There are two ways to deal with dissent: derogate it as insignificant, or suppress it with brute force.
The ruling class in the United States, having tried the first tactic on the Occupy movement to no avail, has now resorted to the second. In city after city, riot-armed police have driven off peaceful Occupiers, bashing heads, making mass arrests, destroying tent encampments and, worst of all, burning books by the hundreds.
In England, Prime Minister David Cameron is invoking the first tactic to dismiss as a petty annoyance ("a damp squib," in his words) the strikes by public sector workers to protest proposed pension cuts. It's one of the "austerity measures" to bring down the debt bogeyman. All of Europe has been infected by the same obsession that fuels the insanity of the political parties here, as well: quit spending, lower the debt.
The austerity campaign is championed by the very people who caused the debt. None of their "austerity measures" will cost them a shilling. The One Per Cent Oligarchy will get still richer. Let the workers, the jobless, the sick, the elderly, the pensioners pay the cost of wars, unregulated financial markets and other follies of the free market priests and prelates.
In the UK, the effectiveness of Cameron's fizzling little firecracker can be judged the amount of time that elapses before he is forced to call in the armed goons and bash heads, as his peers have already done in police states around the world, from Syria and Egypt to the U.S. of A.
Governments today -- whatever label they wear: democracy, republic, dictatorship, military junta, social-democrat, monarchy, etc. -- are all in fact plutocracies. Their richest few either run the country directly, or control those delegated or "elected" to run it. They wring personal profit from traditional religious and ethnic hatreds, exploit hostility toward immigrants and love war as long as they're on the winning side. They're police states, to one degree or another. They are intolerant of dissent, whether they simply send goons to assassinate dissenters or merely throw them in jail without trial (as the United States increasingly does).
Exceptions to the rule seem almost quaint: how much do you hear or read about, say, Costa Rica? Described in 1719 as "the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all America," its citizens today enjoy an enviable quality of life, the highest in Central America. Their life expectancy level is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Their government health care system provides them with better health care than U.S. citizens receive. Once dependent on coffee, banana and beef exports, Costa Rica has diversified its economy. Its high level of education (state-supported) has attracted computer chip makers, pharmaceutical companies, and financial outsourcing enterprises to set up shop there. Ecotourism now earns more foreign exchange for Costa Rica than the combined exports of the country's three main cash cops (coffee, bananas and pineapples). The economy has no army to support: Rebels against its military dictatorship won a bloody civil war in 1948 and one of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the army altogether. Costa Rica's inflation rate, once a worrisome 13.8%, has declined to 5.7%. Its poverty rate is around 8% (vs, 15.1 percent in the U.S.).
Through its last 13 presidential elections, Costa Rica has remained stable, and it is a world leader in efforts to foster human rights and ecologically sustainable development. At home, it maintains one of the strongest social welfare systems in the hemisphere.
According to the New Economics Foundation Costa Rica ranks first in the Happy Planet Index and is the most environmentally responsible country in the world.
It is a government that believes government's principal obligation is to the quality of life of its citizens.
Weird idea, isn't it?
Some might call it paradise. Others would say it's a "damp squib."
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
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.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, October 21, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
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?
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?
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
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?"
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?"
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
TBA: Rotten, From the Top to The Core
If ever sanity returns to public discourse in whatever then remains of the United States, or when inevitably a competent historian from another country examines the decline and fall of our country, the media will be exposed in all their villainy.
Evidence of their betrayal of democracy is readily available even now, if you look beyond corporate-controlled outlets and seek out the testimony of whistle-blowers, honest analysts and a few other truth-tellers.
Our London correspondent, the distinguished author and ex-patriate onetime American journalist Gerald Mayer, recently observed: "When I was a youngster I thought myself unbelievably blessed to have found a place for myself in the newspaper game, where the mission was 'to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' Today I don't think I would consider it as a possible career. Gone gone gone."
'Tis a ubiquitous sentiment among fellow formerjournalists of my generation, whose number of distinguished contemporary comforters and afflicters is far too great to list here. Why their kind of journalism is gone gone gone probably begins at the top. From Punch Sulzberger to Pinch. From Kay Graham to Donnie Graham. From Otis Chandler to Corn Flakes. From Jack Knight to Tony Ridder to oblivion. From Joe Pulitzer to Joe Bftsplk. From CBS News to Fox Fiction. Rupert Murdoch rupert murdoch rupert murdoch.
With rare and sometimes dramatic exceptions, today's media barons have oiled their way across the spectrum from comforters of the afflicted and afflicters of the comfortable to unmitigated Unholy Alliance with the Complex of Greed, Wealth and Power that now governs what once were the great English-speaking democracies. One hardly expects that evil will be exposed by those who are party to it and profit from it.
