Bleeding All Over the Yellow Carpet

The recent monsoons have left our part of the Chihuahuan desert with a carpet of yellow wildflowers accented by clusters of pale violet blossoms amid the varying shades of green of the native lechuguilla, mesquite, creosote bush, yucca and ocotilla. Once this was considered the most biologically diverse desert in the world but man and his cattle have seriously degraded it.  Ranchers have great political clout in these parts and own a big piece of the congressman who represents us.  Efforts to reintroduce the extirpated Mexican gray wolf are failing, off-road riders have savaged huge chunks of fragile desert topsoil and the ocotillo has vanished from areas where cows graze virtually for free on land that belongs to all of us. (The hooved locusts love the sweet blossoms atop the plant's whiplike branches -- which are the plant's reproductive method.  No more flowers, no more ocotillo.)

All of this aside, it's a wonderful time of year, with the cooling change-of-season winds announcing autumn, to visit favorite desert walkways and hide-aways.  The road across public land  to the trails of the Picacho Mountain national recreation area had several wash-outs that required careful navigation when Brandi and I drove out there this morning.  I doubt that they'll get fixed any time soon, what with the idiots in Washington refusing to appropriate the money to operate the federal government as of midnight tonight.  The Bureau of Land Management, which manages these lands on behalf of we, the people who own them, isn't likely to have money for a 'dozer to come out and make the road right. All across this desert, and all the deserts and all the parks and monuments and scenic and historical sites the People own out here, we common folk will suffer the consequences of the  shutdown by the liars and dunderheads who govern us. The little things that make life worth the struggle are the first to be declared non-essential when the idiots shut off the faucet that directs our tax money into the federal agencies and bureaus.

 Oh, they'll find the money for all our wars; for the drones that take out Taliban and children alike; for the spooks who read our e-mail, monitor our Facebook pages and listen in on our telepone conversations; and you can bet that Dr. Kidglove and his playpen pals in Congress will draw down their salaries.  But park rangers and wildlife veterinarians and the people who process things on behalf of citizens will just have to figure out some other way to put beans in the pot and bread on the table.  New Mexico has already cut off any new unemployment benefits for those who lose their jobs, because the state doesn't know when its federal funds will resume.

The pampered nincompoops who hold office in Washington don't give a damn about real people who are jobless or hungry or too old or too sick to fend for themselves.  They don't give a damn about parks and things, about programs that bring free or affordable bits of beauty, of music, of art or of healthful recreation into lives otherwise filled only with frantic hours of strife to survive from one meager paycheck to another.

The Congress is full of people like our guy, whose personal worth is said to be about $30 million, and who cavalierly voted to cut off the SNAP funding that saved nearly 40,000 children from his own district from starvation every day. Their families earn on average less than $17,000 a year. Meanwhile, he's comfortable having $40 lunches delivered to his office for himself, at taxpayer expense.

He's part of the financial elite, the handful of plutocrats and oligarchs who run this sorry-assed country. Few if any of them will feel anything when the shutdown of government comes, despite the fact that the stock markets are down because of it.  We would like to think -- those of us looking through the window from the outside at the lavish lifestyles of our leaders -- that Wall Street's reaction to the upcoming default would pinch some of them enough to order their toadies in Congress to do the right thing.

"But what if," as Paul Krugman writes today, "even the plutocrats lack the power to rein in the radicals? In that case, Mr. Obama will either let default happen or find some way of defying the blackmailers, trading a financial crisis for a constitutional crisis.

"This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

The clock is ticking down.  Even out there in the peace  of our yellow-carpeted desert, Brandi and I can hear it.

How Dare They Attempt Civility!

The England-based American author, Gerald Meyer, taking note of the moderation and friendly gestures of the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, rightly remarked that the U.S. government "doesn't really welcome his overtures, finds the whole thing rather distasteful and wishes it would go away."

Most Americans who actually have knowledge of Iran, its people and its history, immediately recognized Rouhani's unexpected victory in the recent election as an opportunity for President Obama to stop bullying Iran and engage in actual diplomacy.  Now that both presidents will be attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York, these knowledgeable Americans are urging them to meet face-to-face. So far the nearest thing is that Secretary of State John Kerry has agreed to get together with his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, perhaps for a game or two of mah jongg. 

Even this modest first step toward civilized, meaningful engagement seems to have scared the very excrement out of Bibi Netanyahu's neocon hawks in Washington. Mein Gott! Rouhani is making nice and Washington is sort of paying attention!

All a-tremble, the hawks turned to their propaganda minister sans portfolio, David Sanger of the New York Times.  "Unless a good deal of the current infrastructure is dismantled," Sanger wrote just the other day, "Iran will be able to maintain a threshold nuclear capability -- that is, it will be just a few weeks, and a few screwdriver turns, from building a weapon."

