Scott Olsen's War Is Just Beginning -- Here in Amerika

My Teapot neighbors tell me I must "Support Our Troops" because they are fighting to preserve our freedoms.

Among those freedoms are citizens' absolute right to peaceable assembly for redress of grievances, and freedom of speech.

Scott Olsen went to Iraq as one of Our Troops and when he returned home to Oakland, CA, he exercised those rights, joining the Occupy Oakland demonstrators.

Today, however, Scott Olsen cannot speak at all.  Shot in the forehead with a "non-lethal" police projectile, he is in an Oakland hospital for treatment of a skull fracture. "He cannot talk , and that is because the fracture is right on the speech center of his brain," said Keith Shannon, a friend who served beside him in Iraq.

And so in exercising a right he fought for, he has lost the power to exercise it again because of a single act of police brutality. There have been many such acts since the Occupy movement grew beyond anyone's expectations. It is a symptom of our national malaise that this is the normal response to spontaneous mass expressions of citizen dissent.  When the "dissent" is manufactured, funded by Koch Brothers filthy lucre, it is tolerated even if its lemmings carry fire arms into public political meetings.  Go figure.

The 92-year-old icon of modern American citizen action, Pete Seger, gave Occupy his imprimatur earlier this week, hobbling into Liberty Plaza in New York with the aid of two canes and the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son. There's no way of counting the number of times Pete and Arlo have sung Woody's "This Land is Our Land, This Land is Your Land. . .," a hymn to the oppressed workers, farmers and foreclosed of the United States.  The song tells us what the union movement was about, what the civil rights movement was about, what the anti-war movements were about, and what Occupy is about.

It's about the common man, made stronger by coming together in public places, demanding to take back his "Land" and all of the rights it confers upon its citizens, including the right that was violently taken away from Scott Olsen.

Each time the common man rallies to regain his rights, he faces bigger odds, stronger forces of repression, angrier backlash from the privileged few who have put him down. Somehow he rises again and again and again -- whether in Europe, Asia, the Antipodes, Africa, South America or the former United States of America.

If Scott Olsen is unable to return to the public squares, ten more will rise to take his place, to demand justice in his name.

Perhaps, even as their numbers grow, they will not succeed.  Money, Bill Moyers once wrote, fights hard.  And it fights dirty.

Bullets to the forehead, even "non-lethal" ones, are dirty fighting.  Koch money can buy lots of bullets, and buy off lots of bullies to use them on common folk exercising their rights to assembly, redress and free speech.

Whose land is it?  The one per cent?  Or the 99 per cent?

Pete and Arlo know. Scott Olsen thought he knew, too.

The Republican Holiday: Trick, Treat or Flat Tax?

The official holiday of the Republican party is nearly upon us.  Halloween is for bogeymen and nobody loves a good bogeyman more than a Republican.

Obamacare!  Boo boo boo. (Grandma killers!)

Deficit! Boo boo boo boo! (Stop wasting money feeding poor people and declare more wars!)

But the biggest bogeyman of all is taxation.  Boo boo boo boo boo boo boo booooooooooooo . . . .

Since even Republicans realize you can't run a country without some form of revenue, not even the Keystone cop zanies seeking their presidential nomination advocate eliminating all taxes on everyone. So they're falling all over one another rediscovering Steve Forbes's old chestnut, the flat tax.

But in typical Republican logic, their flat tax isn't really flat.  It is just another  ploy to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.  First  Herman Cain -- a lobbyist  for the richest 1% of Americans before he donned his Halloween mask depicting a Republican populist -- introduced his "flat tax 9-9-9 plan."  This would give virtually every American with more than a million dollars a year income a tax cut of almost half a million.  Capital gains  -- which already enrich each retired American millionaire to the tune of 112,000 tax-free dollars a year -- would not be taxed at all. How flat is that ?

Now comes Rick Perry, with another cockamamie scheme that would let you opt for a so-called 20 per cent flat tax, or remain in your present bracket. “This is a change election, and I offer a plan that changes the way Washington does business,” the Texas governor said Tuesday at an event in Gray Court, S.C. It also guarantees less revenue at a time when we're fighting wars all over the globe, prattling about the deficit bogeyman and saying we can't afford to keep our bargain with retirees on Social Security.

As my friend David Cay Johnston (a registered Republican) has demonstrated over and over again in his books, the tax code is rigged to favor the very rich and every attempt by either party to repair it has only made the inequities worse.

Even so, the current tax laws sort of kind of try a little bit to treat everyone fairly. Tea Pots in my part of the country go berserk because very, very poor households pay no federal income tax at all.  "Our taxes support dead-beats," they wail.  They ignore the much larger portion of income paid by these households in payroll taxes, sales taxes and property taxes (directly, if they're struggling to buy a home; indirectly if they rent). In Florida, add the usurious cost of hurricane protection insurance on mortgages.

But the wailers themselves -- like every other taxpayer-- pay no income tax on the first roughly $20,000 of their earnings.  Taxpayers in higher brackets pay a higher rate only on that portion of their income that exceeds their bracket threshold -- not on their total income.