Dan Rather, who was White House correspondent for CBS News when it still honored the legacy of Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, got sucked up to higher ground just as CBS was moving into the Great Ruling Corporatocracy. The unworthy heir to Walter Cronkite gave us a frightening metaphor for what happens to those who still try to practice the old time religion in today's version of journalism: they get "necklaced" with gasoline-filled burning tires.
Where once, for example, we had the likes of Meyer Berger and Harrison Salisbury, we have more recently been handed the likes of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. Bill Keller, like Rather, was once an able reporter but was anointed to power in the New Era; hence his Iscariotan betrayal of Julian Assange, but only after his tenure as editor had reached its journalistic apogee thanks to WikiLeaks. This, alas, at a place supposed to be the paragon of our media!
No wonder there is no place in the mainstream any longer for such as Chris Hedges and Sy Hersh. Better to pass off the likes of Ross Douthat, Charles Gibson and Bill O'Reilly as journalists, instead.
One of the real journalists of my generation alerted me today to the fact that an important documentary film is now available on the World Wide Web. The War You Don't See, produced and directed by John Pilger, was effectively banned from United States theaters and television last year.
Now, if you hurry to http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/ before it's censored again, you can view this deft and chilling indictment of the propaganda role the British and U.S. media played in cheerleading the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It includes a series of interviews in which Pilger confronts British and American journalists (including Dan Rather) and news executives regarding their failure to give air time to weapons inspectors and intelligence analysts who were publicly challenging the excuses for these wars.
Viewing the film may convince you, as it did me and many others, that the real reason it was banned here is Pilger's sympathetic treatment of Assange. In a brief interview with Pilger, Assange condemns the failure of democratic governments to even attempt to control what Dwight David Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. Assange says the "complex" is a network of thousands of players (government employees and contractors and defense lobbyists) who make major policy decisions in their own self-interest sort of in loco parentis for government.
I call it a corporatocracy that really is government. But that's epistemological quibbling.
Truth sets us free; lies enslave us. Given the present state of American media, we are compelled to seek and sift most resolutely for truth, and cherish it where we find it:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/
Evidence of their betrayal of democracy is readily available even now, if you look beyond corporate-controlled outlets and seek out the testimony of whistle-blowers, honest analysts and a few other truth-tellers.
Our London correspondent, the distinguished author and ex-patriate onetime American journalist Gerald Mayer, recently observed: "When I was a youngster I thought myself unbelievably blessed to have found a place for myself in the newspaper game, where the mission was 'to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' Today I don't think I would consider it as a possible career. Gone gone gone."
'Tis a ubiquitous sentiment among fellow formerjournalists of my generation, whose number of distinguished contemporary comforters and afflicters is far too great to list here. Why their kind of journalism is gone gone gone probably begins at the top. From Punch Sulzberger to Pinch. From Kay Graham to Donnie Graham. From Otis Chandler to Corn Flakes. From Jack Knight to Tony Ridder to oblivion. From Joe Pulitzer to Joe Bftsplk. From CBS News to Fox Fiction. Rupert Murdoch rupert murdoch rupert murdoch.
With rare and sometimes dramatic exceptions, today's media barons have oiled their way across the spectrum from comforters of the afflicted and afflicters of the comfortable to unmitigated Unholy Alliance with the Complex of Greed, Wealth and Power that now governs what once were the great English-speaking democracies. One hardly expects that evil will be exposed by those who are party to it and profit from it.
Dan Rather, who was White House correspondent for CBS News when it still honored the legacy of Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, got sucked up to higher ground just as CBS was moving into the Great Ruling Corporatocracy. The unworthy heir to Walter Cronkite gave us a frightening metaphor for what happens to those who still try to practice the old time religion in today's version of journalism: they get "necklaced" with gasoline-filled burning tires.
Where once, for example, we had the likes of Meyer Berger and Harrison Salisbury, we have more recently been handed the likes of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. Bill Keller, like Rather, was once an able reporter but was anointed to power in the New Era; hence his Iscariotan betrayal of Julian Assange, but only after his tenure as editor had reached its journalistic apogee thanks to WikiLeaks. This, alas, at a place supposed to be the paragon of our media!
No wonder there is no place in the mainstream any longer for such as Chris Hedges and Sy Hersh. Better to pass off the likes of Ross Douthat, Charles Gibson and Bill O'Reilly as journalists, instead.