A FEW WEEKS! A FEW SCREWDRIVER TURNS! GET UNDER THE DESKS, CHILDREN!

Sanger as usual offers absolutely no evidence.  Not even his usual unidentified sources among the most war-mongering officials in the Israeli government have gone that far. Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz says Iran is still at least six months away from building The Bomb -- and nobody among the international community's weapons experts takes that seriously. Last March, Obama said, "Right now, we think that it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon."

Right now, the Great Bogeyman in this charade is a single fact: Iran is enriching uranium.  But its enrichment program stops at 20 percent, enough for medical or domestic energy purposes, but far short of the 90+ percent required to make weapons.  The Islamic republic has said repeatedly that it has no interest in making nuclear weapons.  Rouhani not only reiterates that policy, but he does so from a background of credibility and respected service in international diplomatic circles.  To rebuff his overtures is for the United States to shed the last pretenses of sincerity in the quest for Middle East peace. As a lawyer might put it, Obama goes to the United Nations with unclean hands.

Mr. Meyer, seeing these affairs through the clearer air of rural England, offers a tongue-in cheek suggestion for Rouhani and Javad Zarif:

"The U.S. so prefers to deal with countries on which it has had a reasonable opportunity to expend some of its munitions, thereby creating the need to manufacture some more munitions.  Which brings up the subject of cruise missiles.  They're so much more expensive than mere bombs, and therefore so much more constructive. Iran should let Uncle Sam have a prolonged cruise-missile orgasm, its best since the good old days of shock and awe, after which the two sides can have the equivalent of a post-coital cigarette  (what would that be -- some cluster bombs maybe?) and plan their future together.

"Better yet, let israel send the cruise missiles.  That way we eliminate the middle man, and everybody  will be happy!"

Scary thing is, that's exactly  what might happen.

Toward Fulfilling the Neocon Dream

By William O. Beeman

New America Media

There is great division of opinion regarding potential U.S. military action in Syria. However, one group is ecstatic over President Obama’s endorsement of a military attack on Damascus. These are the Neconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration, and who still hold tremendous influence in Washington. An attack on Syria would be one step in fulfilling “stage two” of a longstanding neoconservative plan to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East in three stages: Iraq, Syria and finally Iran. 

The pattern for this plan has been to wait for an event that can be sold to the world public as justification for military attack, and then to push forward, pressuring the military and government officials to move forward with the next stage of regime change. 

President Obama is, perhaps unwittingly, fulfilling this plan, conceived in 1996 by an informal organization, the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, headed by Richard Pearle and including well-known neo-conservatives, Douglas Feith, Meyrav Wurmser, David Wurmser, Robert Loewenberg, Charles Fairbanks, Jr. and James Colbert. All are connected with organizations favoring right-wing extremist Israeli policies toward Palestinians and other Middle East nations. The Study Group plan, titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” was prepared for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The “clean break” refers to their advice that Israel break from the 1993 Oslo peace accords. 

The 1996 plan explicitly calls for attacks on Iraq, Syria and eventually Iran. It states: "Israel can shape its strategic environment . . . by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions."

Many of the same figures carried this plan forward two years later under another rubric, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In a letter to President Clinton and House Speaker Gingrich in 1998, the members of the PNAC, including Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Zoellick called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, carrying out the first stage of the agenda of the “Clean Break” plan. 

Once George W. Bush was elected president, many of these figures took up prominent positions within his administration. Following the tragic destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the removal of Saddam Hussein became a policy objective for the United States. 

The PNAC wrote a letter to President Bush in 2001 stating: “...even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

It was at this time that Iran came more clearly into focus for the neoconservatives. The theory they promulgated was that Iran was the prime mover in all anti-Israeli activity in the region through Iran’s purported support for Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas. Syria was seen as complicit in this, and was regularly identified as a “client state” for Iran. However, neither legislators nor the public could be incited by this theory, for which there was, and continues to be, no credible evidence. 

In 2003, the neoconservatives, working through right-wing think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were able to convince the Bush administration that Iran’s 40 year old nuclear energy program was really a plot to develop nuclear weapons to be used against Israel. This theory eventually became accepted as gospel in Washington, notwithstanding that American and International intelligence agencies asserted there was no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. However, based on this baseless assertion, these same players called for military action against Iran.

Following the “Arab Spring” popular revolts against standing regimes in the Middle East the longstanding tension between the Sunni Muslim majority and the Alawite ruling minority in Syria exploded in resistance against Syrian ruler Bashar Al-Assad. This conflict had been festering for two generations. In 1982, armed resistance from the Sunni population resulted in a massacre in the city of Hama under orders from Hafiz al-Assad, Bashar’s father. Bashar retaliated to the more recent revolt with unprecedented cruelty, and has been accused of using chemical weapons against Syrian rebels. Whatever the United States or other nations might do to remove the Assad regime, the civil war there will continue unabated. 

