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

Anybody here seen the right-wing movie Transformers at the sart when a dumb punk grunge guy says that the hacking done to Pentagon computers might have been done by Iran, but then another stupid punk, grunge blind sheep raped by mainstream media said that Iran was too stupid to do such smart hacking into US defense system computers?

and then at the start there was this patriotic yankee nazi soldier telling another soldier to stop talking in spanish, only english damn ittotally fascist, racist movie indeed

but i dont know what the hell happened with Transformers, why was it so racist

President Bush should be impeached for war crimes

2008-05-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

Bill Wickersham is an adjunct professor of Peace Studies at MU, a member of Veterans for Peace and a member of the national steering committee of Global Action to Prevent War.

By BILL WICKERSHAM
May 14, 2008 10:00 a.m. CST

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2008/05/14/president-bush-should-be-impeached-war-crimes/

In June 2004, the Bush Administration issued a statement that detailed its rationale and legal stance for denying terror suspects the protection of international humanitarian law. The statement included hundreds of pages of White House communications intended to counter widespread criticism that George W. Bush had personally endorsed the plans used to justify the interrogation abuses of U.S. prisoners held in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other worldwide locations. At that time Bush said, “I have never ordered torture.” Ordered or not, it is now clear from recent reports that Bush was well aware of, and approved plans for, the questioning of known and alleged al-Qaida prisoners being held by the CIA.

On April 9, 2008, ABC News reported that Bush’s National Security Council Principals Committee had dozens of top-secret talks and meetings at the White House to review interrogation procedures to be used by the CIA on al-Qaida suspects. Condoleezza Rice chaired the committee, which included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Collin Powell, George Tenet and John Aschroft. According to ABC, the principals discussed and approved specific details of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — “CIA-Speak” and “Pentagonese” for torture, including face slapping, pushing, sleep deprivation and the simulated drowning technique known as “waterboarding.”

According to a recent article by Dan Eggen of the Washington Post, Bush publicly defended the principals’ torture policies and decisions saying, “Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people. And, yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue, and I approved.” As previously noted, Condoleezza Rice chaired the Principals Committee and played a key role in development of policies that cleared the way for U.S. torture practices. In 2004, the CIA sought additional assurance by the administration for use of torture on “high value” CIA captured suspects. In addressing this episode, ABC News reported about Rice: “Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, ... (she) did not back down, telling the CIA: ‘This is your baby; Go do it.’”

When stories regarding detainees at the Abu Grahib prison in Iraq became public, blame for the illegal crimes was placed on “a few rotten apples in the barrel,” low-ranking U.S. soldiers, some of whom are now serving jail sentences. It is now very clear that there were also “bad apples” in barrels at the White House, the Pentagon and in Langley, Va., at CIA headquarters. Much of the torture that has occured is the result of orders fully approved by the White House. Thus, the neo-conservative Bush administration, which purportedly invaded and occupied Iraq to free its people of Saddam’s heinous atrocities, is now guilty of its own, including the killing of innumerable Iraqi citizens via aerial bombardment and house-to-house invasions.

In addressing the torture policies of the National Security Council Principals Committee, University of Illinois Professor Francis A. Boyle, one of the world’s foremost authorities on international humanitarian law, said, “Clearly this was criminal activity at the time they committed it. At the very least, it violated the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, The War Crimes Act, and the federal anti-torture statutes. Clearly these are impeachable offenses.”

Given the “high crimes” committed by top administration officials in violation of the U.S. Constitution, what is to be done? From the first revelations of the Bush/Cheney war crimes, many writers, including Professor Boyle and I, have strongly called for impeachment of the president. Thus far, Nancy Pelosi and other key members of Congress have failed to live up to their oath of office by failing to defend the Supreme Law of the Land. On June 10, 2008, Missourian writer David Rosman wrote a very informative piece citing many reasons to avoid the impeachment process. However, I continue to disagree with Rosman’s position that somehow health care, deficit spending, education, trade, the war and so on take precedence over concern for criminal violations of the basic provisions of the U.S. Constitution, including Article VI section 2 of that revered document. In terms of war, there would have been no war had Bush fulfilled his obligation to defend the Constitution. And the impeachment process, even without conviction of the president and vice-president, would offer a warning to future U.S. leaders that they must obey the laws of war.

Having said this, I certainly do agree with Rosman’s view that “when Bush and Cheney are once again civilians, then file criminal charges against the former holders of the executive office for treason and high crimes against the people. Jail time sounds so much better.” I favor impeachment and jail time for Bush and Cheney and the filing of criminal charges against all of the top officials involved in the planning and approval of prisoner interrogation crimes.

Bill Wickersham is an Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies at MU, a member of Veterans for Peace and a member of the national steering committee of Global Action to Prevent War.

Anglo-American Ascendancy Lost in Unnecessary Wars

2008-05-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

By Paul Craig Roberts

13/05/08 "ICH" -- - -In a new book that will infuriate the fake conservatives who inhabit the Republican Party, Patrick J. Buchanan documents how British self-righteousness, delusion, and hubris destroyed both the British Empire and Western ascendancy in two unnecessary wars launched by a small cabal of morons that ruled Britain

Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War shows that the two world wars that destroyed European civilization began when England declared war on Germany, thus dragging in the Empire, Commonwealth, and United States. This was a strategic blunder unparalleled in history. Mighty Britain emerged from World War II as an American dependency.

Buchanan cites such British notables as F.J.P. Veale, B.H. Liddell Hart, and C.P. Snow to document that it was Winston Churchill who committed, in Veale’s words, “the first deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare that hostilities must only be waged against the enemy combatant forces.” It was Churchill, not Hitler, who first targeted civilian populations in World War II and caused the structure of civilized warfare to collapse in ruins.

The Americans quickly adopted Churchill’s criminal policy of attacking civilians, culminating in the outrageous use of nuclear weapons against two Japanese cities, the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians, and the ongoing slaughter of Afghan and Iraqi civilians.

A popular American myth is that “the greatest generation” saved the world from Nazi tyranny. As Buchanan points out, the fact of the matter is that the Normandy invasion in June 1944 played little, if any, role in Germany’s defeat. By the end of 1942 Hitler had lost World War II at Stalingrad, long before any American troops appeared on the scene. What the Normandy invasion achieved 18 months later was to keep the Red Army from over-running all of Europe.

Although Buchanan’s book is about how the British destroyed themselves, Buchanan is clearly thinking about America. In the closing pages Buchanan shows how the Bush Regime has broken from the sound policy of President Reagan and is replicating the British folly of self-destruction. “There is hardly a blunder of the British Empire we have not replicated,” laments Buchanan.

The distinct American hubris that we are “the indispensable nation” and the braggadocio that we are an “omnipower” has us overcommitted in alliances that we cannot fulfill. Despite 25 percent of the Iraqi population killed, injured or displaced, the “world’s only superpower” cannot even control Baghdad. To deal with the pointless war we started in Afghanistan, we have had to sucker our NATO allies into a conflict that is no concern of theirs.

Militarily overextended and with a faltering economy and collapsing currency, the cabal of morons that rules America still hopes to attack Iran, Syria, and to drive Hezbollah from Lebanon. American idiots in think tanks are busy at work drawing up plans about how the US is going to check China and prevent her emergence as a power beyond US control. The Republican presidential candidate has boasted that he will challenge Russia and bring Putin to heel.

Amazing. The world’s greatest debtor is going to take on the two powerful countries with the largest trade surpluses. According to the World Factbook, an annual publication of the CIA, Russia’s 2007 current account surplus is $465 billion and China’s is $363 billion. In contrast, the US current account deficit is $987 billion--an amount larger that the total deficits of all other countries in the world combined. The out-of-pocket and already incurred future cost of Bush’s wars of aggression is between $3 and $5 trillion, every dollar of which must be borrowed. That comes on top of the unfunded liabilities of the US government totaling $53 trillion. By any account the US is the world’s worst credit risk. The “mighty” US relies on foreigners to finance its consumption, its wars, and the daily operations of its government.

When Buchanan looks at the collection of idiots that comprise America’s ruling class, he despairs. In truth, American power is already broken, and the country is already lost. The country is lost, because the brownshirt Bush Regime has destroyed the US Constitution with the complicity of the opposition party and the federal courts. There is no organized power that can restore the Constitution or even much concern that it has been overthrown.

The country is broken, because American capitalists have moved offshore so many US manufacturing, engineering, and research jobs that US imports now exceed US industrial production. American dependency on imported manufactured goods, advanced technology goods, and energy is astounding.

Moreover, the dependency is escalating dramatically. In March 2002, prior to Bush’s decision to impose Israel’s will on the Middle East, oil was $25 a barrel. Today oil is $125 a barrel, a five-fold increase that has seen our oil import bill rise from $145 billion in 2006 to $456 billion presently, a $300 billion addition to a trade deficit that was already running $700-$800 billion annually.

There is no possibility of the US closing its trade deficit. The US is able to survive such enormous deficits only because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. This role for the dollar is nearing an end as the world looks for more stable stores of value. Although oil is still nominally priced in dollars, in reality it is being priced in euros as oil producers raise the dollar price with a view to keeping their oil revenues at a constant purchasing power in euros.

When the dollar loses its reserve currency role, foreign financing for US trade and budget deficits will evaporate. US living standards will collapse, and the indispensable omnipower will be just another washed up country.

For a world weary of “American exceptionalism,” this can’t happen too soon.

THE JEWS CAME FROM MONKEYS AND PIGS !! THE JEWISH PEOPLE ARE EVIL BASTARDS !!

2008-05-10T10:09:00.001-07:00

Observe from a psychological and scientific cold point of view the mental attitude and behaviour pattern of Beirut who is indeed an israeli and jewish mossad agent infiltrated in http://www.informationclearinghouse.info a website i am part of, i am a member of their forum debates. but observe the fascist Mossad Israeli agentt Beirut, talking nonsense.