One of the real journalists of my generation alerted me today to the fact that an important documentary film is now available on the World Wide Web. The War You Don't See, produced and directed by John Pilger, was effectively banned from United States theaters and television last year.
Now, if you hurry to http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/ before it's censored again, you can view this deft and chilling indictment of the propaganda role the British and U.S. media played in cheerleading the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It includes a series of interviews in which Pilger confronts British and American journalists (including Dan Rather) and news executives regarding their failure to give air time to weapons inspectors and intelligence analysts who were publicly challenging the excuses for these wars.
Viewing the film may convince you, as it did me and many others, that the real reason it was banned here is Pilger's sympathetic treatment of Assange. In a brief interview with Pilger, Assange condemns the failure of democratic governments to even attempt to control what Dwight David Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. Assange says the "complex" is a network of thousands of players (government employees and contractors and defense lobbyists) who make major policy decisions in their own self-interest sort of in loco parentis for government.
I call it a corporatocracy that really is government. But that's epistemological quibbling.
Truth sets us free; lies enslave us. Given the present state of American media, we are compelled to seek and sift most resolutely for truth, and cherish it where we find it:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/
Friday, September 23, 2011
Once, There Was a Thing called Justice . . .
Once again on Planet Earth, the most civilized among us recoil from an abomination of the most vile among us.
The government of Georgia, U.S.A., has murdered an innocent man, joining its fellow racist southern state, Texas, in the ultimate act of legal infamy.
Across the spectrum of those who seek to improve the human species -- the Pope of Rome, the E.U., the Dalai Lama; ministers, scientists, healers and thinkers -- rose today a thunder of condemnation of the rich, powerful and unutterably vile nation that slew Troy Anthony Davis with malice aforethought.
Even our craven media dare to call his execution "for killing a police officer" somewhat controversial; even these cowardly media whores suggest there might be doubt about his guilt.
Where there is the rule of law, there cannot be "guilt" if there is the shadow of a doubt. In the case of Troy Davis, the only evidence against him was the testimony of nine alleged witnesses to the crime. Seven of these have recanted their testimony, citing abuse, threats and intimidation by police, prosecutors and others sworn to uphold the law.
The shadow of doubt? This is a chasm of incredulity! This is an open and shut case of criminal racism on the part of "legal" authorities. Those who brought, pressed, abetted and consented in the charges against and "conviction" of Troy Davis should be brought in chains -- every one of them, jurors, too -- before the World Court in The Hague and charged with crimes against humanity.
For the victim here is not merely a black man named Troy Davis; we -- every single human of any race, creed or color who believes he or she is protected by something called the law -- we are all the victims.
But the most lamentable victim, the most sinned against, the most cruelly violated, is the thing called Justice.
"Justice has been served for Officer Mark MacPhail and his family," said the Attorney General of the State of Georgia, Sam Olens.
If there is a god, if somewhere beyond this tainted world there survives a pure concept called justice, if, then, there is a hell, surely there is an especially vile, punishing and inescapably terrible place within it for Mr. Olens.
Justice?
You, sir, are unfit to utter the word. You violate every ethic, more, fundament-- you urinate upon an open wound in the heart -- of the rule of law you purport to serve.
At a protest of the murder of Davis in front of the White House today, at least 12 Howard University students were arrested for failing to move off the White House sidewalk.
When James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other geniuses of the Age of Enlightenment wrote our Constitution and gave us a nation, Franklin told us that we had been given a republic -- "if you can keep it."
We have failed.
We have failed.
We have utterly failed.
The government of Georgia, U.S.A., has murdered an innocent man, joining its fellow racist southern state, Texas, in the ultimate act of legal infamy.
Across the spectrum of those who seek to improve the human species -- the Pope of Rome, the E.U., the Dalai Lama; ministers, scientists, healers and thinkers -- rose today a thunder of condemnation of the rich, powerful and unutterably vile nation that slew Troy Anthony Davis with malice aforethought.Even our craven media dare to call his execution "for killing a police officer" somewhat controversial; even these cowardly media whores suggest there might be doubt about his guilt.
Where there is the rule of law, there cannot be "guilt" if there is the shadow of a doubt. In the case of Troy Davis, the only evidence against him was the testimony of nine alleged witnesses to the crime. Seven of these have recanted their testimony, citing abuse, threats and intimidation by police, prosecutors and others sworn to uphold the law.
The shadow of doubt? This is a chasm of incredulity! This is an open and shut case of criminal racism on the part of "legal" authorities. Those who brought, pressed, abetted and consented in the charges against and "conviction" of Troy Davis should be brought in chains -- every one of them, jurors, too -- before the World Court in The Hague and charged with crimes against humanity.
