THE NEW FaCE OF SLAVERY
Who Is To Blame?
“We have met the enemy and he is…”
Walt Kelly, Pogo, 1970
By: DW Foreign-Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch
Today I looked at my hometown editorial page and had my dread once again confirmed – we’re at war. I’m not referring to Iraq. I’m talking about war with each other. War in Iraq and the leaders who took us there are the subject, but we ourselves are the injured objects.
Robert Healy (a columnist writing for the High Point Enterprise) last week wrote an article calling Bush a liar and today two of his neighbors publicly labeled him a liar. We’ve got Americans hating and blaming Americans for what’s happening in New Orleans and in Iraq. We’ve got nations hating America for its aggressive (fascist) foreign policy. We seem to be coming apart at the seams.
Who is to blame?
Before I give you Walt Kelly’s punch-line answer to that question, let me lay some ground work. Robert Healy is our friend and neighbor. He fought for us in Viet Nam. One of his hateful detractors on the editorial page is another friend and neighbor who sacrificed two limbs recently in Iraq while doing his best to pursue what we all call “The American Dream”.
A hundred and fifty years ago in America, friends and brothers faced their friends and brothers over a warring fence called the American Civil War. Ninety years before that, British colonists faced their brothers and friends over another warring fence called the Revolutionary War. In Europe , twice in the last century, Americans, Europeans and Asians all faced and fought each another over a warring fence termed “fascism”. In those conflicts, where neighbors and relatives were fighting each other, ultimately over 30 million human lives were sacrificed. Who was to blame?
Today it suddenly occurred to me that the thing to blame in all wars just cited is the same. And the fact is that blaming each other, and hating each other, is just going to keep us in denial as to the true cause. Which was?… Walt Kelly told us the truth in 1970 thru a cartoon prophet named “Pogo” who told us: “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
Think you’ve heard all this before? Think this is philosophic nonsense? Before you fold your paper and move to the important part (sports section), bear with me.
There is a common denominator. In the Civil War, the northern boys we shot at were not our enemy. In our Revolutionary War it was not our British brothers who were our enemy. In WWII it was certainly not the Germans who died on the battlefields or the Japanese who died in their bunkers and beds who were the enemy. Every time, everywhere, the enemy was always the same. It was us.
What was that trait or part of us that was and remains “the enemy” I’m referring to in my indefensibly-naive pursuit of the common denominator of all wars? The “us” I am referring to of course is human kind. “Civilized” man.
In a word, it’s all been over a single human tendency, trait and intent – The desire on the part of the strong to enslave the weak. Only the face of that monster has changed. The monster is perennial and always the same, but the most monstrous thing about him is that his face is that of a chameleon…it changes and dynamically adapts to the times and the chameleon’s surroundings. Every time we see the monster, he’s wearing a different face.
In 1777, it was a King who wanted to enslave his brave subjects abroad in the New World. We were the slaves then and we called it “oppression” and “intolerable” “taxation-without-representation” tyranny. But we were still, in the process, hating and killing our neighbors abroad (and killing a few of each other in the process of deciding to declare war upon our King).
In 1861 it was an elite landed aristocracy who clearly and openly kidnapped and enslaved a race of our human brothers. Pundits will say our Civil War had other precipitating elements, but slavery was at its heart. Yankees envied the elite Charlestoninan society of the “Gentile” southern plantation owners and the South resented the hypocritical attitudes and exploitations of the yankee-dominated Federal government, protesting again the economic enslavement of taxation without representation. But the war was certainly fought on the grounds of both forms of slavery, economic and actual. The weak will endure captivity and exploitation for only so long.
In both the “German” wars, (I and II) imperialist nations endeavored openly and aggressively to enslave (by conquest and annexation) other entire nations and societies. Territorial ambition, acquisitiveness and even genocide were the surface agenda but clearly“slavery” was the generic animus of the seminal and reprised chapters of would-be world conquest by imperialists cum fascists.
The institution whereby one people, through physical supremacy and force of arms subjugate another (weaker) people to the end that the latter involuntarily surrender or forfeit their labors and/or properties to the stronger is still basically, enslavement.
In succession, then: in the Revolutionary war of American independence, the face of the enslaver was that of a European King. In the Civil War in America, the faces of the enslavers were those of Southern Landed Gentry and those of the power barons of Northern Industry. In the two “World Wars” the faces of global enslavement were, chronologically, a German Kiser, Nazi and finally a Japanese Emperor.
Today, the face of the would-be enslaver of the world is neither Bush nor bin Laden, and certainly not an imprisoned Saddam. Today we are all desperately seeking to unmask the face of the enemy enslaver and cannot do it because we are looking everywhere but where we should be looking…in the mirror. We are blaming our neighbors for their “stupidity”; we are blaming invisible and ubiquitous “terrorists” when every rational fiber in our systematically-frightened brains screams to us that terrorism is a tactic and not an army or foreign country. We are blaming the religion of Islam because most of the terrorist acts have been committed by Islamic zealots and most in the name and cause of their putative god, Allah. We are blaming the politicians and intelligence agencies that didn’t foresee and build hedges against the dangers of terrorist (and hurricane) threats.