Most jewish people are psychopaths, not only the zionist elites at the top, but it is fair to state that most Israeli jews have neurotic, irritability, angry and dangerous behaviour. Just look at this statement by Beirut (An israeli mossad agent, reading progressive websites):

"Israeli Zionists are humanist compared to you fucking cunts" -Beirut, Mossad Agent infiltrated in http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

Ok, and now watch this Youtube.com video by a jewish guy on drugs, stoned, and wishing for the destrucion of all human kind. Just use your psychology skills, to study the behaviour of israelites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O9W3UsdRyM

hahahaha, the jews are almost on drugs, rageful and crazy. Watch this video of jews on drugs !!

the jews are evil bastards and one day god will show them a servere punishment tramps they havent even got a country. they have to steal other people country....and they came from the monkeys and pigs

U.S. Imperialism and Human Consciousness from an Evolutionary Perspective

2008-05-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

by S. Brian WillsonDecember 15, 2002
Introduction

Awaiting the impending U.S. government's concocted "preventive" war against Iraq (indeed, against the world), this is perhaps one of the most frightening moments in human history. In a surreal scenario, the U.S. government is renewing active threats of using nuclear weapons and reviving use of anti-personnel land mines, and is introducing new technological weapons of death we can only imagine, and some we cannot. As grim as this scene is, I believe it must be the inevitable and logical extension of the continued growth ad nauseum of the American Way Of Life (AWOL) in particular, and the Western Way Of Life in general. Premeditated murder of thousands--perhaps millions--of innocents is the price for AWOL's insatiable consumption and its bloodthirsty vengeance, totally abdicating responsibility for lethal consequences to the planet and its species, including, ironically, our own. Perhaps Gaia is presenting the current transparent dangers to us as like a cosmic gift so that we might actually be able to see the extraordinary folly of our ways in time to creatively "storm the Bastille."
U.S. Terrorist Roots
U.S. civilization was founded on and has been sustained by terrorism, facilitated by Eurocentric racism, classism, and arrogant ethnocentrism. The grossest irony of all, of course, is that the "War on Terror," to be successful, must focus on our own civilization, the most egregious proponent of terror the world has even known. Terror was systematically utilized since our country's beginnings in the 1600s. The following instructions, facilitated by a cruel racism, are part of the historic record: "burning and spoiling the [Indian] country," (Captain John Underhill, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1636); "put to death the [Pequot Indian] men of Block Island" (Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop's order to Captain John Endecott, 1637); "laying waste," and instilling "terror...by any means" among the Indians (General George Washington, 1779); "[with] malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support" (General John Sullivan, 1779).
In a prominent history book published in 1906 (The History of the United States, James Wilford Garner, Ph.D. and Henry Cabot Lodge, Ph.D, L.L.D), the "destruction" of the American Indian is explained as follows: "History teaches that inferior people must yield to a superior civilization....They must take on civilization or pass out. The Negro was able to endure slavery while learning the rudiments of civilization; the Indian could not endure slavery, and...refused to be taught."
Attitudes uttered by white, Puritan, Christian men, civilian and military, thus set the tone for our civilization, sentiments that to this day have not been seriously renounced. We remain primarily a white male supremacy society with overtly expressed as well as suppressed sentiments of racism and classism dominating much of our political life and foreign policy. How can someone drop a bomb knowing that thousands of innocents will be murdered if the bomber is not possessed by cruel racism and/or ugly ethnocentrism?
Conveniently left out of the historical record is the fact that our civilization has been founded on three holocausts, the first being theft of virtually all our land base at gunpoint while murdering millions of the original inhabitants. The second brought us "free" labor from Africa, but resulted in two-thirds of all those originally targeted for apprehension being murdered in the process of trying to escape or from being stowed as human cargo in slave ships known as floating coffins. The third holocaust took place during what the founder and publisher of Time and Life magazines, Thomas Luce, called "The American Century." This century witnessed more than 300 military and perhaps 10,000 covert interventions by the U.S. into more than 100 countries, stealing resources at gunpoint while murdering millions of the increasing numbers of impoverished people struggling for independence. "American exceptionalism" must succeed at any cost. In the process, the three Buddhist "poisons" are employed:
greed -- for profit at any cost of human suffering;
hatred -- of any obstacles to profit;
ignorance -- of the intimate link between Western corporations/governments and "Third World" repressive regimes.
U.S. Oligarchy
It does not matter which of the two parties, the republocrats or demoblicans, is in power. They both easily consented to the selection of their chief executive officer in violation of the rights of thousands of illegally disenfranchised Black voters, and of their Constitutional system itself that makes no provision for the Supreme Court to make such selection. Both believe in preserving the "national security" of AWOL, which means continued, unabated acceleration of extraction, consumption and pollution patterns, and obscene profits for the plutocrats and their bribed oligarchs in Washington. For all this to happen, Mr. Bush, indeed, has laid out the necessary plans for a world imperium to assure, in his and his cohorts' minds, continuation of our Western way of life, business- and profits-as-usual.
These oligarchs are not able to perceive the fact that further continuation of AWOL guarantees our destruction. They are not able to even consider the need for radical contraction and creative alternatives. They act as if blind drunk with their personal and political values of money and power, under the cloak of their disfigured version of Jesus. Unfortunately, the inevitable consequences of their business-as-usual forces are systematic destruction of virtually all sustainable ecosystems and human-created institutions.
Origins of "Civilization"
Some history. As the revolution of urban civilization took root some 5,000 years ago the basic ingredients of "Western civilization" were introduced into our human evolutionary journey. The basic model of "civilization," for all but the most isolated and exceptional Indigenous groups, has seen the advent of powerful male oligarchs surrounded by elite bureaucracies of scribes and priests, overseeing hierarchies that involuntarily enforced large numbers of laborers, often violently captured during wars, to construct large projects for the pleasure of the king. Wars, systematic violence, and harsh class division originated with "civilizations." Secrecy of priestly knowledge about cosmic regularities and calendar-making assured that knowledge was monopolized by the small elite surrounding the oligarch. And the maxim, "the best defense is attack," was often used in early warfare, roots of our preventive strikes of today. According to Asian and Scandinavian scholars there have been nearly 15,000 wars during the last 5,000 years.
Extraordinarily Dangerous Trends
The U.S. economy reveals increasing vulnerabilities to the fiction and hot air behind Wall Street and the continued exploitation and creation of misery upon which it is based. The U.S. regime has chosen to protect its illusion of omnipotence under the veil of fighting "terrorism" and its curtailing of civil liberties is similar to a police state. Increasingly desperate means used by people in power to maintain that power is a historically typical, predictable phenomenon. Never before, however, have oligarchs commanded so much power and possessed so many weapons of mass destruction, with explicit intentions to use such weapons preventively rather than defensively.
I believe that we are at a pivotal point in history. We sit precariously perched on a ledge overlooking imminent extinction as a very real possibility at this juncture in our long, 7- to 8-million-year human evolutionary journey. Academics often talk about how history is cyclical, but two demonstrable trends, clearly not cyclical, indicate that we are dangerously near the end of our evolutionary branch.
The first fatal trend is the impact of our rapid population growth on space and resources that are finite, facilitated by at least two significant factors -- our departure some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago from the natural accounting system tendered when living close to the pulse of the Earth, and our recent nearly religious belief in and uncritical dependence upon dangerous, mind-numbing technology. Closely related, therefore, is the second trend, the "developed" world's, i.e., Western Civilization's, virtual total dependence upon dwindling supplies of finite material resources. Black gold, or oil, is only one of these resources, but perhaps the one whose imminent depletion may provoke a necessary evolutionary shift in human consciousness. Supplies of these earth resources have been available to us for only a short time in all of our long human history. We must envision a world of energy and fabric without them. Our cultural transition must quickly move from exponential growth to steady-state.
Two other features of so-called civilization have contributed substantially to this pivotal moment. One feature is the male dominator, hierarchical, bureaucratic model that uses violence, terror and secrecy to induce mass compliance. This model clearly emerged during the late neolithic period, about 3,000 B.C.E. Another feature is our inattention to the independent variable of size as a critical factor in the workability and sustainability of any political, social, or economic unit, and of technology itself.
Emergence of Nonviolent Anarchism
Following my tour of military duty in Vietnam, I was shocked at how easily I had followed orders, without asking any questions, to do things that in hindsight seemed so criminal and insane. I began pursuing new ways of thinking. I stumbled on a variety of thinkers who might today be called nonviolent anarchists. Anarchism is the natural and spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit. The idea is that social groups of modest size are better off organizing themselves without government, i.e., organizing without authority. Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Thoreau and Gandhi were all anarchist thinkers.
Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) renounced his privileged position with the Russian Czar's Military Corp to study biology, geography, and anthropology in the vast unknown regions of Siberia. His work ultimately prepared a scientific foundation for an essential feature of anarchism by demonstrating that mutual aid -- voluntary cooperation -- is an even stronger tendency in human evolution than aggression and domination. One of the world's greatest books, in my opinion, and one of the first to present an authoritative long-view of ecology before that word was even used, is Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Kropotkin begins by stating that "it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience -- be it only at the stage of an instinct -- of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own." He concludes his book by declaring that "in the ethical progress of man, mutual support -- not mutual struggle -- has had the leading part."
It was when reading these very words of Kropotkin's sometime during the 1970s that I experienced my first "aha!" regarding the origins of my startling response to a question posed to me by a Vietnamese lieutenant as he and I witnessed the immediate aftermath of the bombing of a small village in Vietnam's Mekong Delta in April 1969. As I looked at mangled and bloodied corpses of mostly women and children, I gagged, then wept. The lieutenant was grinning as he asked me, "What's wrong?" Without thinking, I responded, while pointing to a particular woman who was lying near my feet with three small children next to her, something to the effect that these people were part of my family. He clearly did not understand my response since he apparently perceived the horrible scene as a victory over "communism." My response had been a mystery to me until I read the above passages. Yes, of course, we are all intimately related by spirit, even by molecular and DNA structure, imbedded deeply in our ancient mind-body mechanisms. To realize that and act upon it will enable us to find the strength and wisdom to liberate ourselves from complicity with the depths of our nation's insanity. It was these experiences that began my life-time journey as a recovering white male.
Etienne de La Boetie
Much earlier than the thinkers mentioned above, 18-year old French law student Etienne de La Boetie (1530-63) wrote a short essay in 1548, "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude," which became and remains a classic in the literature of nonviolence. It is brilliant in its explanation of the origins of tyranny and the ease in which enslavement occurs. His ability to grasp, more than 450 years ago, the psychology and inherent corruption that regularly occurs with social and political power is staggering. He argued that men create their own tyrants by giving obedience to them. He stressed that tyranny would easily collapse if the people chose to withdraw their support and complicity.
"The more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies."
Note: "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" was republished as a paperback in 1997 under title The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Harry Kurz, translator).
William Godwin
The 18th Century political philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836), the first person in modern times after the French Revolution to develop a systematic theory of nonviolent anarchism, concluded in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that men are subject to tyranny because the great mass of people agree to be tyrannically ruled. Godwin declared that reliance on basic truth necessitates sacrifices. Regarding war, he concluded: "We can have no adequate idea of this evil, unless we visit, at least in imagination, a field of battle. Here men deliberately destroy each other by thousands without any resentment against or even knowledge of each other."
Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau
Russian Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) espoused a religious anarchist view of nonviolence in which he advocated peasant nonviolent resistance to the State and war (The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not As A Mystic Religion But As A New Theory of Life, 1893). Massachusetts native Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) protested against the institutions of slavery and the so-called Mexican-American War, hoping for sufficient numbers of persons to offer nonviolent non-cooperation. In Civil Disobedience (1849), Thoreau was concerned that people were too attached to the State, too little concerned with what is right. He declared that until people are willing to go to jail in considerable numbers, the State would continue to have its willing instruments for wars and institutions like slavery. He concluded: "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable."
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) rejected the merits of affluent industrial society. It can succeed, he said, only by organized greed or by systematic terrorism and oppression. His first principle of valid political action is non-cooperation with the disorder, injustices, and commitment to untruths characteristic of affluent societies. The core of Satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, or truth-force through love, is to lay down one's life for what one considers to be right. The Satyagrahi has a religious and human duty to confront untruth in society with personal witness in order to reveal to everyone the falsities, even if it means suffering to the point of death. (See Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1948).
The first duty of every person is to recover his or her "right mind" in order that society might once again become sane. Gandhi understood that to be "civilized" by force was in reality to be reduced to barbarism, as the civilizer was barbarized. His pursuit of the awakening of a mature political consciousness was not simply ascetic or devotional routines to suit the fancy of pacifists or poets, but precepts fundamentally necessary if humans are to recover their "right mind." There can be no peace without profound inner change that brings humans back to this healthy inner space.
Martin Luther King
Though Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was not an anarchist, his April 4, 1967 speech, A Time To Break Silence (sometimes referred to as Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam), given at the Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year to the day prior to his assassination, is one of the most revolutionary and prophetic essays of the 20th Century. His 1967 speech clearly indicated he was in the midst of a radical critique of the corruption of U.S. economic and political power as he called for a people's nonviolent revolution of values and structures within the United States. Condemning the U.S. war against the Vietnamese and "deadly Western arrogance," King called for the lives of U.S. American people to "be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly."
"I am 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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
King continues:
"The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before...We must support these revolutions....our brothers [sic] wait eagerly for our response." Then he asks: "Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men [sic], and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."
I hope that after 9/11 we have internally registered that their yearnings and ours are the same. We are not worth more. They are not worth less.
Recognizing Our Complicity: A Key to Liberation and Empowerment
Indeed, I believe we the people have enabled Western civilization with our willing consumption patterns, taxes, silence, and various other levels of complicity. We have given legitimacy to our oligarchic rulers, willingly or begrudgingly. However, this likely happened over centuries of common people abdicating their individual and collective power in community affairs, either for fear of tyrannical rulers or from being mesmerized into dehumanization by cultural technics preempting spiritual meaning. Lack of use causes enfeeblement of physical, intellectual, and spiritual capacities.
Etienne de La Boetie, in his "Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" (see above), possessed a prophetic perception still relevant today:
"It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement."
Our nation's founding document, the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), signed some 226 years ago, forewarned against passivity, asserting active vigilance over government:
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Our originating document indicates a right of revolution when our existing government no longer conforms to the consent of the governed and the laws that government has sworn to uphold, such as our Bill of Rights.
We can now choose to actively and consciously withdraw our support in the best interests of humanity, and Earth herself. Knowing better in our hearts, many of us have nonetheless chosen to quietly "skate" because we could get away with it for just another day, another week, or year. We know differently now.
A Quantum Leap in Human Consciousness: Our Choice
The fact is that you and I just happen to be living at a moment when a huge, quantum leap in human consciousness and a radical cultural adaptation are begging us. Our days of living in relative comfort without paying attention to consequences are over. Done! It took 9/11 to bring us to this point, even though the origins and advancement of the gathering storm have been visible for centuries. As frightening as it is, this moment represents an extraordinary evolutionary opportunity for intentional participation in a huge shift. This is as big as the Neolithic revolution, when Old Stone Age food-gatherers became New Stone Age agriculturalists some 8,000 years ago, and the subsequent urban revolution that saw agriculturalists develop into city dwellers in the ancient Near East some 5,000 years ago. Fortunately, humans are totally capable of rapidly adjusting to imminent danger, if it can be recognized, and of making sudden, radical shifts in behavior and choices.
Is a dignified future worth risking position, reputation, life or limb? Do we want to build a new world, with a new man and a new woman, committed in partnership to emotional as well as intellectual honesty? Do we want to learn to live in decentralized communities based on local self-reliance that wisely honors each bioregion's limits? Local availability of water, energy, food, fiber, and fabric is intimate information to be integrated into our mind-beings, so that our choices become synonymous with Earth wisdom. This wisdom now dictates walking a mindful path of local responsibility within a global context. The Seneca Indians around whom I grew up, prophetically suggested making choices based on how they would affect the seventh generation of offspring. We have wise teachers if only we would listen.
Famous Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957) named his classic book Man Makes Himself (1936). What human beings have created, we can uncreate, and recreate anew, based on history's lessons. There can be no more war, hate or violence! There can be no more systemic ethnocentrisms! There can be no more systemic greed! There can be no more oligarchies! There can be no more male (or female) domination! Out of necessity we must now support one another in healing from these disabling addictions so that our evolutionary process can continue.
Conclusion
Let us commit to a cooperative process of liberation from our quid pro quo, subservient relationship to violent nation-states, renouncing our allegiance to their insanity. We shall strive to recover our spiritual roots and the meaning of life as it connects us to the heavens and the earth--the sky, the cosmos and the carrying capacity of our seasonal Mother Earth in each of the bioregions where we live. We can choose to feel the Mother's rhythms if we walk slowly on the earth, learning from the changing seasons, awe-inspired by a mere glance at the 350 billion-plus stars in our galaxy alone. We can find our way merely by being quiet and listening to the breeze of wisdom that totally envelops us at all moments, including right here at this very second.
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GO TO THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE !! IT IS GOOD SHIT !! SOCIOLOGY ARTICLES BY THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY !!