For the victim here is not merely a black man named Troy Davis; we -- every single human of any race, creed or color who believes he or she is protected by something called the law -- we are all the victims.
But the most lamentable victim, the most sinned against, the most cruelly violated, is the thing called Justice.
"Justice has been served for Officer Mark MacPhail and his family," said the Attorney General of the State of Georgia, Sam Olens.
If there is a god, if somewhere beyond this tainted world there survives a pure concept called justice, if, then, there is a hell, surely there is an especially vile, punishing and inescapably terrible place within it for Mr. Olens.
Justice?
You, sir, are unfit to utter the word. You violate every ethic, more, fundament-- you urinate upon an open wound in the heart -- of the rule of law you purport to serve.
At a protest of the murder of Davis in front of the White House today, at least 12 Howard University students were arrested for failing to move off the White House sidewalk.
When James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other geniuses of the Age of Enlightenment wrote our Constitution and gave us a nation, Franklin told us that we had been given a republic -- "if you can keep it."
We have failed.
We have failed.
We have utterly failed.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Thoughts on Fathers, on Integrity and on a Failed Presidency
As the days grow shorter and cooler and the angle of the sun bathes desert and mountain with the year's most special kind of light, Brandi and I spend more and more time out there, listening to the silence. I can't tell what my uncharacteristically pensive boxer-shepherd is thinking, but I'm thinking about fathers and about integrity.
I think of my father and his father and their passion for the works of Shakespeare. I remember an autumn Saturday in the woods with my Dad. We were "hunting" with our .22s but the squirrels in that Ohio woodland were quite safe; the walk, the companionship, the mutual appreciation of the silence, the sunlight, the falling leaves and the acorns and the scents of deepening fall -- these were more important than shooting at squirrels.
Something I had said the night before troubled Homer Arthur Frederick Wark, the autocrat of Herbert Avenue. Quoting an English teacher, I said that Polonius in Hamlet was an unmitigated hypocrite and so his famous advice to his son Laertes, one of my father's favorite passages, was but so much eloquent bullshit.
When we paused to rest on the trunk of a fallen tree, he turned to me and said softly, "It's about integrity." Shakespeare, he said, used the playwright's tools, from irony ('. . .clothes make the man. . .') to moral imperative ('This above all, to thine own self be true. . .') to place eternal verities in the mouth of a minor and not entirely admirable character. He handed down to me his own moral imperative: "If only men of perfect character can be held to speak truth, scant truth would ever reach human ears. After all, the world could give us only one Lincoln; it can never give us another."
It was Chris Hedges, one of today's most important American writers, who set me to ruminating about fathers and integrity, when I read his recent article based on a long conversatisn with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Hedges:
"Wright, who perhaps knows Obama better than nearly any other person in the country, sees a man who sold his principles for the chimera and illusion of power. But once Obama achieved power he became its tool, its vassal, its public face, its brand."
To Hedges, Obama is Wright's personal Judas: "Obama's politically expedient decision to betray and abandon his pastor (Wright) exposed his cowardice and moral bankruptcy. In that moment, he surrendered the last shreds of his integrity." Now merely a "black Mascot for Wall Street," Obama, Hedges writes, must "grapple with the fact that he was a traitor not only to his pastor, the man who married him and Michelle, who baptized his children and who kept him spiritually and morally grounded, but to himself. Wright retains what is most precious in life and what Obama has squandered -- his soul.
"I grew up as a Christian," Hedges writes. "My father was a pastor. I graduated from a seminary. I can distinguish a Christian pastor from the slick imposters and charlatans. Wright preaches the radical and unsettling message of the Christian Gospel. He calls us to live the moral life. He knows that the measure of our lives as individuals and as a nation is reflected in how we treat our most vulnerable. And he knows on whose side he stands. Obama, who like Judas took his 30 pieces of silver and betrayed someone who loved him, withers into moral insignificance in Wright's presence."
Wright, also the son of a pastor, thunders his own and his father's moral imperative, again and again, in his conversation with Hedges. The uncompromising eternal verities drive themselves home in his voice, like Polonius.
"President Obama was selected before he was elected," Wright said, "and he is accountable to those who selected him. Why do you think Wall Street got the break? Why do you think the big three [financial institutions] were bailed out? Those were the ones who selected him. We didn't select him. We don't have enough money to select anybody. You're accountable to those who select you. All politicians are. (Obama) is accountable to the ones that put him where he is. Preachers, pastors, ministers, we are not accountable to these people."