The new face of “the enslaver” today is hard to see because it’s a product of global modernity, and like a lot of modern things, it’s “artificial”. Unlike all the former “enslavers”, the enslaver of today is not altogether “human”. Accordingly it has no human face. It has no human persona. More importantly and ominously, it has therefore no human responsibility and no human accountability.
The face of the enslaver today is a cyborg….like the “alien” villains of todays Sci-Fi films and comic book sagas…part human and part machine. The enslaver today is what we call a “corporation”.
The only problem is, ol’ Pogo would remind us, our corporations are…in virtual and moral reality…us. And there are…thousands upon thousands of them, and their numbers are expanding with the swiftness and silent stealth of a computer’s mouse click. Any American citizen can synthesize and bring into legal being one of these paper legal entities with a five-dollar form and a hundred-dollar filing fee.
Once alive (legally “de jure”), Corporations are treated like people. They can contract with living human people, hire and fire them, transact any business that humans do (except funny business and there are some exotic—“digitalized”– corporate websites that would argue with that), file, pay (but mostly avoid) income tax, go bankrupt and even die (suffer corporate “dissolution”) …just as though they had a beating heart and soul like any flesh- and-blood American citizen. Unlike “we the (human) people”, however, they have no heart and they have no soul, and they have no flesh and they have no blood. But with our creation, investment in and deployment of them we have imbued in them almost unlimited power today, and this power is capable of causing incalculable losses in terms of actual human flesh and blood. Look to Iraq. Think how and why we got there and what we’re doing there. If you can’t think of why and how, think a little about a little artificial corporate critter named…”Halliburton.”
Corporations of course have human components at the top, bottom and middle. From the promoters and founders who sell their patented ideas to a set of lawyers who transmogrify the idea into a Delaware “corporation” and a public stock offering, to the board of directors appointed to be its policy organ (conscience or “super ego”), its executive officers to be its “brain” and its middle management and labor force its lieutenants and foot soldiers respectively. In our corporations we have created…quite innocently, a Frankenstein monster of galactic proportions, which is now, like the “automatons” of the recent movie “I Robot”, enslaving and quite cannibalistically devouring the civilized human world. And the process of enslavement and conquest may well be terminal.
The dangerous element of a mob is its anonymity. Individual faces—and inhibitions–disappear (the mobsters think and feel) in the crowd. It’s the same with corporations—from the stock-optioned robber barons at top to the mutual-funded shareholders on bottom. The most dangerous thing about creating a corporation is that, although there is theoretically at its head a board of directors charged with the duty of drafting and policing policies that make the corporation’s conduct socially efficacious and symbiotic with global humanity, there is in corporate constitution an inherent and insidiously- dangerous flaw.
Viewing the corporation as a humanly-synthesized machine (which it is), a physicist might contend that the machine’s flaw is one naturally inherent in all machines – entropy. Entropy in physics is that little quantum of heat or inertia energy which is somehow lost any time a machine is utilized to accomplish work. But “entropy” in another sense is defined as “homogeneity” or “lacking diversity or differentiation”. In other words, the problem with mobs and corporations is that, as individuals and humans, we can “disappear” in the masses and machines and when we don’t carefully watch ourselves, “our crowd”, “our guys” “our team” ,—yes, even our “All-American Team” can become and act as a mob.
The seminal model for the U.S. Corporation (the “Delaware Corporation”) was created for the expressed purpose of permitting humans to operate behind what is in law termed “the corporate veil”. If the corporation has sufficient assets and insurance (and the required $5 corporate charter), its creators and owners cannot be held personally responsible (sued) as individuals. By virtue of the corporation’s existence, only the paper construction (and its money and other assets) are accountable for corporate conduct…and catastrophe.
In other words, if you made a contract with Disney or Halliburton, and you get either cheated or killed by virtue of Disney’s or Halliburton’s breach of that contract, you can bring suit against Disney or Halliburton, but the guys who called the shots that resulted in your getting sorely cheated or killed (Mike Eisner or Dick Cheney), are totally immune from responsibility. And so are their shareholders. If, as with Enron, the boys at the top have run away with all the toys (money), and you’re left holding the bag, then it’s the paper bag you wind up with in place of the money it once held. And sending a police posse after the corporate insider criminals won’t change that paper bag to money and sooner than we can restore the peace and sovereignty to the people of Iraq. With Ken Lay and Saddam Hussein in jail, and Cheney not even under arrest, we still have a bankrupt Enron and a civil war in Iraq.
Not a single shareholder, director or officer of R.J.R., Liggett and Myers or any other tobacco company will ever pay the first dollar of damages to the families of the millions of people their corporate product has sickened and killed.
If power (as Henry Kissinger claims) provides “the ultimate aphrodisiac, then certainly absolute anonymity provides the power holders the ultimate corruption. It is the anonymity of the mob (including the corporate mob) that lends the mob its lethal potential and propensities. Of course the face of the corporation is chameleonic and hard to spot. But as the frighteningSchwartzenagger “Predator” of recent cinema fame, corporate anonymity translates functionally to predatory “invisibility”…such that…although we cannot physically “see” Dick Cheney trading human American blood for oil in the sands about Baghdad, and converting it in Dubai to gold stored in his bank vaults back home in the U.S. (or maybe Zurich) he is doing precisely that through Halliburton Corporation. Of course stealthy lawyers have made the “paper trail” connecting blood, oil and money wholly invisible and untraceable, this arch-evil criminal alchemy is being performed as your eyes scan these line with the silent stealth of his CPA’s computer mouse.