2008-05-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/ <---THIS IS GOOD SHIT !! Sociology articles by the frankfurt school

LET'S START A WAR AGAINST CAPITALISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE WORLD !!

2008-05-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

Most americans and most people already have an enemy, it is corporate-capitalism, and the Upper bourgeois classes. I don't know why people don't fight a war against capitalism, bourgeoise upper classes and the fascist ruling classes if they want to be Spartan Warriors indeed. Instead of directing their anger against muslims, illegal aliens and other cultures that have nothing to do with USA problems, people in this country should direct their rage, violence and anger against capitalism (The real enemy). Like they are doing now in Venezuela, Bolivia and other societies who are being architects of their own destiny

I JUST GOT THE BOOK FROM AMAZON.COM THE POWER OF ISRAEL IN THE UNITED STATES WRITTEN BY JAMES PETRAS !!

2008-04-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

The Power of Israel in the United States
Stephen Lendman

James Petras is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He’s a noted academic figure on the US Left and a well-respected Latin American expert and longtime chronicler of the region’s popular struggles. He’s also an advisor to the landless workers in Brazil and the unemployed workers movement in Argentina. Along the way, he managed to find time to write many hundreds of articles and 62 books published in 29 languages including his latest one in which he discusses another vital world region he has extensive knowledge of and has written frequently about - the Middle East and specifically the state of Israel and its relations with its neighbors, the Palestinians and, most importantly and the subject of this book, the US.
Petras’ powerful new book is titled The Power of Israel in the United States. It’s a work of epic writing and essential reading documenting the enormous influence of the Jewish Lobby on US policy in the Middle East. It focuses like a laser to assure that policy conforms with Israel’s long-term goal for regional hegemony. The Lobby’s influence is broad and deep enough to include officials at the highest levels of government, the business community, academia, the clergy (especially the dominant Christian fundamentalists/Christian Zionists) and the mass media. Petras shows how together they’re able to assure the full and unconditional US support for all elements of Israel’s agenda going back decades even when that agenda harms our interests such as the unwinnable war in Iraq, any future one against Iran if it’s undertaken, and the appalling and brutal subjugation and colonization of the Palestinian people that serves no US interest whatever. In spite of it, the Lobby is able to get the US to go along with Israel unconditionally with no serious opposition to it tolerated.
The book is divided into four parts. This review will cover each one in detail, and what’s discussed will likely surprise any reader unfamiliar with the thoroughly documented account presented in it so compellingly. Petras sets the table in his introduction for what’s to come in the later chapters. He notes what author JJ Goldberg reported in his book Jewish Power: Inside the Jewish Establishment. Goldberg wrote in the early 1990s that 45% of the Democrat Party’s fundraising and 25% of that for the Republicans came from Jewish-funded Political Action Committees (PACS). Petras then updates the numbers using the ones Richard Cohen published in the Washington Post showing them now at 60% and 35% respectively, and that this funding relates to a single core issue - unconditional US support for Israel’s agenda including those parts of it human rights activists and observers of conscience judge most egregious and illegal. Petras stresses that no other single US lobby including Big Pharma, Big Oil, agribusiness, or any other one has this kind of dominant influence over the political process here. He refers to “Zioncon” ideologues and policymakers whose main goal is to make the Middle East into a “US-Israeli Co-Prosperity Sphere” under the fraudulent cover of promoting democracy in the region - but doing it through the barrel of a gun.
Petras explains the root of the Lobby’s power lies in the high proportion of Jewish families who are among the wealthiest and most influential ones in the country. He cites Forbes magazine that reported 25 - 30% of the wealthiest families here are Jewish despite the small percentage of Jews in the population overall. They include billionaires with enormous influence, and along with all others comprising the Jewish Lobby, have created a “tyranny of Israel over the US” with consequences grave enough to threaten world peace and stability, the global economy, and the very future of democracy in this country.
That democracy and our constitutionally protected rights now hang by a thread after the recent passage of the Military Commissions Act (aka the “torture authorization act” or more accurately the “US Constitutional annulment act”) that makes everyone everywhere an “enemy combatant” subject to arrest and detention out of sight anywhere in the world without regard for our (no longer) constitutionally guaranteed rights. The new law also applies to US citizens as the Jose Padilla case showed. We’ve effectively lost our habeas and due process rights even though technically we still have them.
Because of the Lobby’s power, Petras reports, the US has unconditionally supported Israel’s wars of aggression since 1967. It’s influence also led to the US Gulf war in 1991 and the second Iraq war begun in 2003, now raging out of control and seen by some noted analysts as unwinnable and causing potential irreparable economic and political harm to the nation. Nonetheless, it persists with no plan agreed on to end it. The Lobby also guaranteed this country’s unconditional support for Israel’s illegal wars of aggression against Lebanon and Palestine with all the devastation they caused and the horrendous consequences from them unresolved. The Palestinian conflict still rages under the radar, and the status in Lebanon hangs by a hair trigger ready to erupt again any time Israel decides to resume hostilities. But inflaming the Middle East powder keg to a near boiling point is the strong possibility the US and/or Israel will attack Iran because Israel wants it and the Jewish Lobby put its powerful support behind it. More on this, Palestine and Lebanon below.
Today the situation in the Middle East is so dire, Petras reports a large majority of Europeans and a growing number of Americans believe Israel is the greatest of all threats to world peace and stability. Nonetheless, the Bush administration, in acquiescence to the Lobby, has “bludgeoned” its European partners to go along with its uncompromising support for the Jewish state despite all the obvious perils from it. In this country, open debate is stifled, public figures and academics daring to air one truthfully are pilloried, ridiculed, called anti-semitic and even threatened, and no serious dissent is ever tolerated in the corporate-run media or their funded and controlled so-called public radio or PBS parts of it.
No publication is more servile to, supportive of, or more influential than the nation’s so-called “paper of record” publishing “All the News That’s Fit to Print” - the New York Times. It’s important because the stories it features prominently resonate around the country and the world. This dominant newspaper pledges unconditional support and fealty to the state of Israel whatever it does. The rest of the major media go along unquestioningly putting out regular one-sided pro-Israel uber alles propaganda with no opposition voices allowed to represent other points of view. We call that a free press - but only for those who own one. The state of the corporate-controlled media in this country is now so pathetic that Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders - for press freedom) just ranked the US 53rd in the world in press freedom behind countries like Benin, Namibia, Jamaica, France and Bolivia.
James Petras is a courageous independent voice who bucks this disturbing trend and refuses to go along. He proves it in his powerful and carefully documented new book that gives no quarter countering the mendacity, deceit and danger of the Lobby, its acolytes and hangers-on, and the corrupted major media. In his introduction, he calls for a “counter-hegemonic movement” to free us from our destructive “Israeli entanglements.” It’s needed to begin rebuilding our democracy and freedoms that are somewhere between life support and the crematorium. This book, he says, is his modest effort toward that goal. Because of the important information in it, it’s considerably more than that. It needs widespread exposure so people will know about it. Hopefully this review will help arouse some of them to want to find out in more detail.
Part I - Zionist Power in America
Petras begins with a discussion of who fabricated the lies about Iraq’s threat to our security and why. He mentions two competing channels of policy makers and advisors - the long-in-place formal structure of career military and civilian professionals in the Pentagon and State Department and a parallel one Bush administration neocons set up for this one purpose in the Pentagon, staffed by political appointees, and called the Office of Special Plans (OSP). It was the OSP’s job to cook the books, come up with the idea of weapons of mass destruction while ignoring the clear evidence to the contrary and contrive a fraudulent case for war against Iraq. The people in it were those in Donald Rumsfeld’s and Paul Wolfowitz’s chain of command and were closely connected to a number of influential neoconservative and pro-Israel organizations. They planned a war agenda based on lies because Israel wanted it for its security and hegemony in the region - beginning with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein followed by regime change in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and even Saudi Arabia.
Petras points out, contrary to popular belief, this war happened largely due to the efforts of the Jewish Lobby representing the interests of Israel. Big Oil opposed the idea because it feared attacking Iraq would jeopardize its business prospects with other oil-producing states in the region. Still, Israel and the Jewish Lobby got their war, and aside from the gain from high oil prices, Big Oil may end up a longer-term loser from it. US oil interests always prefer stability and normal relationships with countries where they operate or wish to and were quite comfortable dealing with Saddam Hussein without wanting to risk a war that might upset an otherwise profitable arrangement. Their fears proved justified as the war they feared created such unresolved turbulence in Iraq, it’s become too dangerous and unprofitable to undertake new ventures there except perhaps in parts of the Kurdish-controlled north. Big Oil also chafes at not being allowed to deal with the Iranians for contracts now let to its European and other competitors because US sanctions prevent them from doing business there. It’s hard to imagine those interests would ever go along with US - Israeli belligerence in the Middle East, but they dare not oppose it publicly.
Petras observes there’s never a public discussion allowed about that relationship in the mainstream nor will there ever be any, especially any hint the US attacked Iraq in service to Israel. There should be plenty of it though because the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have enraged hundreds of millions of Muslims and all people of conscience worldwide. They’ve caused the US to be seen as a pariah state and George Bush as a dangerous and morally depraved president of a failed administration. He and those closest to him like Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are reviled around the world and increasingly here at home as witnessed by the many thousands who took to the streets on October 5 in over 200 US cities on The World Can’t Wait Day - Drive Out the Bush Regime. The cost of Bush’s wars far exceed any possible future benefits from them, our security has been jeopardized, the nation’s status has been compromised, and some analysts believe the total dollar cost of the Iraq adventure may eventually top $2 trillion - an amount extremely harmful to the nation’s economy that’s now worrying key business leaders and responsible people in government.