Selected before he was elected. Think back, America. Think back to the Democratic National Convention of 2004. Somewhere, probably in Boston, very powerful and no doubt very rich people reached down into the murk of Illinois state politics and selected an obscure black politician to speak to Democrats and to the world in prime time amid expertly orchestreated media hype, both before and after. With his acceptance of their pieces of silver, Barrack Obama had the presidency conferred upon him, and lost his soul. His betrayal of Wright was inevitable from that moment on.
Hedges (quoting Wright):
"In February 2007 on [a broadcast of 'Religion and Ethics' I said there will come a time when Obama will have to distance himself from me," Wright said. "Now that's February 2007. So the fact that he had to distance himself from me does not come as a surprise."
Nor is what follows a surprise, coming as it does from this stern demander of Christian principles, this apostle of truth, this custodian of the eternal verities:
"I was walking through the airport a few weeks ago," Wright said. "I saw on the cover, I think, of Time Magazine, Osama bin Laden's picture. The caption on the cover said 'Justice.' I said, 'How about murder? It was an assassin's hit.' What really bothered me as I read more about it was that Barack and Hillary [Clinton] and the war folk were sitting in the war room watching the hit. There were cameras in the field. It was a hit, two right above the eyebrow. Why, why, why did you murder that man? We have international courts. We have trials like the Nuremberg trials. Why did you murder him? Why not put him on trial?
"And I sat up in the middle of the night, about 10 days later, with the answer. I said, because you didn't want him to talk. If he starts talking on the stand everything comes unraveled. We will have to look at the Cheney war machine. A trial would rip to shreds the lies we have been telling ourselves and our American public. We can't afford that, so we murder him. We murder him and call it justice. That one really hurt. I said to myself, this is the Barack you once knew who cared enough about humankind to work in Altgeld Gardens with the poor, to not run against an African-American female, who now calls for a professional Navy SEAL assassination, a hit, and watches it. It's like that story you heard your dad preach and you know from seminary in Acts, where the demons said to the seven sons of Sceva, Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you? Who have you become?"
* * *
"One of you shall betray me." (Matthew, 26:21)
"Is it I, Lord?"
"He it is, for whom I shall dip the sop, and give it him." (John 23:26).
I think of my father and his father and their passion for the works of Shakespeare. I remember an autumn Saturday in the woods with my Dad. We were "hunting" with our .22s but the squirrels in that Ohio woodland were quite safe; the walk, the companionship, the mutual appreciation of the silence, the sunlight, the falling leaves and the acorns and the scents of deepening fall -- these were more important than shooting at squirrels.
Something I had said the night before troubled Homer Arthur Frederick Wark, the autocrat of Herbert Avenue. Quoting an English teacher, I said that Polonius in Hamlet was an unmitigated hypocrite and so his famous advice to his son Laertes, one of my father's favorite passages, was but so much eloquent bullshit.
When we paused to rest on the trunk of a fallen tree, he turned to me and said softly, "It's about integrity." Shakespeare, he said, used the playwright's tools, from irony ('. . .clothes make the man. . .') to moral imperative ('This above all, to thine own self be true. . .') to place eternal verities in the mouth of a minor and not entirely admirable character. He handed down to me his own moral imperative: "If only men of perfect character can be held to speak truth, scant truth would ever reach human ears. After all, the world could give us only one Lincoln; it can never give us another."
It was Chris Hedges, one of today's most important American writers, who set me to ruminating about fathers and integrity, when I read his recent article based on a long conversatisn with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Hedges:
"Wright, who perhaps knows Obama better than nearly any other person in the country, sees a man who sold his principles for the chimera and illusion of power. But once Obama achieved power he became its tool, its vassal, its public face, its brand."
To Hedges, Obama is Wright's personal Judas: "Obama's politically expedient decision to betray and abandon his pastor (Wright) exposed his cowardice and moral bankruptcy. In that moment, he surrendered the last shreds of his integrity." Now merely a "black Mascot for Wall Street," Obama, Hedges writes, must "grapple with the fact that he was a traitor not only to his pastor, the man who married him and Michelle, who baptized his children and who kept him spiritually and morally grounded, but to himself. Wright retains what is most precious in life and what Obama has squandered -- his soul.
"I grew up as a Christian," Hedges writes. "My father was a pastor. I graduated from a seminary. I can distinguish a Christian pastor from the slick imposters and charlatans. Wright preaches the radical and unsettling message of the Christian Gospel. He calls us to live the moral life. He knows that the measure of our lives as individuals and as a nation is reflected in how we treat our most vulnerable. And he knows on whose side he stands. Obama, who like Judas took his 30 pieces of silver and betrayed someone who loved him, withers into moral insignificance in Wright's presence."