However, neoconservatives have seized on this more recent revolt against the Assad government as justification for military action to carry out regime change there, but not just because the Assad regime is objectionable, but rather because in an attack on Syria they see an opportunity to strike a crippling blow against Iran. As conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks stated on the PBS News Hour on September 6, “this isn’t really about Syria. . . . the real issue is the broader credibility of the President, the international credibility of the United States, especially vis-à-vis Iran. This is really about Iran more than Syria.”

Brooks’ widely held view is a miscalculation. Even if the Assad regime is removed from power, Iran will not be significantly damaged in its foreign, nuclear or economic policy.

A quick examination of all of these efforts—the pretext based on the 9/11 tragedy for ousting Saddam Hussein, weak justification for U.S. involvement in a longstanding and ongoing civil war in Syria, and the claim that Iran is not only directing all anti-Israeli action in the Middle East, but is also a nuclear threat show that the neoconservative agenda is a tissue of fantasy designed to convince the world, episode by episode, to completely reshape the region with U.S. military firepower. 

Americans should not be listening to these neoconservative voices. They have been responsible for a debilitating and useless conflict in Iraq already. Their “advice” to President Obama and his administration will only drag the United States into another useless and debilitating conflict in the Middle East that will accomplish nothing, and will exacerbate violence rather than bringing the world closer to peaceful resolution of the tensions in the region. 

*   *   *   *

William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and Visiting Professor at Stanford University. He has worked in the Middle East for more than 40 years. 

Syria, Iran and the U.S. of Frankenstein

The American war machine is our Frankenstein's monster.  It has to kill.

Syria is next.  Syria is no threat to the United States.  The U.S. has no dog in the fight between Syrians. It defies morality, ethics, law and reason for us to kill Syrians on either side of the ugly civil war there. But kill we will for kill we must.

As the late George Carlin once remarked, it's what we're good at. Without wars to fight, or to plan to fight, our economy would collapse.  Once, we couldn't go to war without a  declaration by Congress. Silly detail, inasmuch as we've fought 70-some in our history.

For the sake of show, we invent reasons for our wars.  Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Al Qaida was in Afghanistan.  Osama Bin Ladin was in Pakistan.  El Qaida was in Yemen.  The Syrian government gassed its own citizens (so did Saddam, but that was with our blessing). The Devil Himself is in Iran.

The reason to attack Syria, if reason there be, is Iran. Ray McGovern, a very smart, very honest guy -- too honest, too smart for the CIA, where once he worked as a senior intelligence analyst -- writes:

Tehran is not likely to see the common interests of Israel and the U.S. as very complicated. Both appear determined to exploit the chaotic duel among the thugs in Syria as an opportunity to deal a blow to Hezbollah and Hamas in Israel’s near-frontier and to isolate Iran still further, and perhaps even advance Israel’s ultimate aim of “regime change” in Tehran.

In the nearer term, are the neocons in Washington revving up to nip in the bud any unwelcome olive branches from the Iran’s new leaders as new talks on nuclear matters loom on the horizon?

The lemmings of the mainstream U.S. media, long in thrall to the war machine and its government toadies, are Judith Millering the forthcoming attack on Syria as part and parcel of their long-term propaganda campaign against Iran. Without a scrap of actual evidence, they have for years been assuring us (with unattributed feeds from Israeli intelligence services) that Tehran is on the brink of developing atomic weaponry. 

McGovern cites  a policy document prepared in 1996 for Benjamin Netanyahu by a study group led by American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who gave us the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Among the plan’s features was “the containment of Syria by engaging in proxy warfare and highlighting their possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’” The following “Clean-Break” paragraph is, no doubt, part of the discussion in Iran’s leadership councils:

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” 

Against this background, what is Iran likely to think of the two-year old mantra of Hillary Clinton, repeated by Obama that “Assad Must Go?” Or what to think of Obama’s gratuitous pledge a half year later, on Super Bowl Sunday 2012, that the U.S. will “work in lockstep” with Israel regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Assuming they checked Webster’s, Iran’s leaders have taken note that one primary definition offered for “in lockstep” is: “in perfect, rigid, often mindless conformity or unison.”

In that pre-game interview, Obama also made the bizarre charge that the Iranians must declare, “We will pursue peaceful nuclear power; we will not pursue a nuclear weapon.” In actuality, Iran has been saying precisely that for years.

 "Actuality" is just another word for truth, and truth means nothing to the great American war machine.  It has to kill, and kill it will.

A Word on a Postage Stamp. That's All.