The only clear beneficiary of the Bush war agenda is Israel. It removed its main adversary in the region and cut off the political and economic support it gave the Palestinians. Petras points out that Iraq along with Iran and Syria comprised the core resistance to Israel’s expansionist plans to crush the Palestinians (one down, two to go), ethnically cleanse them from their homeland and seize their land as one part of a long-term goal for a greater Israel and unchallengeable dominance in the region. Israel is the only country in the world with undeclared borders. It’s kept that status to give itself maximum latitude to annex all the territory it can toward the goal of a greater “Eretz Israel” Zionists want that includes the ancient lands of “Judea” and “Summaria,” the West Bank biblical parts of Israel Palestinians claim as their homeland.
With US help, Israel removed one threat to its plan for regional supremacy, but it still faces determined resistance from the Palestinians in spite of having crushed its democratically elected Hamas government. It also faces a resilient Hezbollah in Lebanon that humiliated the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the summer war there as well as opposition from Iran and Syria. In addition, there’s internal opposition within Israel over its war and colonization agenda because of its enormous cost plus the added insecurity it causes. It’s resulted in a level of out-migration now exceeding new arrivals as well as an erosion of the nation’s social programs because the state needs the resources for its aggression and annexation agenda. It’s much like what’s happening under the Bush administration where the people pay the price for imperial wars abroad and the moral decay and authoritarianism at home.
Obstacles and setbacks aside, Israel has pursued its goal to “democratize” the region through a belligerent policy of neutralizing its enemies in it by force. The plan they crafted is for a series of wars with its US ally taking the lead and the eventual goal of joint US - Israeli control over the entire region. Making it work depends on getting US administrations to go along, which so far hasn’t been a problem and has never been easier with the Bush administration in power and the high-level pro-Zionist officials in it with long-standing ties to Israel. They have the most important policy-making positions in government or are closely associated with the ones who do. These officials have a history of dedication to Israel’s interests even when they conflict with those here at home. They’re in the administration, the Congress as well as in the most influential Jewish organizations and lobbying groups like the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and what some observers believe is the single most powerful lobby in Washington - AIPAC.
Committed support for Israel also comes from the “Jewish Diaspora” that comprises thousands of dedicated activists here - doctors, dentists, philanthropists, key individuals on Wall Street, the major banks and the Federal Reserve and other key segments of business, the major media, the clergy and academics and journalists given special prominence because of their willingness to corrupt their integrity in return for the handsome benefits they get for their unconditional public support and contrived rationalizations for the US -Israeli agenda. This kind of influence and support has made Israel by far the largest recipient in the world of US financial aid that amounts upfront to about $3 billion a year with more forthcoming any time as needed in added funding, weapons transfers and large low or no-interest loans that may never have to be repaid.
Israel also gets the unheard of advantage of receiving the latest and most advanced US arms and technology, unrestricted US market access for its products and services, free entry of its immigrants, unconditional support for its aggressive wars and colonization of the Palestinians and South Lebanese, and guaranteed US vetoes in the Security Council against all UN resolutions unfavorable to its interests. It’s also able to get prominent Washington officials and the dominant corporate-run and funded media to label all criticism of Israel anti-semitic and freely uses this ruse whenever it serves its purpose. Israel is allowed to get away with its intelligence operations here as well including its covert penetration of military bases, the FBI, IRS, INS, EPA and many other government agencies. In addition, it’s believed its agents knew in advance about the 9/11 attack but withheld the information knowing it would serve its interests to let it happen. There’s also considerable evidence high US officials either knew about it themselves or were complicit in carrying it out because they also knew it would allow them the kind of reckless free reign at home and abroad they never could have gotten any other way. This is a story that won’t go away nor should it, and one day we may finally learn all the parts of it we can only speculate about now.
Because of Israel’s unparalleled ties to the centers of power and dominant media, Petras notes it’s able get back $50 in return for every dollar it spends. That’s how it’s able to finance its military and colonial settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) on annexed land. The Jewish networks here support these practices as justifiable compensation allowed victims of the “Holocaust” (the ones noted author John Pilger calls “worthy victims”) and circulate that ideology in the corporate media. They also reinforce anti-Muslim hysteria labelling all Arabs untrustworthy, radical Islamic fundamentalists or Islamo-fascists (”unworthy” victims for John Pilger), claiming the right to arrest, torture and mete out summary justice to them in military tribunals or just attack and kill them in imperial wars of “liberation.”
The result for Israel and its people has been disastrous because the Palestinians have refused for almost six decades to accede to this abuse and have waged two Intifadas to end it. With little more than a fierce determination, their bodies and crude weapons, they’ve fought back with suicide bombings and attacks on public facilities in Israel knowing what harsh retaliation they’ll face afterward. People in the US have also paid a heavy price in the erosion of democracy and freedom. It’s evidenced by the Bush administration’s harsh legislation beginning with the infamous USA Patriot Act passed in short order right after the 9/11 attack, followed by other repressive laws and practices allowed like illegal surveillance and secret renditions of anyone targeted to torture-prisons with court acquiescence or silence about most of them.
Petras points out that none of this deters powerful supporters of Israel who raise billions of dollars to support the country’s war machine and finance its colonization of annexed Palestinian land plus the Golan Heights (with its invaluable water resources) seized and never returned to Syria after the 1967 war. Israel’s economy is not self-sufficient, and without this aid, it would have to make unacceptable cuts in social services, reduce its military budget and curtail its expansionary plans. With it, plus the $3 billion a year direct US contribution and lots more help, US taxpayers (like it or not) have the burden of funding Israel’s belligerence and colonization agenda.
Petras itemizes what it all costs:
– $3 billion annually in direct aid.
– Billions more in loans as needed.
– Millions annually for resettlement help for Soviet (now Russian) and Ethiopian immigrants.
– a $10 billion loan guarantee in 1990 and a further $9 billion one in 2004 plus billions more for the asking and to be forthcoming to pay the costs of the 2006 Lebanon and Palestine wars.
– Since 1981, economic aid made in cash transfers, and since 1985 military aid done the same way.
– $45 billion in repayment waved loans since 1974 and billions more for the asking - free money at US taxpayer expense.
– Since 1982, ESF cash transfers in one early in the fiscal year lump sum with no strings attached while other countries receiving them are paid quarterly with their use monitored. Israel invests the money in US treasuries costing US taxpayers millions more annually and also gets special FMS funding arrangements costing US taxpayers well over $1 billion since 1991.
– Other privileged benefits include financial aid to develop Israel’s defense industry, transfer of state-of-the-art technology and the latest US weapons, US guarantee for Israel’s access to oil, and the likely massive aid still to come to defray the country’s “special costs” for its Gaza “disengagement plan” morphing into the colonization of whatever parts of the OPT Israel wishes to annex for new settlements US taxpayers pay for.
– Add to this some $22 billion Israel got over the past 50 years through the sale of its below-market interest paying bonds that have financed half of its development - meaning the colonization of annexed Palestinian lands and military funding for its predatory imperial wars.
Petras explains the Zionist power structure in the US makes it all possible, but its reach extends well beyond the so-called “Jewish Lobby.” He identifies a “Zionist power configuration (ZPC) that includes AIPAC as one part of a “complex network of interrelated formal and informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional, and local levels” unconditionally supporting the state of Israel and all its policies including its wars, colonization and oppression. It’s power is like a cancer infecting the highest levels of government and all the other centers of power and influence as already explained. It controls the selection of political candidates and can defeat incumbents or aspirants daring to criticize Israel. It also shapes the reporting on Israel in the mass media suppressing any of it that’s unsupportive or critical. And it’s powerful enough to get “uncooperative” journalists, and even some academics, fired and banished from the mainstream for daring to step out of line.
Petras reports the power of the ZPC was evident in the run-up to the Iraq war and the Gulf war before it in 1991. Going back to the GHW Bush administration, the US wanted regime change in Iraq, but that decision was heavily influenced by the ZPC that considered Saddam a mortal enemy of Israel who had to be removed. He managed to survive through the 1990s despite our efforts to destabilize the country and bring it to its knees. But once the GW Bush administration neocons took over in 2001, the ugly business of war planning and occupation took hold to complete what the Gulf war left unfinished, and powerful Zionists (like Paul Wolfowitz and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman - the senator from AIPAC) in key policy-making positions invented the threat to bring it about in March, 2003 - all based on lies, deceit and subservience to Israel’s imperial agenda.
The US military finally removed Saddam and conducted a scorched-earth campaign to destroy Iraqi society, its infrastructure and historical treasures to “dismantle the secular state (and) turn the country in a desert kingdom - a loose collection of at least three ‘tribal’ client mini-states based on ethnicities, religious-tribal loyalties (and no viable threat against) Israeli expansionism, particularly in Northern Iraq.” The effort to do this is now underway after the Iraq puppet parliament’s passage of its federalism bill to take effect in 18 months that will effectively divide the country into the three US-ordered, designed and supposedly more easily governed parts it wants.
It’s unlikely this can work, but it’s clearer than ever now what the human cost of the war has been for Iraqis. It caused the violent deaths of about 655,000 of them attributable to the war according to a shocking new study published by the noted Lancet British medical journal which updated their two earlier ones done after March, 2003. The study used the statistically reliable technique known as random households “cluster sampling” with personal interviews conducted across the country that used death certificate verification in the great majority of cases to come up with the total. It’s likely the true number of deaths is even much higher than this appalling number as the interviewers were unable to include in their count the most dangerous and violent parts of the country like Fallujah, Ramadi and other areas of al Anbar province where mass killing still goes on daily as well as families (likely in the thousands) in which all the members were killed.
This new information, just out and covering a period since March, 2003, compares to Human Rights Watch’s estimate of 250,000 - 290,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime over its 20 year existence. It amplifies the outrageous crime of this barbarous adventure to achieve a “Greater Middle East US-Israel Co-Prosperity Sphere” and to give Israel access to the extra water, oil, capital and markets it lacks. It was also part of Israel’s greater agenda under the Sharon Likud, and now Olmert Kadima, governments to have free reign to pursue their stated policy of “annexation and separation” in the OPT. The Zionist influence in the Bush administration is so entrenched, it assured there’d be no opposition to it then or now.