Here are some of the facts: Halliburton machinated the political ascendancy of their executive cyborg puppet, Dick Cheney. Corporations, through unregulated lobbying now control Congress by contributing huge capital to the campaigns which funds are used to control media programming content and spin and thereby get senators, representatives and presidents elected. American and internationally-conglomerated corporations presently control the Republican Party and through the Party-dominated Congress , American Evangelically-dominated Christian television and Supreme Court have so effectively eroded walls constitutionally erected to separate Church and State and the State’s three branches of governance, that there is today, in the U.S. a de-facto government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. As a result of this, Cheney’s corporate, cyborg self was granted the billion-dollar war and oil contracts in Iraq without even a pretense of a competitive (honesty-insuring) bid. Presently the only question that remains in this conundrum of corporate complicity is – how much of what the Halliburton corporation stole from America did the criminals inside Halliburton in turn steal from Halliburton? As Ken Lay and Cheney will ultimately attest, the corruption inspired by corporate anonymity is systemic, and the corporations are, ipso facto, rotten to the cores.
Because the same corporations presently control the media (the mouth of “Big Brother” in “1984” Orwellian terms) and through the media the sermons on the pulpits of evangelical, fundamentalist Red-State, middle America, out-right lies are told and sold through repetition , spin and propaganda-prowess as truth. To mention only a few fabricated “Big-Brother Big Lies”: “WMD’s” , “Saddam/bin Laden connections” , “We thought there was an exit strategy from Iraq even though daddy disagreed,” “We didn’t wage war for oil.” , “We’re staying in Iraq for other reasons than oil. We want to establish a democracy…” (in this country we just enslaved). “ Clinton didn’t warn us of bin Laden or give us a blueprint of terrorism-prevention strategies.” “And Cheney is no longer associated with Halliburton and Halliburton is not stealing billions from America”… “Hansen says there is a ‘scientifically-questionable possibility’ of global warming” …etc. ad infinitum….)
As we are heading towards November’s national crisis at the polls, where we decide whether to let these corporate-machinated Republican liars keep their seats, we will be casting our votes on electronic (computer-designed) voting machines manufactured by Republican-dominated (Diebold) corporations. Bell-ringing former agents of those corporations are shouting to us from the media wilderness that they have been asked by Republican politicians how to rig the machines to control the outcome of the election and they have confessed the fact that the machines can be rigged to do just that. All of us who can read and reason know that the only way to prevent another Florida or Ohio-type tainted election outcome is to resort to paper ballots, and yet we also know that the only way this could happen is for Congress and/or State Legislatures controlled by Republicans to volunteer to give up that unfair advantage (plan for another corrupt election), which is the equivalent of putting a pulled tooth under an Afghani’s pillow in a Guantanamo prison cell and praying for the tooth fairy.
So why did I suggest at the beginning of this rant that Pogo’s words are true…that “We have met the enemy and he is us”, and that we need to look into the mirror to find the “enslaver” of today’s war-ridden world?
Because it’s true. The enslaver IS the endless stream of part-human and part-robot corporations running all the capital shows in America and the rest of the industrialized globe. And just because we humans have gone to bed with an inhuman creature like a “corporate entity” and symbiotically become co-progenitors of the sinister system of corporate tyranny that has criminally and fraudulently installed an American President—TWICE IN A ROW—and managed to send America into three foreign wars in the past 13 years (Gulf I, Afghanistan, Iraq) to insure its vital flow of self-sustaining energy… are we doomed and bound to find the face of today’s enslaving monster in our mirror?
Yes. And yes.
O.K. I have looked for the enemy and it’s….us. But it’s us genetically mutated into this corporate monster that’s cannibalistically eating its own (by exporting labor and manufacturing industry to foreign enslavers of cheaper labor). And it’s us holding shares in a Wallymart corporation that’s now employing Americans (and illegal aliens) at slave labor rates so they can sell TV’s and toasters made by Chinese slaves…and ultimately it’s us buying the slave-made TV’s and toasters.
It’s us. And we need to quit throwing rocks at each other and start E. Pluibus Unum all over again. All corporations–from Disney to Enron–have evolved into a-morally-corrupt entities. A-moral because they are motivated no longer by the idealistic dreams and desires of their corporate constituents (innovators, shareholders and labor) but by the dollar-skimming, golden-parachuting, self-serving good-old-cyborg boys at the top, who’ll out-source and cannibalize everything from their service departments to your retirement and your children’s health insurance to justify their stock-optioned, expense-account padded, golden-parachuted landings in Maui and Dubai when everything but the brand name is shipped to New Delhi or Peking, including your job, and your family’s equity holdings in the corporations which now have the value of the gas that just exploded from the latest “deflated” corporate balloon…and finally blame it all on an international phenomenon called “the world’s globalizing economy”.