An unintended irony popped up recently when I mailed a check.  My latest book of so-called "forever" stamps contain the image of the U.S. flag and a one-word patriotic slogan --"Freedom." "Equality," etc.  The stamp on this envelope bore the word "Justice." The check inside was a donation to the ACLU to suport its legal efforts on behalf of Edward Snowden, who gave The Guardian and others secret documents that revealed the enormous extent of U.S. government spying on its citizens. It was mailed the day Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning, a U.S. soldier, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison for revealing the truth about U.S. war crimes.

"Justice," indeed.

Here is but a sampling of "Justice" in these United States.

MANNING: Her sentence is by far the longest ever imposed by a democratic government for leaks to the press. Manning's pretrial detention amounted to torture and her post-trial treatment has been far worse than that of soldiers who murdered civilians and tortured captives and their superiors who authorized their war crimes. When she requested appropriate medical treatment for a legitimate medical disorder involving gender, she was refused. Untreated transgender people in prison experience "a heightened level of gender policing. The clothing they wear, their hairstyles and grooming practices, their bodies, mannerisms and identities are scrutinized and controlled by the state." Any alleged deviance can lead to violence at the hands of corrections officers or other people who are incarcerated, studies have found.

SNOWDEN:   David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained by British authorities under an unprecedented interpretation of a terrorism statute while passing through Heathrow Airport, almost certainly at the behest of the American government. Miranda has threatened legal action over his nine-hour detention and the confiscation of his electronic equipment.  Subsequent actions by British authorities suggest that they might be in league with the CIA to manufacture a "conspiracy" among Snowden, Greenwald, Miranda and others to commit "crimes" against the U.S.

POLICE STATE SURVEILLANCE: The U.S. Government seizes and searches all internet and text communications which enter or leave the country. It created and maintains secret backdoor access into all  electronic databases, searching for information on US citizens. It operates its own vast database which allows it to sift through millions of records on the internet,  learning nearly everything a citizen does. It has set up a special court which meets in secret to authorize access for the FBI and other investigators to millions and millions of US phone, text, email and business records. The actiions of this (FISA) court are Top Secret. An important (to civil liberties) 2011 decision of the FISA court remains Top Secret although the court itself said it can be made public.

BIG BROTHER: The FISA court routinely issues so-called NSL letters, which enable the FBI to demand financial records from any institution -- banks, insurance companies, casinos, stock brokers -- plus telephone records, subscriber information, credit reports, employment information, and all email records of the target as well as the email addresses and screen names for anyone who has contacted that account. Tens of thousands of these letters have been used. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told the U.S. Senate on March 12, 2013 that the NSA did not wittingly collect information on millions of Americans. The Snowden documents prove this to be a blatant lie. No action has been taken against Clapper.

 CANCELLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION: Amendments and sections of the Constituion violated by Obama's extension and broadening of Bush's usurpation of Executive authority beyond the Constitution: First amendment (prosecution and jailing of whistle-blowers; silencing, beatings by police, and imprisonment of lawfully-assembled dissenters; many other examples); Fourth (probable cause, prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure); Fifth (ignoring due process, allowing for indefinite incarceration without a trial); Sixth (the right to prompt and public trial); Eighth (protection against against cruel and unusual punishment); cancellation of Habeus Corpus which (Article 1, Section 9) is allowed only in times of "Rebellion and Invasion);  war powers (Article 1, Section 11); Article II (defines Executive powers and limitations).


ECONOMIC INJUSTICE: Tax money in the trillions  used to bail out big banks whose unregulated craziness caused the worst recession in 80 years, while those criminally responsible for those policies not only escaped accountability but had their incomes increased. Four years after the official end of the Great Recession, the United States had recovered only 6.6 million jobs, less than three-quarters of the 9 million jobs lost. While: 21% of the jobs lost  were low wage (paid $13.83 an hour or less) almost 60%  the jobs regained fell into that category. The lower 70% of the American people on the wealth/income scale  have no influence on government policy whatsoever. As they move up the wealth/income scale, they gain minuscule influence on policy.  The richest one-tenth of one per cent virtually dictates all policy. Since the recession "ended," the richest Americans have been getting  a lot richer. The top one percent of  of richest Americans have taken 121 percent of all income gains between 2009 and 2011. Their average income  ranges between $5.2 million and $7.5 million annually. Inside the top 1 percent, those with the highest incomes pay the lowest tax rates. The number of households living in poverty is rising. Millions of full-time workers have had their hours cut, reducing them to part-time status, which costs them all of their employee befits including pensions and company-paid health insurance.

Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning writes: "When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.  I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

It takes more than the word "Justice" on a postage stamp to achieve that goal.

It's a Free Country (They Told Us,and Back Then We Had Reason to Believe Them)

By MORT PERSKY

 

Good morning, America, my old friend, land that saved me and my family from Old World fires! What's become of our "free country," anyway, and doesn't anyone care? What in God's name is going on in Washington? Is there anybody left who answers to the name "American," as in the meanings "American" and "America" used to have?