It’s all gone on in spite of mass anti-imperial resistance to what’s seen as an arrogant disregard for the standards and norms of international behavior and laws in the pursuit of an expansionist agenda. Israel and the US today willfully violate the UN Charter, the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions relative to the conduct of war and when it may be legally waged, the treatment of prisoners, the use of torture, destruction of infrastructure and historical sites, and plunder of natural resources to establish client puppet-run regimes exploiting their people in service to the dominant capital and political interests of their imperial conquerors.
Then to quell resistance and tighten security, the US and Israel resort to the most extreme methods including mass arrests and detentions and the free use of torture and targeted assassinations as state policy. Amnesty International reports since the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the US and Israel are the only two countries in the world to have legalized the use of torture. Petras and others report the top leaders in the Pentagon up to Donald Rumsfeld specifically ordered its use “while the Justice and Defense Departments insisted that the President could override any laws - international or national as well as the US Constitution - in defending the empire.” These top officials in key areas of government have audaciously given the President “de facto and de jure dictatorial powers” to do whatever he chooses to establish “Imperial Security.” It makes our citizens at home no safer than the victims of US and Israeli imperial aggression in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine or anywhere else in the world.
But Petras reports it’s even worse than that as the expose of torture in Iraq revealed a highly organized network of US and Israeli assassins worldwide. They operate as international death squads engaged in “killing, kidnapping and torturing ’suspects’ and sympathizers of resistance movements.” Petras calls this a US-sponsored “Murder Incorporated” that’s composed of Army Special Forces, Navy Seals and a DELTA force operating in a Special Agency Program (SAP). It follows the same practices long engaged in by Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations known as the Mossad, and its aim is to remove all opposition by whatever extralegal methods it chooses while ignoring international law. It then justifies this activity at the highest levels of government as a matter of policy.
Petras further points to the UN’s International Leadership report on the destruction of civilian and military infrastructure in Iraq (much like what Israel did in the OPT discussed below). It showed “84% of Iraq’s higher learning institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed.” Archeological museums and historic sites, libraries and archives have also been plundered, and targeted assassinations have been carried out against academics, other teachers, senior military personnel, journalists and other professionals including doctors. In addition, there are random or targeted daily terror killings by US-directed “Salvador option” death squads as well as thousands of kidnappings and other systematic horrors making life intolerable for most everyone in the country outside the four square kilometer fortress-like Green Zone HQ in central Baghdad for “coalition” officials and the puppet “Iraq interim government.”
It’s all part of Washington’s design to destroy the country’s cultural identity as an Arab state, separate its oil resources from any large population base, and divide the nation into more easily governed parts just the way it was done in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It’s now been reported that longtime Bush family consigliere James Baker, co-chairing an Iraq Study Group, will formerly propose the kind of plan the Iraq puppet government just passed putting a quasi-official US imprimatur on it as part of a US - Israeli divide and conquer strategy that may not be as easy to pull off as as the one in the former Yugoslavia or in the simple north - south divisions of Korea and Vietnam after WW II.
What’s happening today in Iraq and Palestine is so outrageous and chaotic, Petras refers to a “House of Horrors” in both countries with the Zionist militarists at the Pentagon and their Israeli counterparts in charge of their respective “Horror Shows….under the big tent of a ‘Mid-East Democratic Reform Initiative.’ ” This is the modus operandi of empire building and colonization - blast and tear a nation to shreds so it can never again exist as it once did. Then terrorize the people into submission and kill off all the ones who resist. It’s a barbaric thumb in the eye to humanity, but this is the way rogue empires do things, especially when they’re too powerful to challenge.
The US-led killing machine is in full operation in Iraq, and so is the Israeli one in the OPT. Petras calls the one there “Israel’s Final Solution” or the “Palestinian Holocaust,” and it’s focal point is in Gaza which even unoccupied is the world’s largest open-air prison for its 1.45 million people in the most densely populated space of its size in the world. Today the Strip and the West Bank are Israeli-directed killing fields targeting Palestinian civilians helpless to stop it beyond their courageous acts of desperation with crude weapons and their bodies against tanks, F-16s, helicopter gunships, and illegal and immoral terror weapons like white phosphorus bombs and shells, cluster bombs that never stop killing and maiming, and experimental new weapons that don’t have publicly-known names yet.
Israel’s war on Palestine has gone on for nearly six decades, and September 28 marked the sixth anniversary of the al-Aqsa Mosque Intifada resistance against it that began with Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the holy site in 2000. Israel dramatically escalated the conflict after the minor June 25, 2006 incident at an Israeli military post near Kerem Shalom crossing killing two IDF soldiers, injuring several others and capturing a third still held whose name the corporate media made sure everyone knows but won’t ever reveal any of over-10,000 names of Palestinian prisoners held (the fate of “unworthy victims”). The June clash followed a series of bloody earlier in the month Israeli attacks on Gaza including the widely reported beach shelling that killed eight Palestinians and injured 32 others including 13 children. Much as it did in Lebanon (discussed below), Israel’s response was swift, deadly, disproportionate to what happened and planned months in advance as revealed by General Yoav Galant, in charge of Gaza, in a candid interview he gave in Israel’s Maariv daily.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented it all including the devastation of the past six years. Overall it created a state of mass-immiseration for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank:
– essential infrastructure affecting power, clean water and sanitation destroyed
– mobility restricted or denied
– imposition of an embargo threatening the collapse of an already weak economy creating unemployment up to 80% of the population
– hostile incursions into the OPT, daily killings, and frequent extra-judicial assassinations
– home and property demolitions
– mass arbitrary arrests, administrative detentions of thousands of Palestinians without charge, and the systematic use of torture on those held including against women and children
– the destruction of a viable Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) through imprisonments of its democratically elected members held without charge or on contrived ones against them as well as the destruction of its civil and security facilities
All this and much more has been done (as in Iraq) to destroy the cultural identity and very existence of the Palestinian people to prevent them from ever having a viable independent state of their own as well as force a mass-Palestinian exodus to other Arab states willing to help them escape their intolerable situation in the OPT.
The plan to crush these defenseless people now includes credible evidence that the Bush and Olmert administrations have been arming, training and plotting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah followers to lead a civil uprising against the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) and destroy it by force. It follows the Palestinians failed efforts to form a national unity government because Hamas refused Fatah’s demand to govern as Israel’s enforcer and abandon its own pledge to serve the welfare of its people. Now in an interview on October 8 in the London Sunday Times, Fatah militia leader Tawfig Tirawi, inflamed matters by accusing Hamas of “accumulating weapons” and that “a full-scale civil war can break out at any moment.” He earlier said “civil war is inevitable.” The paper also reported President Abbas “notified the US, Jordan and Egypt that he is preparing to take action against Hamas.” These statements defy Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh who firmly said he’ll never allow a civil war to happen, and it’s unimaginable the Palestinian people want one. But Haniyeh and his people may have no choice as this seems to be the current joint US-Israeli strategy to destroy Palestinian resistance and do it with help from Fatah President Abbas. This is the same man who pledged his fealty to Israel as a participant in crafting the Oslo Accords sellout of his people and being a principle in the Arafat-led corrupted and mismanaged Palestinian Authority until Hamas won a majority of the seats in the January, 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections. The Bush and Olmert governments wouldn’t tolerate that outcome, and the New York Times reported right after the election US and Israeli officials met at the “highest level” to plan the destruction of Hamas by “starving” the PA and making the people in the OPT pay the greatest price.
For Israel, this is part of its state policy of ethnic cleansing by slow-motion genocide and out-migration all leading to the destruction of the Palestinian identity. It wants to co-opt a corrupted PA leadership of its choice to act as Israel’s enforcer and partner in the destruction of its own people. It’s to fulfill the intent of what former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier meant by her racist comment that “There are no Palestinians” and what Prime Minister David Ben Gurion earlier said after Israel brutally expelled the Palestinians from their homes and land in the 1948 war establishing the state of Israel: “We have come and we have stolen their country….We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return….(and 10 years earlier had written his son) We will expel the Arabs and take their places….with the force at our disposal.” He and his successors planned to include all the land of biblical Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) within the final fixed borders of a greater Israeli state whenever they’re finally declared. The US unconditionally supports Israel’s plan to do this as well as its policies of plunder and exploitation, but as Petras explains: “No one in their right mind can claim that the Israeli assault on Gaza advances US policies, interests or US imperial power.” It doesn’t matter because the power of the Jewish Lobby got the full support of the Bush administration for it anyway as well as the near unanimity for it in the Congress.
The Rape of Lebanon
What Israel did to the Palestinians in the OPT over decades, it did to Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and in about a five week blitzkrieg beginning July 12, ending formally but fragilely with a UN-brokered ceasefire on August 14. Petras compares the assault to the Nazi’s November 9 and 10, 1938 infamous Kristallnacht pogrom in the German Reich against the Jews calling that event a “garden party” compared to the rape of Lebanon and vast devastation from it. It began with Hezbollah’s cross-border incursion on July 12, killing eight IDF soldiers in the exchange that followed and capturing two others. There’s still a dispute over which side of the Lebanese border the incident took place as for years Israel routinely makes hostile incursions into Lebanon by land and air, and still illegally occupies the 25 square kilometer Shebaa Farms area of South Lebanon it never relinquished after seizing it in the 1967 war.
As against Gaza, Israel again responded swiftly and disproportionately in a reign of terror against the Lebanese people by land, air and sea. It killed and wounded thousands and displaced a million or more Lebanese civilians. It also systematically destroyed the country’s essential to life and other vital infrastructure and created an amount of physical devastation that could take a generation to recover from if Israel even allows it to happen. It was done in part to destroy Hezbollah as a political entity and as an effective resistance force against Israel’s imperial designs on the country. But Israel’s plans are much more far-reaching than that as explained below.