Wright, also the son of a pastor, thunders his own and his father's moral imperative, again and again, in his conversation with Hedges. The uncompromising eternal verities drive themselves home in his voice, like Polonius.
"President Obama was selected before he was elected," Wright said, "and he is accountable to those who selected him. Why do you think Wall Street got the break? Why do you think the big three [financial institutions] were bailed out? Those were the ones who selected him. We didn't select him. We don't have enough money to select anybody. You're accountable to those who select you. All politicians are. (Obama) is accountable to the ones that put him where he is. Preachers, pastors, ministers, we are not accountable to these people."
Selected before he was elected. Think back, America. Think back to the Democratic National Convention of 2004. Somewhere, probably in Boston, very powerful and no doubt very rich people reached down into the murk of Illinois state politics and selected an obscure black politician to speak to Democrats and to the world in prime time amid expertly orchestreated media hype, both before and after. With his acceptance of their pieces of silver, Barrack Obama had the presidency conferred upon him, and lost his soul. His betrayal of Wright was inevitable from that moment on.
Hedges (quoting Wright):
"In February 2007 on [a broadcast of 'Religion and Ethics' I said there will come a time when Obama will have to distance himself from me," Wright said. "Now that's February 2007. So the fact that he had to distance himself from me does not come as a surprise."
Nor is what follows a surprise, coming as it does from this stern demander of Christian principles, this apostle of truth, this custodian of the eternal verities:
"I was walking through the airport a few weeks ago," Wright said. "I saw on the cover, I think, of Time Magazine, Osama bin Laden's picture. The caption on the cover said 'Justice.' I said, 'How about murder? It was an assassin's hit.' What really bothered me as I read more about it was that Barack and Hillary [Clinton] and the war folk were sitting in the war room watching the hit. There were cameras in the field. It was a hit, two right above the eyebrow. Why, why, why did you murder that man? We have international courts. We have trials like the Nuremberg trials. Why did you murder him? Why not put him on trial?
"And I sat up in the middle of the night, about 10 days later, with the answer. I said, because you didn't want him to talk. If he starts talking on the stand everything comes unraveled. We will have to look at the Cheney war machine. A trial would rip to shreds the lies we have been telling ourselves and our American public. We can't afford that, so we murder him. We murder him and call it justice. That one really hurt. I said to myself, this is the Barack you once knew who cared enough about humankind to work in Altgeld Gardens with the poor, to not run against an African-American female, who now calls for a professional Navy SEAL assassination, a hit, and watches it. It's like that story you heard your dad preach and you know from seminary in Acts, where the demons said to the seven sons of Sceva, Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you? Who have you become?"
* * *
"One of you shall betray me." (Matthew, 26:21)
"Is it I, Lord?"
"He it is, for whom I shall dip the sop, and give it him." (John 23:26).
Sunday, September 11, 2011
A 9/11 Story
A Guest Post
By Lois Sutherland Wark
We were driving the wild and rugged north coast of Scotland, day-tripping from our cozy Scottish hunting lodge-turned-hotel in Tongue. After a day of sight-seeing, walking the empty beaches and climbing headlands to watch the sea crash against the towering stacks just off the coast, we pulled into Durness, the most northwesterly village on the British mainland. At the gas pump an attendant, recognizing that we were Yanks, asked, "Have you heard about the Twin Towers?"
Stunned and horrified, we drove on a short distance to a grassy clifftop near the ruined Gothic chapel of Balnakiel, where we had intended to walk a sandy path that winds north through the dunes and eventually leads to Faraid Head, where there is a good chance of spotting puffins. Instead, we sat dead silent in the car for hours, listening to the BBC reports from New York and around the world.
Later, back at our hotel in Tongue, our dinner-table mates and hotel staff reached out in sorrow. The sympathy for Americans -- and for the international community who had worked at the World Trade Center -- was strong and palpable. With U.S. air space closed indefinitely, we remained in our room at the hotel, occasionally taking walks in the rain but no longer interested in touring. We just wanted to get home. Home, where no one any longer was safe.
Finally, the call from British Airways arrived: Our flight from Gatwick to Houston would leave Saturday morning. On the drive south from Tongue, the rain and heavy clouds seemed very much in keeping with our thoughts. At the airport, attendants were particularly solicitous of travelers, as though no one ever again would take traveling lightly. It was there, while we were waiting for our flight in the gigantic airport terminal, that we took part in a Europe-wide remembrance of the 9/11 dead -- three minutes of absolute silence. Halfway through, a harried couple came rushing through a door, clearly afraid they were about to miss their flight. They stopped suddenly, feeling the silence. Dropped their bags, realizing what they had walked into. Joined the mourning.