Or is it all over for freedom of the press and all kinds of dissent, just like in Mao's China and the present China, which our apparently unembarrassed government continues to rebuke unself-consciously for behaving the same way we ourselves have apparently learned to behave, perhaps from the Chinese. Did we really like their model?

And if not, why don't we behave as if we notice we've made the change and who we now resemble? Why can't we see how we look in our self-ignorance as we arrest and/or intimidate people as the Chinese do, exactly the people we need to wake us up and point that out? Because it's high time we began turning back from wherever we've strayed, and suppression of free speech is the worst possible place to start, but we're already there.

Yes, of course the way we're treating Manning, Snowden, Assange and now Greenwald is exactly what we've always reproached totalitarian countries for doing. We've succeeded far too well in turning these rareties -- four people willing to take huge risks to tell us what's wrong -- into criminals in the public mind, just as the countries we rebuke did and still do, while we annoy them by lionizing their Snowdens. 

Good Lord, is this real? Has anybody looked at our "logo" lately, the flag of this once-great nation, great because it didn't do such things, or which once upon a time didn't appear to do them knowingly? And even our diaphanous excuses then were a noticeable improvement over what we've worked out for ourselves during our most recent presidencies.

What's up, Washington? Where's the country our Founding Fathers took the trouble of setting rules for in a document called the U.S. Constitution, the same rules that one of our political parties is even now cancelling out line by line, according to its own wishes? We still call it our rulebook (even in its ominous absence), the one that almost made it to age 200 in reasonably presentable condition, but for those nagging and oft-ignored complaints from citizens of a different color or sexual preference -- complaints from which a big segment of the citzenry apparently learned that not all rules must be followed, those based on fairness to be regarded as particularly onerous. Those based on shooting people to be most lightly and tenderly enforced.

And now breaking the Constitution's rules on the nation's highest court has become a political sport and pastime played by uncaring "justices" in black robes, enough of them with no consciences to speak of and no thought of imposing real justice, but unequivocally devoted to obliterating one step at a time the document on which they claim all their decisions rest.

Can we cure this self-destructive, self-aggrandizing gamesmanship while also doing the opposite of curing anything, harassing those whose careers require them to tell us the whole truth in their  media, though they currently don't. And there's government aid to bolster their shirking! We've still got the Constitution, but like the flag, it's treated like a dead or obsolesced symbol with only a few downgraded humans to speak out for it loudly enough to be heard. This turns out to be their problem and ours, though most forcefully claimed as a problem by the harassers and jailers. And some of us actually expect the poor beset few to awaken their country to what's become of it.

No wonder we ask ourselves if we can have any effect on our government beyond the votes we cast, making our choices with full confidence as if we had no clue that our political parties, particularly the Republican one but the Democratic one not excepted, were lying to them. So one might call it sheer luck that those who make an art of lying and fact-distortion keep pulling the least educated voters to their polls, provided they are also white. Thus professional legislators and office-holders have become an aristocracy of know-nothings, the persons least able to recognize the truth were it to pour down on them from the skies. As for voters who know the truth, whose TV commercials do they like this year?

And in this mendaciousness and inability to recognize truth when it shows its face lies the truest essence of our downfall, more than in our self-spying programs, our phony, thoughtless (and undeclared) wars in foreign countries, our idiot love of "better" weapons programs, and our war on dissent here at home.

"Dare we open our mouths?" hints at an un-Americanness so deep that no "Un-American Activities" investigators ever considered the question. And it cries out to be asked harder, more often & right now, remaining a bad bet to be uttered by non-risk-takers.

Alas, the question of opening our mouths was no total stranger even in the much better America, the one I don't have to break a sweat to remember. That America must be caught by the tail and hoisted onto dry land before it becomes a memory -- keeping the question ask-able, not accepted fact about the USA, version 21.0.

 

The Silence That Shouts Out Loud

Those who Marched to Praetoria wondering Where All the Flowers Had Gone; who heard what was Blowin' in the Wind and understood that a Hard Rain Was Gonna Fall; who knew the slough where the Big Fool Said Push On; who tried to Give Peace a Chance while the Dogs of War Ran  Loose; who Quit Followin' and said, "I Ain't Gonna March No More" -- those folks are puzzled and pained by the dreadful silence around them.

Where are the songs of protest in this, their nation's direst hour?

Why is no Ode to Bradley Manning being sung and strummed in smokey clubs and at angry rallies?

Why did the revelations of Ed Snowden not inspire barbed choruses of bitter dissent to be sung in the public square?

Why do those who march for justice for Trayvon Martin have no anthem to mark their steps, no buglers to sound their battle cry?

How can a president assume the right to murder citizens on his own authority without someone giving us a thundering j'accuse to sing from the mountaintops?