Petras reported Middle East expert Juan Cole claims Israel wanted the war and planned it at least a year in advance. Matthew Kallman of the San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service also found and reported evidence that preparations for it began in May, 2000, immediately after Israel ended its occupation of the country that began with its invasion and brutal assault in 1982 that killed about 18,000 Lebanese. Kallman also reported that over a year before the conflict began a senior IDF official gave “PowerPoint presentations” off the record to US and other officials and unnamed journalists and think tanks explaining how the attack would unfold “in revealing detail.”
Again, Israel got the full backing, funding and arming as needed from the Bush administration to carry it out, effectively making this gruesome adventure a joint US-Israeli operation. Besides wanting to neutralize Hezbollah’s resistance, the goal was to destroy Lebanon as a functioning country and ethnically cleanse the southern part of it up to the Litani River Israel wants to control and eventually annex and keep as it did the Golan after the 1967 war. Israel claims this area (like the Golan) is important for security reasons, but its greatest value (again like the Golan) is as a source of fresh water from the Litani and from the Wazzani springs that feed into the Hasbani River that’s a tributary of the Jordan River. The Hisbani flows into Israel two miles downstream from the Wazzani and runs into the Sea of Galilee that’s Israel’s largest source of fresh water.
Israel has had designs on Lebanon for 40 years or more and has kept the country in a state of instability, partial occupation and conflict over most of that time. Now the state of the country is a devastated near-wasteland monitored by so-called (Israel-approved and friendly) UN Blue Helmets and Lebanese Armed Forces replacing the IDF on the ground under a fragile UN brokered ceasefire arrangement that could end any time Israel wishes again to unleash its war machine and on any pretext. There’s nothing to deter Israel from doing it as it has the unconditional support of the Jewish Lobby and whatever US administration is in power. Unless this changes, the people of Lebanon, like those in Iraq and Palestine, can only look ahead to more conflict and the pain and suffering from it.
That’s because there’s still unfinished business for both empires, and it’s not likely either one will soon give up on what they’re determined to achieve. So even though Iraq is a hopeless quagmire, the Bush administration says it will “stay the course.” And as long as Israel has full US backing, it will continue pursuing its imperial agenda even though Hezbollah humiliated the IDF in Lebanon and the Palestinians show no signs of ending their determined resistance short of mass-annihilation or forced expulsion. But it’s not all smooth sailing as the unholy US-Israeli alliance faces a threat it can’t ignore that could derail it. It’s a growing broad-based worldwide anti-imperialist movement against these two partnered pariah states. It remains to be seen how far it will go, whether it can achieve critical mass in the US and in Israel, and if it can succeed in changing the direction of these two belligerents so far unstoppable and determined to go on unchecked by what passes for the civilized western world.
Part II - Israel and Middle East Warfare
It now looks like the only lesson the US and Israel learned from past failure is to press on with a new adventure. It appears the likely prime target is the Islamic Republic of Iran, as ill-advised as it will be to attack it. Petras explains that “Israel’s political and military leadership have repeatedly and openly declared (their intention) to attack Iran in the immediate future.” And once again it looks like the power of the Jewish Lobby in the US has the Bush administration thinking the same way to help its Israeli partner free itself from another “irritant” in the region that stands in the way of both countries’ imperial aims. Petras calls Israel’s Iran-directed war preparations “the greatest immediate threat to world peace and political stability (today).” It’s hard to disagree.
That threat was heightened following North Korea’s nuclear test which Israeli officials were quick to jump on suggesting it will benefit Iran. It came from an inflammatory statement by Miri Eisin, Prime Minister Olmert’s spokeswoman, who told the AP: “We should remind ourselves that the North Koreans have already been suppliers of launching platforms which could reach Europe and certainly Israel. As such, they have already shown their willingness to be suppliers to Iran.” Then Israel’s UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman went further on Israel’s Channel 2 TV referencing North Korea’s nuclear activity and adding: “what Iran is about to do could be much worse, much more frightening and much more dangerous.” This language practically demands an attack on Iran to destroy its presumed “nuclear threat” even though Iran is no threat to any country and the real threat is a growing likelihood of an Israeli and/or US attack on Iran or any other country in the region targeted as an enemy.
The US and Israel are allowed to get away with these kinds of outrageously stark and provocative statements even though the only pretext either country can fabricate is the baseless claim that Iran’s legitimate right to enrich uranium for commercial use means the country has embarked on a nuclear weapons program that will threaten Israel. In fact, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and, from all the evidence uncovered from years of monitoring by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is in full compliance with it. It has every legal right to pursue its commercial nuclear program and nuclear enrichment for it. Israel, on the other hand, never signed the treaty, is known to have two to three hundred or more sophisticated nuclear weapons and launching systems for them, has stated its intention to use them if it chooses to, and is a nuclear outlaw - but one with an important ally the Iranians lack.
Today the debate in Israel is only over the method and timing of attacking Iran. Petras explains the Israelis have been pushing the US to do it for over a decade with the power of the Jewish Lobby in full support claiming the Islamic Republic threatens Israel’s security and its dominance in the region. It doesn’t matter that Iran never attacked its neighbors and isn’t likely to undertake a military action except in self-defense as it did against Iraq in the 1980s. Further, it’s an Israeli and made-in-America agitprop fabrication that Iranian President Ahmadinejad threatened “to wipe Israel off the map.” The president said a number of things including….”this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” meaning an illegal racist colonial one, but he didn’t say or mean it should be removed by force or that Jews should be expelled from Israel.
Further proof of Iran’s intentions came from Grand Ayatollah Khamenei’s public pledge never to attack another country. He also condemned the development and use of nuclear weapons as being against Islam. The Western media was careful to suppress Khamenei’s pledge and instead published false reports that he threatened the US to heighten the tension between the two countries. It’s all part of the scheme to get full US support for Israel’s intended war plans and the long held desire of both countries for regime change in Iran.
Petras lays out a dire scenario if a US, Israeli or joint attack is launched. It will be especially bad if the US does it using so-called “mini-nuke robust earth penetrator bunker-buster” munitions which are weapons that can be made to any desired potency and are likely to be from one-third to two-thirds as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. In other words, there’s nothing “mini” about them. Aside from the catastrophic level of immediate and long-term casualties from nuclear annihilation and radiation in Iran and beyond, Petras explains such an attack will only be a “pyrrhic victory.” If Israel does it alone, it may set off a chain “political conflagration (to) unseat the rulers of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia.” If the US attacks, it “would be even worse: major oil wells burning, US troops in Iraq surrounded (with the catastrophic consequences of far greater loss of life on both sides), long-term relations with Arab regimes undermined and increased oil prices (possibly high enough to cause a worldwide economic calamity) and supplies disrupted.” It’s almost certain this would inflame or enrage public opinion in the US and Israel that could lead to the ouster of the ruling parties in both countries.
It would also likely undermine Big Oil’s existing and desired major oil exploration projects and cause the Israelis to crack down harder on the Palestinians and make them face forced massive ethnic cleansing expulsion from their homeland. Further, it would almost certainly get a response from Hezbollah or other resistance in South Lebanon, reignite the conflict there, unleash the Israeli killing machine all over again and cause more mass displacement and reoccupation by the IDF as the UN Blue Helmets and Lebanese forces evacuate the conflict zone. And it would lead to a growing threat of retaliatory terror attacks in the US, other Western countries and in Israel and would likely strengthen the resolve of other nations feeling potentially threatened by a hostile US, Israel and the West to seek defensive economic and military alliances in a structure like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that was formed in 2001 for political, diplomatic, economic and security reasons to act as a counterweight to NATO which the US dominates.
Still, with all the hazards of attacking Iran clearly in the minds of US policy makers, the momentum for it is moving ahead. It’s happening in spite of serious high-level dispute in Washington about undertaking it. The Pentagon has war plans for it to include NATO, Israel and Canada, and it currently has a major US naval strike group deployment in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean. Part of it is permanently stationed in the region, and in early October, The powerful Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group got “prepare to deploy” orders, headed there on October 3 and is now in place for whatever action may be intended. It joins the Enterprise and Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Groups making a total of three US naval task forces in position opposite Iran for whatever purpose may be planned and will shortly be joined by a fourth Boxer Expeditionary Strike Group that left Singapore on October 16 for the region. Naval forces already there have been engaged in what the Iranian foreign ministry calls “dangerous and suspicious” exercises in the Gulf practicing intercepting and searching ships for potential WMDs and missiles.
This all may be just a saber-ratling bluff, but if it’s more than that it could unfold as a late October or early November “surprise” ahead of the November 7 congressional elections now only days away and be initiated in response to a manufactured incident on the order of the August, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin one or the blowing up of the USS Maine in February, 1898 in Havana Harbor. It’s never hard for an aggressor to find reasons for war if it wants one and just needs a convenient excuse to start it.
The Bush administration and Israelis may get their wish if the Navy goes ahead with its reported plans to blockade Iranian oil ports. This action will be an act of war if it’s done that Iran will have a legal right to respond to in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter but will surely be met with a “shock and awe” counterattack against about 400 Iranian target sites already designated as ones to destroy in the event of hostilities. None of this guarantees an attack is imminent, but it shows a real possibility one may be coming. It also shows the power of the Jewish Lobby in the US that supports Israel’s long-term aim to attack Iran no matter how grim the fallout from it may be. There’s so much open speculation about this, it’s gotten saner military, political and economic analysts here to believe this would be an act of insanity with the kind of potentially catastrophic consequences Petras outlined above. Will it happen? We can only hold our breathe waiting to find out, but it may not be long before we do.
Part III - Experts on Terror or Terrorist Experts