If it’s us, what can we do about it?
First, we can scream for a paper ballot that will at least allow us to accurately count the number of “us” who exist. As a democratic people we exist only because of and at the voting polls.
Second, we can voluntarily, both individually and collectively, work in every way to divest the corporate enslavers of their plenary and unchecked power. Let’s sell our stock in Walmart to protest the sell-out to China and to slave labor in general. Let’s seek out and disassociate ourselves, our consumer patronage and our investment dollars from those corporations conspiring with the genocidal rulers of slave nations such as Sudan and Darfur. I’ll excerpt a paragraph from an earlier essay (“America…the Beautiful Glass House, DW, Sept. 27)…
“The world is faulting America primarily now for failing to intervene in Sudan and Darfur to stop the genocide. Soon the world will recognize the fact that corporate-dominated America is funding that war, furnishing arms and aid to the terrorist regime in Khartoum. Our oil companies are buying oil (giving Dollars in exchange) from those terrorists. Our pension companies (including 33 in N.C.) invest dollars in corporate partnership with those terrorists. These realities alone would justify any nation in the world’s condemnation (and/or invasion) of America under Bush’s bully doctrine that is still the only excuse for our being in Iraq and Afghanistan. .. (read the rest of this at DW, Sept. 27, “America the Beautiful…Glass House”).
When conservative legislators in Delaware conceived of the “corporation”, they created unknowingly the Frankenstein monster that would one day dominate its creators. Eventually, I fear, kill them. Corporations lobbying legislators and orchestrating the messages of the “free” press (e.g. Fox network) have enabled a mental dwarf to obtain the most important office on the globe. He’s a pathetic puppet of petrochemical and military industry who’s probably blind to most of the strings pulling him this way and that. He “thinks” it was his decision to enter Afghanistan and Iraq. He never had a clue. A man with no intellect, no true ideals, no sense or knowledge of history became a tool for corporate fascists. (read the rest of this at … DW March 7, “Neo-Contentions, Including the Neo-Con Corporate Frankenstein Monster”.
What We (the enemy) Can Do to
Change the Things We Blame….
Watch what you buy. Be aware that buying shampoo at Walmart and chilli atWendy’s is contributing to the Republican party and thereby to the war in Iraq. Watch who contributes to the campaigns of those you vote for. Watch out and make sure your voting polls have exit polls that might discourage the Republicans and their voting machine manufacturers from stealing another election. Write and call your Congressmen and demand they pass legislation outlawing (not simply limiting) campaign contributions by any corporation or person lobbying a U.S. Congressman. Both limited contributions and lobbying should be allowed and regulated, but in no case should any entity, corporate or human be permitted to do both. Otherwise what the hell is the meaning of “bribery”? How can it be sanely said that campaign contributions are not bribery when enough contributions (and purchased TV hype) land candidates in the plushest jobs on the planet?
Look in the mirror and admit that the person you’re gazing at is among those who fell asleep at the switch and didn’t do enough to prevent America’s being overrun by the most dangerous enslavers in the history of the world: the all-mighty war-mongering, ocean-polluting, global-warming dollar-driven American Corporations, which if allowed to control the outcome of one more Congressional election could easily ensconce on the U.S. Dollar their new national motto: “In Gold We Trust”.
Dusty, Oct. 7, 2006
War is the only enemy.
And corporations sponsor them.
Posted in America, Corporations, Political | Leave a commentAmerica The Beautiful…Glass House
By: D.W. Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch
By virtue and effect of what it’s doing in Sudan, America is living in a glass house.
I say “glass house” in order to further say we shouldn’t throw stones, and I know we’ll live to regret the fact that G.W. Bush did so in the name of America. He did it with what history will label “The Bush Doctrine”, with which wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were based and are being waged - the extraordinarily fascistic and imperialistic proclamation he and his oily neo-con Zionist cabal contrived to the effect that America has the right to invade any country harboring and aiding terrorists.
I say “glass house” again, because that same stone (preemptive war on nations aiding terrorists) is inevitably going to be hurled our way before long. How so? Because we are harboring and aiding terrorists ourselves—terrorists responsible for killing hundreds of thousands and committing genocide in the process.
The world is faulting America primarily now for failing to intervene in Sudan and Darfur to stop the genocide. Soon the world will recognize the fact that corporate-dominated America is funding that war, furnishing arms and aid to the terrorist regime in Khartoum. Our oil companies are buying oil (giving Dollars in exchange) from those terrorists. Our pension companies (including 33 in N.C.) invest dollars in corporate partnership with those terrorists. These realities alone would justify any nation in the world’s condemnation (and/or invasion) of America under Bush’s bully doctrine that is still the only excuse for our being in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But don’t take my word for it. Start with: http://www.twf.org/News/Y2004/0807-Darfur.html
War is still the only enemy.
Dusty Schoch
Sept. 23, 2006
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One Party Nation?
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How—And Why are Bill Clinton and Laura Bush Partying Together?