Why is there not one satirical music maker to decry the criminal incompetence and meanness of those we have elected to govern us?

Why is there no musical champion for our growing legion of poor and jobless?

Why do we not realize that We Did Not Overcome, and street-compose a new song to march to in the struggle to make a decent nation out of a sick one?

When will new rhythms and rhymes demand justice for our beleaguered immigrants and their starving children?

Who will raise his voice with the first song to demand the restoration of our civil liberties,the end of our corporate dictatorship, the reversal of endless war, the enslavement of the many for the profit of the few?

Songs of protest and revolution have always been part of great movements in human history.

Their absence in the United States today my be the most telling symptom of the nation's malaise and,therefor, its grim fate.

We got the the Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die blues. But the wars and ignorance drag on, and the chasm widens between the very rich few and the ever-poorer masses.

How many times must the cannon balls fly, before they're forever banned?

It's windy as hell today, but I don't see any answers blowin' around.

Nonfunctional. Dead. Kaput. RIP Democracy.

Even Jimmy Carter, who knows a good malaise when he sees one, recognizes that the U.S. has "no functioning democracy."

The former president and Chris Hedges, a reformed journalist who now writes the painful truth about our riven nation, both mentioned this fact recently. Hedges, who with other litigants sought a court's protection against persecution of journalists for such truth-telling, lamented that - having already been betrayed by Congress and the President - citizens can no longer rely on the courts for justice, either. Three strikes and democracy's out.

July, when we celebrate our independence from the English monarchy, has been a bad month for truth, justice and rule of law.

Besides the court's ruling against Hedges et al, we have witnessed:

--The acquittal of George Zimmerman by a jury of six white women in Florida.  These "peers" ruled that Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, was perfectly justified in shooting to death a 17-year-old black boy named Trayvon Martin who was wearing a hoody and carrying Skittles in a white neighborhood at night. Their logic was that Zimmerman, who had a gun, feared for his life at the hands of Martin, who was unarmed and whose hands, in fact, bore no trace of Zimmerman's DNA. 

--The refusal by the military officer in charge of his court martial to dismiss the "aiding the enemy" charge against Pfc. Bradley Manning. The lady colonel ruled that Manning did in fact "knowingly" aid the (unnamed) enemy when he released a trove of covered-up government documents to WikiLeaks. They disclosed, among other unsavory things, that U.S. forces have committed war crimes in their waging of endless war around the globe. Citizens, it seems to me, are entitled to know such things in a democracy. We laughed when a character in Walt Kelly's comic strip "Pogo" said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."  Nobody's laughing now, least of all those who believed, like Manning, that the truth shall make us free.

--The governor of Texas signed the most Draconian anti-abortion law in the land. It has already forced many women's health clinics to close.As in the Zimmerman trial, race is the looming specter here.  White middle aged males are telling black pregnant teenagers they have to bring their pregnancies to term because "life is precious." Well, precious in the womb, anyway.  When those black baby boys are old enough to wear a hoody and buy Skittles, they're fair game for any white whacko with a handgun.

--A United States Department of Justice lawyer filed a brief in court alleging that government use of drones to kill American citizens abroad was legal -- because the Attorney General and the President said it was legal.  No further comment necessary.

--A federal appeals court in Virginia struck down the long-established legal precedent of reportorial privilege that emerged from the Constitutional guarantee of a free press.  In ordering New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources under oath, the court specifically held that there is absolutely no ground for protection of a reporter's sources. Risen's testimony is wanted in criminal proceedings against a CIA whistle-blower.

Wise guys used to say, "It's a free country, ain't it?"

It ain't.

Happiness Is a Deep Lake

SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF A REDWOOD TREE, Oregon--I love it! There's The Gas Station (also sells firewood). The Resort (The Post Office is behind the registration desk). The Pizza Shop (also sells 16 flavors of ice cream). The Campground (National Forest Service; fire ring and table at every site, pit toilets).  The RV Park (across the road from The Campground, privately owned and operated.  No propane; you get that at The Gas Station).

And there's The Park.  That would be Crater Lake National Park surrounding the deepest lake in the United States, 30-some miles in circumference and nearly 2,000 feet at its deepest point. Although it has at least as many Spectacular Things per square mile as Yosemite or Yellowstone, only about 500,000 people a year navigate south central Oregon's narrow, twisting Cascade range roads to visit it. For miles around it, there is, as Dorothy Parker put it, "no There there."

The Gas Station is open 7 days a week from 7 to 7. But there's a hot line telephone that rings up the night watchman at The Resort, who will hustle down there and fill your tank when the station is closed.