In this part of his book, Petras goes head-to-head with the so-called self-styled “terrorist experts” (TE) and clearly comes out ahead with his incisive dissection of them explaining why they’re prominently featured in the major media. He calls them the “set-up” people - there to play a role to “motivate the colonial and imperial conquerors and reinforce their idea that the terrorists are not worthy of ruling or being ruled,” so we have to get rid of them. It doesn’t matter that the so-called “war on terrorism” is a shameless overused but very effective ruse scare tactic. It’s always used because the public never catches on no matter how many times before supposed threats turned out to be another scam to get them to go along with whatever schemes our government had in mind to undertake. It never ceases to amaze how short an attention span the public has, but it’s clear the power of the corporate-run media has a lot to do with it. It led author Studs Terkel to refer to a national Altzeimer’s disease and author and political critic Gore Vidal to subtitle his 2004 book Imperial America - Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.
It gives the whole propaganda apparatus and the TE an open field to manipulate the public mind and get it to believe most anything. Petras calls these people “verbal assassins” who can’t or won’t understand that people pummelled by “shock and awe” attacks, their countries plundered in the name of “liberation,” their people mass-murdered, raped, arrested and tortured might be desperate and motivated enough to strike back in retaliatory self-defense. It follows logically from Newton’s law that for every action there’s a corresponding reaction. In 1954, the CIA understood this and invented a term for it (no self-respecting TE will touch). The agency called it “blowback” referring to the unintended consequences from US hostile acts abroad like overthrowing legitimate or otherwise constituted governments as it did against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 ushering in the 25 year terror reign of the Shah. It finally led to the “blowback” 1979 revolution, and it causes other instances of retaliation now ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and for nearly six decades in Palestine.
But prominent TE featured in the major media have a different diagnosis of resistance fighters. They call them “incurable psychopaths (who are) extremely dangerous when at large (so we must flush them out to) capture, confine, torture or kill (them).” A convenient division of labor is then arranged to do it and the TE play their assigned role along with the military, recruited satraps, prison commandants, interrogators, guards and assorted other functionaries. They’re team member hegemon-devil’s disciples turning “victims into executioners and the executioners into victims.” They do it by dehumanizing the legitimate resistance they label Islamo-fascists, Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists or other invented designations of inferiority or implied threat that must be destroyed.
It’s incomprehensible to the TE that almost any act of retaliatory self-defense might be justifiable resistance given the level of state-directed violence used against them mercilessly. In Israel, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan it led to the phenomenon of suicide bombings which Petras calls “a form of individual sacrifice, of individual resistance taken in the name of the collective.” He explains further that in the West individual sacrifice is rewarded with medals, but in the Middle East and specifically in the case of suicide bombers the reward is martyrdom for giving their lives in the cause of national liberation against a superior hostile force. This is a phenomenon common throughout history when a people face an overpowering conquerer and occupier. Petras explains “there have always been and always will be self-sacrificing individuals or (whole populations)….prepared to defend nation and home….and to use (their) body as a missile or weapon (to do it).”
Petras also explains there are different forms of imperial conquest and subjugation, and the one the US uses in Iraq and Afghanistan and that Israel uses against the Palestinians is a cruel and dehumanizing “process of destruction, degradation, and exploitation followed by efforts to ‘reconstruct’ a colonized military, police, and political structure willing and able to repress and contain anti-colonial resistance.” It’s a doctrine of “total war” against target nations too weak to fight back except by asymmetrical guerilla warfare means that include tactics like car and suicide bombings. Petras calls this practice “one of the ultimate forms of rejection of tryanny” that will only end when “total war” does. And that will only happen when the “colonial revivalist strand of imperialism in….its US, European and Israel variants” are defeated….Peace and reconciliation is only possible if justice is meted to the architects and practitioners of total war and human degradation.” A long and painful struggle for liberation may be ahead before that goal is ever achieved.
Part IV - Noam Chomsky and the Pro-Israel Lobby
In the book’s final part, Petras challenges a man who may best be described as an iconic figure on the Left, an anti-war activist, and much more but not one unused to being challenged and sometimes harshly. Petras points out that Chomsky has been a sharp critic of Israeli policies through the years and has been strongly attacked for his views by pro-Israeli organizations and the major media on the rare times his name is even allowed in it. Still he defends the existence of the Zionist state and has a different view than Petras on the power and influence of the Jewish Lobby in shaping US policy toward Israel. Petras lists what he calls Chomsky’s fifteen erroneous theses reflecting his long-held belief that the Lobby isn’t as potent as the strong case Petras makes in this book that it is. Not wishing to take sides with two distinguished men this writer holds in high esteem, the points of disagreement will only be listed so the reader can decide who makes the better case.
Petras begins by listing what he calls Chomsky’s eight “dubious propositions:”
1. The pro-Israel Lobby is like any other one.
2. The Lobby’s backers have no more power than other pressure groups.
3. The Lobby succeeds because its interests coincide with those of the US.
4. Israel is a tool of the US empire and used as needed.
5. “Big Oil” and the “military-industrial complex” are the major forces shaping Middle East policy.
6. US and Israeli interests usually coincide.
7. The Iraq war and threats to Iran and Syria stem from the “oil interests” and “military-industrial complex.”
8. US behavior in the Middle East is the same as what it practices worldwide.
Petras then uses the above list to discuss what he calls Chomsky’s 15 theses and uses the persuasive evidence presented in his book to take issue with them, one by one. He sums up his case stating he’s done this because of Chomsky’s enormous stature making whatever his views are stand out prominently. It’s a matter of consequence when a man like Noam Chomsky believes the Jewish Lobby is like all others which in Petras’ view gives a “free ride to the principal authors, architects and lobbyists in favor of the (Iraq) war (and is an) obstacle to achieving clarity about whom we are fighting and why. To ignore the pro-Israel Lobby is (also) to allow it a free hand in pushing for the invasion of Iran and Syria (and any other regime in the region Israel may wish to remove).” Petras sums up saying that “the peace and justice movements, at home and abroad, are bigger than any individual or intellectual - no matter what their past credentials.” In this battle of noted titans on the Left, it’s for the reader to decide who’s right.
Summation - Confronting Zionism and Reclaiming American Middle East Policy
Petras has written a powerful and important new book that needs broad exposure and resonance. But he’ll never get its content past the corporate gatekeepers controlling the major media because of his courage to reveal what others fear to do - confront Zionism, its agenda of aggressive wars and colonization, and the power of the Jewish Lobby to assure Israel gets the full and unconditional support of every US administration regardless of whether what it does serves the interests of this country. That Lobby power reached its apogee and full fruition with the ascent of the Bush administration neocons that effectively pledge their fealty to the rulers of the Israeli state and prove Ariel Sharon may have been right when he once arrogantly boasted about his relationship with George Bush saying: “We have the US under our control.”
The result has been disastrous for this country and the sacred principles on which it was founded. In partnership with Israel, the US began tearing apart the Middle East and Central Asia by attacking and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. It now threatens to inflame the whole region enough to make it explode if we go ahead with plans to attack Iran, do it with nuclear weapons, and then move on to Syria and even Saudi Arabia while continuing to hold Lebanon hostage and under siege in a state of interregnum awaiting the next inevitable trigger igniting the whole ugly business there all over again. The Bush administration “long war” against Islam enraged 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide growing in unity against us. It’s also destroying our freedom and democracy at home in the process threatening everyone with the emerging power of a national security police state that spells tyranny with an out-of-control president usurping the dictatorial power of a “unitary executive” claiming the right to go around the law of the land and its international obligations to govern as he pleases.
Petras sounds the alarm and asks how did we get into this debacle, and who’s responsible for it. He stresses the need for a full-scale Congressional investigation to find out, but laments it’s not likely to happen as long as the Bush neocons have their way. The central thesis of his book is that the Jewish Lobby serves the interests of Zionism and acts as agents for the state of Israel. It co-opted the Bush administration, all others preceding it, and the key centers of power and influence in the country leading us to the disaster we now face because of our misguided Middle East adventurism. He equates our actions in league with Israel to the Nazi war crimes committed in WW II, saying “These are the highest crimes against humanity.” Referring to the crime of aggression, the Nuremberg Tribunal called it the “supreme international crime,” and those Nazis found guilty of it were hanged. Petras explains that the “worst crimes are committed by those who claim to be a divinely chosen people, a people with ‘righteous’ claims of supreme victimhood.” He goes on to say: “Righteous victimology, linked to ethno-religious loyalties and directed by fanatical civilian militarists with advanced weaponry, is the greatest threat to world peace and humanity.”
Petras makes an impassioned plea for progressives (really all people of conscience) to reject the imperial agenda of all nations, and in the case of Israel, to stand firm against inevitably being labelled anti-semitic. Scurrilous name-calling is another refuge of scoundrels that shouldn’t be tolerated or allowed to deter our committed assault against the forces of darkness that will destroy us unless we stand firmly against them. Petras tells us it won’t be easy, and we can expect forceful ideological attacks against us premised on the notion that Israel is the embodiment of “democracy, liberty and justice” and those daring to criticize the Jewish state will be called supporters of “Arab dictatorships, repression, injustice and terrorism.”
The stakes are much too high to let them get away with it using scurrilous name-calling in defense of it. In Petras’ words: “Israel and its overseas network in the US….(threatens) not only the oppressed people of Palestine (and Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and any other state Israel takes aim at) but the rights of people throughout the world.” He stresses we have mass public opinion on our side nearly everywhere outside the US, and it’s gaining resonance here as well. It sees Israel and our actions in support of the Jewish state as the greatest of all threats to world peace and stability. Petras ends his book with one final impassioned call to arms: “Let’s move ahead and de-colonize our country, our minds and politics as a first step in reconstituting a democratic republic, free of entangling colonial and neo-imperial alliances.” Wise thoughts from a wise and courageous man. We can’t ignore them lest we pay the supreme price of the loss of our freedom (and maybe our lives) because we didn’t know it was being taken from us until it was too late to act to save it.
Stephen Lendman is a regular RINF contributor, lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