We had begun this trip to Scotland in high anticipation, a celebration of my Scottish Sutherland ancestry. Every four years, the Clan Sutherland Society of Scotland gathers in Golspie, on the coast about four hours north of Edinburgh, to spend four days together celebrating our Sutherland ancestry -- a homecoming for the worldwide diaspora. My cousin, Donald Gene Sutherland, had proposed the trip more than a year before, and eight of us had signed on: Gene, his daughters Victoria and Heather and Heather's husband, Norbert; Gene's older brother, Guy, and wife Diana; and Tom and me. On the way out, Tom and I had met Guy and Diana at the Houston airport and flown together to Gatwick, then on to Inverness. Staying together at the Dornoch Castle Hotel near Golspie, we had admired the 97 varieties of single malt scotch above the bar in the hotel pub and vowed that among the eight of us, we would taste every single one.
The highlight of the trip had been a formal dinner dance at Dunrobin Castle, the ancestral seat of the Sutherlands which overlooks the sea a mile north of Golspie. At the castle a day before the dinner dance, Alistair Sutherland, Lord Strathnaver, son and heir to the Clan Chief, Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, had taken our group on a tour of the castle; he was a gracious host, in that way that the Scottish nobility has, who now depend on tourists for the upkeep of their ancient piles (Dunrobin is the most northerly of Scotland's great houses and is the largest house in the Northern Highlands). During the days leading up to the dinner dance, Gene's daughter Vicky had attended classes every afternoon in Scottish dancing, learning its intricacies. In Dunrobin's formal ballroom, with her father beaming on the sidelines, Victoria had danced every single dance. The trip had been Gene's gift to his daughters, in hopes it would kindle a lifelong interest in all things Scottish. Done.
Now, our fairy tale journey had ended in tragedy. As Tom and I settled into our seats on British Airways, it all seemed unreal. Midway into the flight, as Tom dozed beside me, he was suddenly awakened by a tap on the shoulder. Hovering over him was the smiling bulk of cousin Guy, who had no business being there. He and Diana had caught a flight out of Gatwick four days before us -- on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
In midair over the Atlantic, their pilots had been ordered to divert the plane to Halifax, Nova Scotia -- had been told that U.S. airspace was closed. When the British pilots demurred and asked why, they had been given no explanation. Enter U.S. airspace and you will be shot down, was the terse response from air traffic controllers. It was only after they had landed in Halifax, where the passengers were bedded down on cots at a local high school gymnasium, that they were told of the attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon.
So what were Guy and Diana doing on our plane? Another of the ironies of that iconic week. When flights to the U.S. were allowed to resume, their British Airways flight was directed not to its original destination of Houston but was sent back to Gatwick, where we all boarded the first flight out.
When we landed in Houston, the first stop for Clan Sutherland was the nearest pub. Single malt all around.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The Fatal Flaw in Dr. Kidglove's Voodoo
Much as I admire Krugman, Steiglitz, Baker and the other enlightened popular economists of our era, I am somewhat less whelmed than they seem to be by Kidglove's latest voodoo economics.
Their well-modulated approval of the president's plan for job creation may, as Krugman suggested, be the result of low expectations. The Princeton Nobelist called Obama's plan "bolder" than expected.
Although it's too little, and probably too late, the plan does at last acknowledge the Keynesian wisdom of increased government spending in times of both recession and high unemployment.
But too few voices of alarm have been raised about the real impact of one of the key points in the Kidglove Plan: cutting the "payroll tax" in half.
The White House is selling this as a "tax cut to the typical American family" amounting to about $1,500 a year.
What it really is, folks, is a back-door attack on your Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, disability insurance and survivors' benefits.
The President, I think, wants American workers -- those lucky enough to still have jobs -- to think that he's cutting their income tax, as he and his predecessor have done for the really, really rich one per cent of us.
But FICA -- the Federal Insurance Contributions Act -- is less a tax than a mandatory investment in the health and welfare of all Americans, to be used when they're too old to work. Employers and employees contribute equally -- 6.2 per cent of payroll up to a fixed limit for employers, 6.2 per cent of salary up to a fixed limit for employees --through FICA to the Social Security Trust Fund. This is what pays retirement, health and disability benefits that all Americans enjoy.