The nearest real grocery store is 35 miles away but there's a small store inThe Resort that sells the necessities of life -- fishing tackle, snowmobile route maps, sleeping bags, mosquito repellant, lots of mosquito repellant, bread, milk and coffee.  Plus Dave's amazing organic bread and Sin Dawgs. "Dave" is actually a small corporation far away in Salem, but, hey!, they're people, aren't they?  Dave bakes up the best-tasting loaf of healthy, whole-grain organic bread between the Atlantic and Pacific. And the Sin Dawg? It's a whole-grain baguette with a cinnamon-raisin filling that is so sublime it drove two generations of French pastry chefs out of business. A Sin Dawg breakfast sends you to heaven despite its name.

The Restaurant (part of The Resort) occasionally features Pan Seared Rainbow Trout. A patron might imagine he's devouring an animal that swam that very morning in Muir creek, but he'd be wrong.  It's a farm-raised fish from Idaho. The patron can content himself as he consumes the import with the knowledge that Muir creek indeed teems with the real thing.  The waterway, a thing of great beauty, is an appropriate tribute to John Muir, the great American naturalist who campaigned so articulately for the preservation of just such places as these. To sit beside it, hearing only its babble and the songs of birds, is to know at last what serenity is.

Absent the crowds attendant to other national park neighborhoods, Crater Lake is host to countless other serene places. Knowing this, one is prone to condemn the more harshly the crimes mankind, most especially corporate mankind, commits against too many of the planet's finest places. Imagine a mine pumping toxic tailings into Crater Lake near Wizard Island; behemoth thumper trucks pounding Pumice Desert seeking pockets of oil to drill into; a field of natural gas pumps where now stand the redwoods that tower over worshipful pines in the Rogue-Umpqua National Forest. Such sacrilege has been committed elsewhere on our public lands, and the profiteering overlords are pounding on the doors at this very moment of Grand Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Otero Mesa and more.

Almost 8,000 years ago, Mount Mazama erupted in what may have been the greatest volcanic episode ever to take place on this continent. It made the crater that Nature filled with rain and snowfall alone (no river or stream flows into the lake carrying sediment; that's why its waters are so deep, deep blue) . For a long time native Americans were the custodians of this special lake and held it sacred. Sandals worn by their distant ancestors have been found buried under volcanic ash in a cave deep in the surrounding forests.

In 1853, a European-American Caucasian looking for gold found something far better: today we call it Crater Lake. We've only had 160 years In which to spoil it.  Give us time.

The Cuckoo's Nest

Insanity, Einstein remarked, is repeating the same action and expecting a different result. United States foreign policy of endless war, by this measure, is incurably insane.

Ah, but it's profitable for the powerful few corporations and indivuals who form the American ruling class. If by magic all military spending ceased tomorrow and forever, most of the country's economy would vanish just as magically.  Poof!

This is the corner into which unfettered capitalism has painted us.  Even if we could agree (althought not even the most powerful magic could accomplish this)  that fossil fuel energy must be replaced by renewable energy, the Exxons and BPs and their ilk are so powerful and so profitable that we could not do so, even though we know we are literally killing our planet by degrees.

Vietnam should have taught us that hegemonic war is disastrous, too, and if not Vietnam then Iraq, but here we are, in an Afghan quagmire, trying our damnedest to follow Israel into war against Iran, being prodded into making the Syrian civil war our war while a legion of "national security" experts plot the scenarios for their successors in our chain of endless war. Never mind the fact that each new war in fact diminishes our national security. Each new president, regardless of party, boards the war-making roller coaster the moment he steps into the Oval Office. When he leaves office he steps into one or another of highly compensated places within the hierarchy of the miIlitary-industrial complex. The policies   of endless war, of unfettered profiteering, of planetary  destruction are self-perpetuating.

We subsidize the companies that fuel the machines of war and spew the carbon that is killing the planet.  Their margins of profit make Midas look like a pauper.

Once in a discussion about climate change I remarked to a friend that technology is at hand today to transport goods and people in vast areas of the country with just the energy of the sun.  He replied that when it can be done profitably it will become reality.

Aye, there's the rub.  In this land of unregulated capitalism, it is unthinkable that we should make things happen for the immediate health and welfare of the populace, and the long term improvement of the health of the  planet. We act only on that which will further enrich the oligarchs of the ruling class. As long as they toss a few orts to the rest of us every now and then -- say, a few thousand minimum wage jobs -- the people remain anesthetized and sedate.

Poor fools think they're living in a state of democracy.  Actually it's a state of insanity. The kind Einstein warned about.

Neither Truth nor Law Shall Prevail

"when the President does it," Richard Nixon infamously told a TV interviewer, "that means it is not illegal."

Thus did the president who was not a crook establish the guiding principle of the two worst presidents in this country's history. When it comes down to presidential prerogatives, both George W. Bush and  Barack Obama hold that the law is a ass. International law especially is a ass.