RON PAUL SAID ISRAEL HAS 300 ATOMIC BOMBS. ISRAEL IS A THREAT TO THE WORLD

2008-04-27T11:55:00.001-07:00

most USA voters are too fucking dumb, that's why Ron Paul gets so litte %, because of the fucking stupidity, illiteracy and fucking dumbness in this fucking society

hahahaha, the jews are almost on drugs, rageful and crazy. Watch this video of jews on drugs !!

2008-04-27T11:30:00.001-07:00

the jews are evil bastards and one day god will show them a servere punishment tramps they havent even got a country. they have to steal other people country....and they came from the monkeys and pigs

War educates toward liberty

2008-04-26T18:22:00.000-07:00

"The great men are necessary, the time in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become masters over their age is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time much was gathered for them." -Twilight of the Idols

War educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure."

The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top.

The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by "tyrants" are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar.

To those men who are of any concern to me I wish them suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, and indignities

2008-04-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

"To those men who are of any concern to me I wish them suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, and indignities. I also wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: And i have no compassion for them, because I wish them the only thing that reveals value in a man: that they should endure firmly !!" -(The Will to Power, Sec. 905)

"You want, if possible and there is no more insane "if possible" to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it, that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible, that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering. Do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?" -(Beyond Good and Evil, p 225 )

"I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been." -Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900)