By: Dr. Leonard Carrier, D.W. In-House Historian and Philosopher
PREFATORY NOTE (by D.W. Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch) : While we might all prefer Len lower his erudite guns on the theaters of American folly abroad in Iraq, Iran, Mexican border (list must end here for conservation of space), I am appreciative as always of the poignancy with which he paints the now blurring lines of demarcation between Democrats and Republicans where their rubber is hitting our road to the future. Money and power create a powerful club, argues Len and I have to concede it. Dollars may be both the common denominator of the Republican and Democratic elite; or more pertinently, Dollars may be the denominator that renders them both common.
Hell, for that matter, Dollars may be the best way to end the divisive brouhaha over our National Pledge of Allegiance: Just excise the last letter in four-letter “Hell” and implant it in “God” and you get the E Pluribus that will clearly Unam us again….. “In Gold We Trust”! Now, who in hell’s going to debate that? Sorry I’m raising all this “hell” today, but through a speech given by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the U.N. just yesterday, I learned who the devil really is. And he is in fact the same one in charge of and currently spending all America’s gold, and in all the wrong places.
Len, at the risk of aiding the neo-con practice of slamming Clinton as a Democratic effigy, or handy “straw man”, is making informed comment here on Laura Bush’s jumping on board and stage to strut her eleemosynary stuff in token support of Clinton’s Global Initiative which is a follow-up to the 2005 event that brought $2.5 billion in pledges to help solve challenges such as the HIV infection in Africa.
The first lady’s speech next Wednesday (Sept. 27, 06) will cover topics such as literacy and education, AIDS and women’s rights that she has highlighted in her travels. The whole story is available on line at the following link:
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0906/361089.html
Now, the story thru Len’s keen lens . . .
Is this bizarre? Bill Clinton and Laura Bush are now teaming up for a charitable venture. This is not to knock the goal of raising money for a good cause. By all means, this is something that the former president and the present first lady should be doing. But why do it together? It was also a bit strange for Clinton and Bush Sr. to act like chums for their tsunami rescue mission. That was another good cause, but why couldn’t the Democrats raise their own money and let the Republicans raise theirs? They probably could have had a contest to see who raised more. But then there wouldn’t have been the photo-ops of the two ex-presidents and former adversaries acting like buddies. Those warm, fuzzy moments played so well in the media. They told us that all was forgiven, and that they were now great friends.
Pardon me for being cynical, but this latest melding of Democrat and Republican power people makes me suspect that there’s no real difference in who gets to run the show. That suspicion was first planted when Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox television station regularly blasts progressive thinking, hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. It seems to me that the big-name politicians in either party just take turns running with the same baton. In 2008, will it be Hillary’s turn, she of the ever-changing mind? It would not surprise me to see Bill nodding benignly behind the scenes, while his wife pardons “W” for his sins in wasting more than 3,000 American lives waging a criminal war while he was president—a war that Hillary voted for and still won’t emphatically denounce. The celebrities change places at the table, but the party seems to go on; and the American people keep getting stuck with the bill. The multi-millionaires who run the country contribute to both parties, and so regardless of who is elected they get to do what they want and pay their media flacks to say what they want them to say. I ask myself when the American people are going to realize that they don’t really have a voice anymore. When are they going to start electing people who care about their country and not about being seen glad-handing at posh fund-raisers and celebrity events? The cynic in me says, “Probably never.”
I’m cynical about the electorate because when gasoline prices go down, Bush’s popularity goes up, as if that could possibly make him a better president. I’m betting that those prices will be back below $2.00 a gallon before November 7. It would be sad to think that we’re going down the tubes of history because we really didn’t care about defending our Constitution and its values, just so long as we could keep on driving our SUVs. Plato had Socrates say that voting by ballot was no better than voting by lottery, because the electorate could be swayed by empty rhetoric and high-flown phrases. I keep hoping that Socrates was wrong, but with big media teaming with big business and big celebrity to keep the party going, the odds seem stacked against it.
Leonard Carrier
Posted in America, Corporations, Political | Leave a comment|
Mr Chairman, I rise to speak
in favor of the Revolution… |
I have jumped feet first back into the political fray. I have done this grassroots politics thing before and now find myself leading a group whose name includes “action”, so I can’t be still.
I was active when Ronald (and Nancy) Reagan served as president. The reality of “supply-side economics” meant very little “trickled down” to the common folk. The war on the poor was in full swing and still rages today. Reagan broke the PATCO [Professional Air Traffic Controllers] union in July 1981 — a slap labor hadn’t had in almost 50 years — and the people began to lose their voice. The “bosses” embedded divides and factions that, 25 years later, are chasms between those WITH and those withOUT. Our differences — money, skin tone, status, ideology, political leaning, spirituality, power — are pushed at us like evil street drugs so we cannot coexist as the wonderful “stone soup” that makes
US America.
Enter Bush II and a new level of audacity; an administration steals an election and is blatantly handed the White House. The usurpers verbally beat their critics and call them crybabies. Mainstream media, bought up and sold out to the controlling interests of the administration, have skewed what is regarded as important news: no one discussed the economy or the (s)election or dishonesty. “Hanging chad” was vilified, so the people stopped speaking out.