And so it came to pass that the Obama administration bullied three of its European allies into acts of air piracy against the head of the sovereign nation of Bolivia because his airplane was wrongly thought to be spiriting Ed Snowden to safe harbor.

To their everlasting credit, President Evo Morales of Bolivia and the heads of two other Latin American countries, Venezuela and Nicaragua, told the U.S. and its pals, "we are not your colonies," threatened to close the American embassies in their countries, and offered asylum to Snowden.

Snowden, the former government contractor who made public secret documents disclosing massive American spying on its own and other citizens and governments, is in legal limbo in an area of a Moscow airport that is technically not "Russian ground." On that basis the Putin government won't extradite him, but it won't help him leave, either.

This raises questions as to whether Snowden can actually do anything with the new offers of amnesty.  The Obamanations have canceled his  U.S. passport.  He needs some kind of legal document to get out of Russia. His would-be benefactors in Latin America so far are being careful to stay within the complex rules of international law for such stateless persons. Perhaps one of the Latin American countries will decide to show the same disdain for law that the U.S. regularly shows, and figure out a way to pluck Snowden out of Russia and deposit him safely onto their soil.  But that's unlikely.  They may be piqued but they're not crazy.

Obama, playing the laid-back moderate role, said he wasn't going to send up a fleet of jet fighters to gun down any plane that dared to try to  fly Snowden to safe harbor. Given the episode of the Bolivian state plane, and Obama's record for truthful public statements, would you want to pilot a plane anywhere in the world with Snowden aboard?

I thought not.

Obama holds all the cards in his high-stakes game of Texas hold 'em against truth-tellers.  Julian Assange languishes in Ecuador's London embassy; Bradley Manning has his neck in a noose in a military "court" in Maryland, and Snowden is holed up in a ratty old Moscow airport.
Once upon a time in this land of the free, a Daniel Ellsberg could turn over the secret documents that exposed the lies and deceit of the Vietnam war, and there was still enough justice in our system for him to go free.

Back then, It was the president who was not a crook, not Mr. Ellsberg, who was discredited under the law.  These days, the president is above the law but truth-tellers are fugitives FROM  the law.

Go figure.

We Are All on Trial in Maryland

Little by little, day by day, the present and immediate past presidents of these United States have been scraping away the last remaining vestiges of democracy. It hasn't been a single-handed operation, of course.  Inept or ill-intentioned aides, cabinet members and advisers are complicit; so is a corrupt and cowardly Congress; so, too, a wayward and enfeebled press and a politicized judiciary.

Today in Maryland, the U.S. Military began a new and shameful exercise in contempt for human rights, the Bill of Rights and and other quaint aspects of democracy: Pfc. Bradley Manning's sham trial began in a military court.  The prosecution has named his alleged crimes 32 different ways, but ultimately they come down to this: he made the Truth public. For this our governors want him to pay with his life, either by killing him or stuffing him into the hellhole of prison without parole. He is 25 years old.

He will be judged in secret under something called the Universal Code of Military Justice, which is neither universal nor just.  The code is designed to enable an elite and amoral leadership to enforce discipline upon a brainwashed legion of trained killers.  Compassion, human rights -- even thinking, much less expressing forbidden thoughts -- have no place in this code.

But Bradley Manning is a compassionate and thoughtful man, one who finally acted on his beflief that murder and other high crimes must be reported to the public on whose behalf they are being committed. When he looked at video proof of a United States helicopter team laughingly assassinating innocent men, women and children, he acted. He gave this and thousands of other suppressed documents to WikiLeaks, the rogue journalists led by Julian Assange, an Australian, to publicize.

Now, like Daniel Ellsberg before him, he faces the wrath of our ever more secretive government.  Ellsberg risked life and career to leak to the press a secret study of the Vietnam war, an act that arguably led to U.S. disengagement there.  Manning said he believed "that if the public, especially the American public, had access to this information, this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general, as well, as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan."

Debate . . . on policy!  I am old enough to remember when there were those in government who actually believed that that is exactly what government is supposed to do.

But that was long, long ago and, it seems, far, far away.  This is now, this is today, and and today the Chief Executioner in this sham, Army Col. Denise Lind, has ruled that the 24 principal witnesses against Pvt. Manning may testify in secret.

The mere 70 (out of nearly 400 applicants) journalists who were credentialed to watch and report this farce won't even be able to tell the public who said, or showed, what, even though it may well send Pvt. Manning to face a firing squad.

I consider Ellsberg, Manning and Sy Hersh to be heroes for showing the American public the truth about Vietnam, Iraq/Afghanistan and My Lai. I decry as the ultimate treason our government's violent efforts to silence them and others like them.

You cannot, fellow Citizens, shrug this off as "not my business," or, worse, support your government in the name of "national security." If you allow the government to take away any citizen's rights, you forfeit your own, and there is no security.