As Robert Reich, a former Clinton cabinet member, points out in a recent article, ending the Bush tax cuts on incomes over $250,000 would increase taxes only on the portion of income that exceeds $250,000.  Republicans consistently misrepresent this.  Reich writes that "they want Americans to believe, for example, that if the Bush tax cut ended, small business owners with incomes of $251,000 a year would suddenly have to pay 39 percent of their entire incomes in taxes rather than 35 percent. Wrong. They'd only have to pay the 39 percent rate on $1,000 -- the portion of their incomes over $250,000.

"Get it? We already have a flat tax -- flat within each bracket.

"The real problem is the top brackets are set too low relative to where the money is. The top-most bracket starts at $375,000 a year. People with incomes higher than that pay 35 percent -- again, only on that portion of their incomes exceeding $375,000.

"This is absurd. It means a professional who's making, say, $380,000 a year pays the same income-tax rate as a plutocrat pulling in $2 billion or $20 billion.

"Our current flat tax at the top is treating the nation's professional class exactly the same as it treats super-rich plutocrats. My doctor pays the same rate as Steve Forbes."

Which gets us back to square one.  The so-called flat tax was a clinker when Stevie first introduced it and no amount of tinkering by the likes of Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Ron Paul or Homer Simpson will gussy it up into responsible policy.

A Soldier Shouts a Nation's Epitaph: "There Is No Honor"

He looms large over the New York City policemen to whom he directs his words.  Expressions that might pass for shame cross the faces of the cops.

The big guy wears a patch of medals on the left side of his camouflage jacket.  Smaller than the sea of brass and ribbon that adorns the tailored uniform of Betray-Us Petraeus but unlike the general's, the big guy's medals were earned in combat service in the armed forces -- two tours in the Middle East.

The police have been abusing participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests, and former Sgt. Shamar Thomas, in the viral video of the week on the web, is shaming them:  "It doesn't make you tough to hurt these people.  This isn't a war zone!"

And then he delivers the epitaph for the United States of America, words that will live in infamy as they ring with truth:

"There is no honor in what you do.  No honor."

There is no honor in accepting  $4.6 million bribe from JPMorgan Chase to beat the heads and mace the eyes of United States citizens peaceably assembled to exercise their Constitutional right of free speech.

There is no honor in ten years of war based on lies, wars whose toll on innocents is greater by far than the "value" of the "enemy leaders" slain in them.

There is no honor in a nation that spends trillions of dollars and thousands of young lives fighting these wars, while refusing to provide jobs for the one in five workers who have none, refusing to provide government medical care for those who have none, refusing to feed those who have nothing to eat.

There is no honor in a nation whose voters applaud aspirants to its highest office for saying that those who can't afford health insurance should be left to die.

There is no honor in a nation that tortures prisoners never charged, never tried, in black sites built at enormous profit by former Vice President Dick Cheney's Haliburton Corp.

There is no honor in a nation that creates the myth of an American Dream and then forecloses on the homes of those who believed in it.

No honor in a nation that forces its young into usurious debt in order to become educated. 

No honor in a nation whose parents with children are forced into bankruptcy to pay obscene medical bills.

No honor in a military that kills women and children and then orders bomb strikes to obliterate the evidence.

No honor in a nation that willfully destroys the thin envelope called ecosystem that sustains life on the planet, in order to extract natural resources that add to the riches of the wealthiest handful of its people.

No honor in a country where there are fewer and fewer jobs, paying less money than at any time in more than a decade, except at the very top where the number of people making more than $1 million increased by 20 percent over 2009. The median paycheck of working America -- barely 80 per cent of us -- is $507 a week, the lowest level since 1999. The richest one per cent of us -- who control our government, our lives, our very destinies, make that much every 72 seconds. There is no honor in this.

There is no honor in a government that rigs the official inflation measures in order to hold down cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security recipients,.

How can a nation honor the elderly citizens who helped build it by taking away at least 4% of their retirement capital every year? (Banks pay less than one-half of one percent on FDIC-insured savings deposits; short-term US government bond funds pay essentially nothing.)  There is no honor in a nation whose government policies wipe out 11.5% of retirees' accumulated savings.

There can be no honor in a nation that labels dissent as "terrorism" and whose President actually ordered the murder of a citizen who had never been charged with or tried in a court of law for a crime.

What honor is there in national policies that negate the Constitution, imposing de facto a state religion?

There is no honor in violating international law in quest of hegemony, utter dominion over the rest of the world.

There is no honor in making the obscenely rich even richer at the expense of the sick, the poor, the aged.

There is no honor in these United States. No honor.

A Giving of Hearts on a Special Birthday

We are celebrating the birthday the odds said would never come.

Brandi, the shelter mutt whose "kennel cough" turned out to be a life-threatening case of distemper, is a year old today.  More or less.  This is the birthdate his doctor and I arbitrarily assigned to him when we decided to"throw the book" at his ailment rather than "throwing in the towel."