When the war drums began beating, we took to the streets. We didn’t want to wage war on the Iraqi people. The UN wanted us to wait 30 days, but the administration said we couldn’t — they were gonna “git” us if we didn’t “gitRdone” first. It is now obvious to most of the nation that we could have waited those 30 days, but the Bush Administration had already planned to start this war and profit from it.
People lose jobs while corporate fat cats continue to profit. Yet WE allowed NAFTA and CAFTA to happen. Have we ever held our representatives accountable, really? Trails of corruption and deceit accompany this administration, trickling down to others in the Grand Oil Party, but they still have the power. No Orange Revolution here.
There is plenty to be upset about: comprehensive health care (how many people don’t get any because they can’t afford the doctor visit, diagnosis or treatment?); job loss; housing costs; inflation and the cost of fuel. The government Beast, deaf and blind to environmental destruction, and with palms greased by the gas and coal industries, has a snail’s pace of research and development into sustainable energy. Religious fundamentalism has taken hold in this country like the Taliban elsewhere, driving further divides based on silly things that don’t really matter and on important rights that have no business being legislated or restricted. There is no freedom FROM religion.
It is time to feed, house and employ our people! It is outrageous that we promote democracy and civil rights elsewhere when our own people are hungry and homeless. I would have made that statement before Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, but now I underscore it. Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of the Revolution, but ONLY if it is bloodless. I’m afraid, however, that the hate and fear mongering of the last five years have made that impossible.
For now, we must exercise our duty and VOTE. Register to vote, get your neighbors and friends to register by October 13, and then vote this fall. Early voting (October 19 – November 4) makes it easy. Call for a ride if you need one. There are no excuses for complacency. We have settled for too long.
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Kirby Heard is Chair of the High Point Democrats in Action, a non-profit social change group promoting full participation in democracy. Visit www.highpointdems.org.
Kirby Heard
Posted in America, Immigration, Political | Leave a commentIllegal Mexican Aliens…
A Common Sense View
Mi Casa es tu casa, pero..
Mi patria ???
[Editorial Note: B.E.A. member and DW contributor, Charlie Crotts, a native High Pointer, artist, printer and Viet Nam veteran forwards us this uncommonly-sensible take on illegal Mexican Immigration. The article is a letter to an unknown editor by an unknown citizen of the U.S.
We are all familiar with the friendly expression Americans have adopted from their Mexican amigo’s who entered the country legally: “Mi casa es tu casa” (translated: “My House is Your House”). It’s got a warm and fuzzy ring to it, I think we’d all agree. This is the way we’d all like to feel about all our neighbors, and the way we’d like them to feel about us, I’m sure.
The writer asks, however, two important related questions: (1) Is the reverse true? That is to say, what would you feel like if your neighbor walked up to your door, walks in without knocking and said: “Your House is My House”? and, much more importantly (2) When someone enters your country without knocking (legally immigrating) and says… Mipatria ! , what should our reaction be? I think the “unknown” op/ed writer makes a poignant point here. Thanks, Charlie for the contribution.
Dusty Schoch (DW foreign policy Editor)]
Mi patria ???
I have NOTHING against anyone from other countries immigrating to the United States legally. Having said that….
Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration. Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely. Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests.
Let’s say I break into your house. Let’s say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave. But I say, “I’ve made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors; I’ve done all the things you don’t like to do. I’m hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).”
According to the protesters, not only must you let me stay, you must add me to your family’s insurance plan, educate my kids, and provide other benefits to me and to my family (my husband will do your yard work because he too is hard-working and honest, except for that breaking in part).
If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my right to be there. It’s only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I’m just trying to better myself. I’m hard-working and honest, um, except for well, you know.
And what a deal it is for me!! I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of selfishness, prejudice and being an anti-house intruder.
Oh yeah, and I want you to learn my language so you can communicate with me.
Why can’t people see how ridiculous this is?! Only in America….if you agree, pass it on (in English). Share it, if you see the value of it as a good analogy. If not, blow it off along with your future Social Security funds.
“MY HOUSE” IS “TU CASA”
AN ADDENDUM ON THE ISSUE OF A COUNTRY WITH A LANGUAGE BARRIER
By: Michael Kevin Murphy
Dear Dusty and DW friends:
The older I become, the more convinced I am that language — specifically, a common language — is the single most unifying attribute of a country and is far and away ahead of whatever is in second place: religion, commonly accepted form of government, political persuasion … whatever.
One can look across the planet and point to any of a number of countries where there is no common language and you’ll find one or more pieces of evidence of civil unrest — even chaos, political instability, weak public institutions; the list goes on and on.
And we have to look no further than our neighbor to the north for evidence of that. Canada is blessed with abundant natural resources, a population that was settled largely by industrious European stock during the same period that the U.S. was peopled with the same kind stock. Yet Canada is riven by political and cultural strife. Is it a country with formal Anglo-Saxon based institutions but its two languages, French and English, have left its people with two distinct countries and cultures nesting inside a single border. Canadians are 25% French extraction and 35% British, and in total population are a bit more than 10% the size of the U.S. but, geopolitically, why did Canada lag so much behind over the years on so many indicies? I believe that lack of a common language accounts for much of that.