The Kidglove voodoo jobs plan would get a substantial part of the money to "create jobs" by taking it away from workers when they reach retirement age. His fifty per cent cut in the "payroll tax" is actually a fifty per cent cut in funding for those worker benefits -- robbing from Peter what should be paid to Peter when he reaches retirement age.
The White House says this plan will put more money in American pockets, which presumably they will spend, which will stimulate the economy. But with the Baby Boomer generation just reaching retirement age, it effectively cuts in half the income to the Social Security Trust Fund.
Not to worry, sayeth the Voodoo Doctor Kidglove. We will make up the difference, as we did on the last "payroll tax holiday," from general revenues.
Huh?
The same general revenues that are inadequate to pay for our ongoing wars, our ongoing government costs, our interest on trillions of dollars of debt? Those general revenues? The general revenues the Republicans refused to increase by raising taxes on the wealthiest among us, while at the same time declaring that our debt was of sufficient magnitude to threaten to bring down the government by forfeiting on its debt repayment?
Does Kidglove honestly believe that the Teapot Nuts in Congress will approve dipping into general revenues to keep Social Security solvent? The same Social Security Republicans have wanted to scuttle ever since the New Deal?
You can smell in the wind another political farce like the debt crisis fiasco. GOP fights Obama job plan. Obama cuts back on the only parts of it that will actually create new jobs (but only about a million in a country where well over 14 million able-bodied workers are jobless). GOP, in a great show of bipartisanship, says, "OK, now you can have your payroll tax cut." Smirk smirk.
Everyone in this cute little drama knows that in a year or so a new "crisis" will be declared: Social Security is "running out of money," they will shout in Congress. "We must end this failed Ponzi scheme right now!"
Lots of really, really rich folk will be chuckling all the way to the bank. Again.
Their well-modulated approval of the president's plan for job creation may, as Krugman suggested, be the result of low expectations. The Princeton Nobelist called Obama's plan "bolder" than expected.
Although it's too little, and probably too late, the plan does at last acknowledge the Keynesian wisdom of increased government spending in times of both recession and high unemployment.
But too few voices of alarm have been raised about the real impact of one of the key points in the Kidglove Plan: cutting the "payroll tax" in half.
The White House is selling this as a "tax cut to the typical American family" amounting to about $1,500 a year.
What it really is, folks, is a back-door attack on your Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, disability insurance and survivors' benefits.
The President, I think, wants American workers -- those lucky enough to still have jobs -- to think that he's cutting their income tax, as he and his predecessor have done for the really, really rich one per cent of us.
But FICA -- the Federal Insurance Contributions Act -- is less a tax than a mandatory investment in the health and welfare of all Americans, to be used when they're too old to work. Employers and employees contribute equally -- 6.2 per cent of payroll up to a fixed limit for employers, 6.2 per cent of salary up to a fixed limit for employees --through FICA to the Social Security Trust Fund. This is what pays retirement, health and disability benefits that all Americans enjoy.
The Kidglove voodoo jobs plan would get a substantial part of the money to "create jobs" by taking it away from workers when they reach retirement age. His fifty per cent cut in the "payroll tax" is actually a fifty per cent cut in funding for those worker benefits -- robbing from Peter what should be paid to Peter when he reaches retirement age.
The White House says this plan will put more money in American pockets, which presumably they will spend, which will stimulate the economy. But with the Baby Boomer generation just reaching retirement age, it effectively cuts in half the income to the Social Security Trust Fund.
Not to worry, sayeth the Voodoo Doctor Kidglove. We will make up the difference, as we did on the last "payroll tax holiday," from general revenues.
Huh?
The same general revenues that are inadequate to pay for our ongoing wars, our ongoing government costs, our interest on trillions of dollars of debt? Those general revenues? The general revenues the Republicans refused to increase by raising taxes on the wealthiest among us, while at the same time declaring that our debt was of sufficient magnitude to threaten to bring down the government by forfeiting on its debt repayment?
Does Kidglove honestly believe that the Teapot Nuts in Congress will approve dipping into general revenues to keep Social Security solvent? The same Social Security Republicans have wanted to scuttle ever since the New Deal?
You can smell in the wind another political farce like the debt crisis fiasco. GOP fights Obama job plan. Obama cuts back on the only parts of it that will actually create new jobs (but only about a million in a country where well over 14 million able-bodied workers are jobless). GOP, in a great show of bipartisanship, says, "OK, now you can have your payroll tax cut." Smirk smirk.
Everyone in this cute little drama knows that in a year or so a new "crisis" will be declared: Social Security is "running out of money," they will shout in Congress. "We must end this failed Ponzi scheme right now!"
Lots of really, really rich folk will be chuckling all the way to the bank. Again.
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