Our five-pound runt is a 57-pound guy now, a boxer-shepherd who runs like a greyhound, eats like a horse and repays us a thousand times a day for the long hours spent nursing and medicating him.

Each of our dogs has been special in his or her own way.  (Dog people will understand this. It is our fate to "give our hearts to a dog to tear,"  as a poet once put it.) But Brandi, having cheated death with our help, is beyond special, and so is his first birthday.

If it were in my power, I'd capture a jackrabbit for him, or find him a lifetime supply of the most succulent chew bones, or even reverse his neutering for a single day so that he could just this once know the Joy of Sex.  Something, you know, spectacular.


But that isn't really necessary.  He already knows he's my one, true dog. 

In the finest hour of a magnificent fall day here in the desert, we'll sit by a favorite rock overlooking a favorite canyon and watch the setting sun paint murals on the mountains.  I'll stroke his ears.  He'll nuzzle my cheek.

What a perfect birthday, eh Brandi?

Last (Best?) Fanfare for the Common Man

From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park,  from the Arab Spring to the American Autumn, the common man is aroused.

In what even the skeptic Chris Hedges hopes will become a movement too big to fail, the common man is speaking out against his oppressors.  He has, Hedges observed, "nothing as weapons but dignity, resilience and courage."  His movement, Jimmy Breslin reports, "is threatening to become historic."

He can achieve great change, this common man, and has done so often in my lifetime alone.  Just in this year of his newest arousal he has overthrown dictators.  But if one form of tyranny is simply replaced by another form of tyranny, he must rise again, and so he has returned to Tahrir Square, where it all began, and where, once again, the real outcome is in doubt.

Can he prevail against the enormous power of tyranny, greed, wealth , bigotry and weaponry in the modern world?  In Egypt or in Libya; in Somalia or Syria or America, can the common man win back his human rights, his freedom, his dignity? Can  he once again secure the blessings of liberty for himself and his posterity?  Can he do so with no weapons save his voice,  his resilience, his yearning to breathe free?

In America, his "Occupy" movement has spread from Zuccotti Park and Wall Street to squares and parks and plazas in cities large and small across the nation.  It has lasted longer and grown larger than even its deepest sympathizer ever dreamed it could. And when the oligarchs who rule us showered money on the New York police to embolden them to suppress the mother movement, reinforcements flocked to Zuccotti Park and, in the dawn of last Friday, the army of repression backed off. For now.

Hedges celebrates this as "the first salvo in a long struggle for justice . .. a step backward by the corporate state in the face of popular pressure."

I want to believe.  Ever so desperately, I want to believe that the revolution has begun, there in Zuccotti Park, where a regiment of common men with brooms and mops stood off the kevlar-clad, mace-wielding, rapid-fire weapon toting army Wall Street had sent to drive them out.

In Egypt, the common man drove out a ruthless dictator only to have him replaced by a ruthless military.

Wall Street is a power far stronger, more ruthless and more evil than Hosni Mubarak.  Yet if somehow the common man prevails over Wall Street, it would be only the second salvo in a long struggle for justice.

For, after all, what  kind of nation would remain?

Hedges:

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

This is the kind of nation that would remain, even if, against such enormous odds, the common man prevailed over Wall Street.

Lurking still in the background, as in Egypt, would be the military -- the strongest element in the trinity of corporate greed, political cowardice and sheer armed force that rules us.  It represents, exponentially, the greatest power the common man has ever undertaken to defy, armed only with his "dignity, resilience and courage."

Perhaps, as the "Occupy" movement gains momentum by the day, the choice at last is thrust upon the rest of us: either we join the common man, or we, too, are the enemy.

A Citizen Murdered by His Government

And so it has come to this: the United States government, on orders of the President, has murdered a United States citizen who has never been tried for, much less convicted of, a capital crime.

Anwar al Awlaki, 40, was born in the very city in which I now reside.  His father, a Fulbright scholar, earned his master's degree at a university a few miles from the house I live in.

He was slain, my government boasts, by the same elite team that murdered Osama bin Laden rather than bringing him to trial for allegedly plotting, directing and financing the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on this country.

My government says ex patriate Citizen Anwar al Awlaki is a terrorist.

My Constitution says no American citizen can be executed by my government unless convicted of a capital crime in a trial by a jury of his peers, and that anyone accused of a crime must be presumed innocent until proved guilty in a trial.

My government says al Awlaki was involved in planning the attempted bombing of a U.S. - bound aircraft in December of 2009.

My government told me we had to invade Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction.  It had no such weapons.

My government says Citizen al Awlaki sought to use poisons, including cyanide and ricin, to attack "Westerners."

My government sent its Secretary of State to the United Nations to soberly assure the world that trucks photographed by aerial surveillance in Iraq contained lethal chemicals for warfare.  They were laundry trucks.

My government says Citizen al Awalaki "inspired" several people now jailed awaiting trial for a variety of capital crimes.

My government says terrorists "hate us because we are free."

My government lies.

My government kills.

My government uses its lies to justify its killing.

Is this what it means to be "free?"