*Mr. Michael Kevin Murphy is an attorney in Virginia, and a B.E.A. correspondent of long standing. Mike served with the U.S. Army in Viet Nam during the period which straddled the 1968 Tet Offensive. He was commanding officer of an infantry rifle company in the Mecong River delta and his badges and decorations include the U. S. Parachutist Badge, the U.S. Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Vietnam Ranger Badge (Biet Dong Quan), the U.S. Bronze Star Medal, thirteen Air Medals, and the Vietnam Gallantry Cross.
Posted in Immigration, Political | Leave a commentWMD’S – SADDAM’S VS. GEORGE’S
Dear Wall Street Journal Editors:
Your anonymous editor’s August 23rd op/ed capped “Saddam’s WMD” sets a new standard for neo-con ditto-headedness in its justifying U.S. pre-emptive war against Iraq on the “global hygiene”-high moral grounds of Saddam’s (1) megalomania (2) invasion of Kuwait (3) gassing his own people (4) tossing out UN weapons inspectors (5) harboring terrorists (!) (6) retaining infrastructure for making WMD’s and (7) hating America.
Did Cheney pen and pass you this consummate hypocrisy or did your nameless editor actually miss the point that he was condemning a tiny tea pot on behalf of a titanic kettle for WMD blackness?
Forget the ex-post facto, bootstraps tactic of invading Iraq for declared purposes and, failing therein (finding WMD’s and 9/11 complicity), reflexively focusing on the hypocrisies in the above “magnificent seven”: (1) Bush as a megalomaniac makes Saddam appear both clean shaven and lobotomized. (2) Preemptive invasions of Afghanistan + Iraq exceed invasion of Kuwait by 100%. (3) (THE BIGGIE) – Bush’s military hasn’t gassed anyone–yes; but he’s done infinitely worse, quantitatively and qualitatively: He has unleashed and exploded to toxic and ambient dust over 130 tons of depleted uranium with our military’s Abrams, Bradley and A-10 Warthog war machines. The dust from these weapons, once inhaled, accounts for our friendly-fired (U.S.) casualties in the 1991 Gulf War and untold Iraqi innocents and dying soldiers (both sides) returning from the awful shock and smoke of our 2003 Iraq invasion.
Radioactive sickness is infinitely more “sickening” than “gas” weapons, and the dust, 60 percent as lethal as natural uranium, will stay there sickening and killing people for 9 billion years. (4) Bush didn’t toss out UN inspectors, he gave them an option of staying away or dying. (5) Which is worse…harboring terrorists or being terrorists? I’d say invading a country on false pretenses and killing 20,000 to 45,000 innocents in the process, and thereafter deploying DU poisons and killing and sickening countless more qualifies Bush for that label. (7) The U.S. retains more WMD infrastructure than all nations of the world combined, from plutonium warheads to germ warfare; they all use us as either a model or direct source for WMD’s. (8) Hating everyone who opposes American (PNAC) foreign policy goes without question in Bush’s roadmap to Middle Eastern peace.
I really can’t fault the WSJ Editor who withheld his by-line for this peerless exercise in hyperbolic hypocrisy.
Dusty Schoch
High Point, N.C.
August 23rd, 2006
Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch
607 Overbrook Drive (parcels)
P.O. Box 5743 (letters; insured parcels)
High Point, NC 27262
Phone: (336) 887 3119
Fax: (336) 887 1227
E-Mail: [email protected]
Cell: (336) 847 4777
Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch is an attorney, inventor and writer (novels, essays, screenplays) living in High Point. BA (English) degree, UNC Chapel Hill, JD (law) U. of Ala., Tuscaloosa. Dusty is founder and scribe of the B.E.A. (“Barristers et al”) a N.C.-based, politically-independent foreign policy think tank. He is also co-editor (foreign policy) of Democratswrite.com through the contact link of which readers are invited to correspond with him.
Posted in Bush, Bush Lies, Political, War, War On Terrorism | Leave a comment|
The Madness of King George England’s George III and America’s “W” The Perils of History’s Parallels By: Dr. Leonard Carrier, I.H.H.P DW”s In-House Historian and Philosopher King George III of England suffered his first attack of Porphyria in 1765. This is a disease resulting from an insufficient supply of hemoglobin. In 1766, an enraged King George, in an attempt to punish the American colonies for repealing his Stamp Act, pushed through the Townshend Acts, which raised taxes on many staples, including tea. This resulted in the Boston Tea Party and afterwards the American Revolution. Porphyria is a debilitating disease that interrupts nerve impulses to the brain, causing psychiatric symptoms, epileptic convulsions, and finally death. King George suffered all of these reverses, becoming more and more deranged, until he finally died at age 82. His fits of rage directed at the colonists’ attempts at self-rule, and his intransigence in negotiating with them, were probably some of the consequences of his disease. So it is likely that King George’s madness played a large part in causing the American Revolution and the resultant loss of his colonies, leaving England much the poorer for it in both riches and power. We do not have to use much imagination to see striking parallels between King George III and our own version of a king, President George W. Bush. According to intimates, our King George is also prone to fits of rage. No one wants to bring him bad news for fear that he will explode. His intransigence shows itself in his refusal even to talk with the leaders of Iran, Syria, or North Korea. He asserts that Israel won the war over Hezbollah in Lebanon, even though Israeli leaders are saying that Hezbollah is stronger than ever. He insists that we have got to “stay the course” in Iraq, even though he hasn’t clearly said what that course is; and he declares that our troops will remain as an occupation force for as long as he is president. He announces that he will continue warrantless wiretapping of Americans, even though a Federal judge ruled that it was against the law. Even with laws that he signs, he issues “signing statements,” asserting that he reserves the right not to follow these laws. He declares that the only way to support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is to support his “war on terror,” and he says that if we are not with him in this war, then we are, in effect, supporting the terrorists. With our King George, there is no room for reasoned dissent. We can now imagine how colonial governors, and his own Parliament, felt when they tried to reason with King George III. Such fits of anger, such stubbornness, such examples of black-and-white thinking, such imperious disregard for the Constitution (of which he reportedly said was just “a piece of paper”), such callous disdain for all those who disagree with him, might just be attributed to sheer bone headedness on the part of a child of privilege who never had to work a day in his life, a bully boy who was always allowed to get his way—including wriggling free of his commitment to the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War because he was apparently afraid to fly F-102s. Up until recently that was my own take on why George W. Bush behaves the way he does. Now I’m not so sure, because there are other things about his behavior that can’t be explained in so simple a fashion. First, there is his inability to speak a grammatical sentence unless he is reading it off the teleprompter. Next, there is his tendency to make jokes about things that are not funny; for instance, pretending to look for weapons of mass destruction in his own office. There is also his habit of blinking rapidly when he is nervous and contorting his face when he tries to think of what to say. He wasn’t always that way. When he was running for governor of Texas he spoke fluently and without notes. He was quick-witted and was never at a loss for what to say. He possessed excellent coordination than enabled him to fly jet planes. He was a different man from what he is today; and since he has just turned 60, such a striking change in facial appearance and behavior cannot simply be attributed to age. George III was 47 when he suffered his first attack of Porphyria, and he was George Bush’s present age three years into the Revolutionary War, when he was really losing his marbles. We are now three years into the war in Iraq, and it is now a good possibility that our King George is losing his marbles, too. I do not raise this possibility lightly. I would prefer to be angry with George W. Bush for what he has done to our country, even to the point of hatred. But if he is really suffering from a disease, then he is more an object of pity, rather than hate. I don’t really feel like pitying George Bush; I’d rather hate him. But there is mounting evidence that he suffers from what a medical doctor recently described in a letter to the Atlantic magazine. According to this letter, Bush suffers from “presenile dementia.” It is most likely caused by a series of “transient ischemic attacks” (TIAs), or several mini-strokes. These are usually caused by “atrial fibrillation,” (AF), or irregular heartbeat; which, in turn, is caused by hyperthyroidism, or Graves disease, a condition suffered by Bush’s father and mother. Bush’s recent strange behavior—falling off bicycles, giving German Chancellor Angela Merkel an uninvited neck massage–can simply be explained by tracing it back to a hereditary condition, most likely aggravated by Bush’s alcohol use (and probably cocaine, as well) when he was much younger. There is also the visual evidence presented by Democratswrite foreign policy editor, Dusty Schoch, that Bush wears a defibrillator to keep from having AF, and thus to prevent more TIAs. So when the question arises whether I feel safer now than I did before 9/11, my answer has got to be a definite, “No.” I felt safer before I entertained the possibility that my president might be a madman. Before that, I imagined that his advisors would keep him from making colossal mistakes that would lead us into World War III. That hopeful thought was clouded over when Bush overruled Condoleezza Rice’s attempts to get an early cease fire in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Now all that comes to mind when I think about our president is mad King George III, simultaneously losing his mind as he loses his empire.
Leonard Carrier |
PRETZELS AND PRESIDENTIAL PRETENTIONS
BUSH’S “STUPIDITY” EXPLAINED…
HE AIN’T DUMB….HE’S DEMENTED
(DOT) “Fainting spells”
(DOT) “Choking on Pretzels”
(DOT) Saying Really Dumb things
(DOT) Choking German Chancellors”
(DOT) Falling on his Bicycle
CONNECT THE DOTS AND IT SPELLS “PRE-SENILE DEMENTIA”
Photographs and Videos Now Prove It-
HERE’S THE SCOOP:
There is now compelling evidence indicating that President Bush suffers from seriously-disabling pre-senile dementia secondary to T.I.A.’s (multiple mini-strokes or “transient ischemic attacks”) secondary to “atrial fibrillation” , secondary to hyperthyroidism, and that he (constantly) wears a machine to “defib” his diseased heart in emergencies, and has hidden this life and national-security-threatening condition from us as just another one of his “BIG LIES”….
By: Dusty Schoch , DW Foreign Policy Editor
Ever see that great Kevin Klein movie (“Dave”) about the guy (named “Dave” ) who looked so much like the president that when the president had a stroke and lay in a coma, his crafty White House staff were able to pawn Dave off as the real president? Well, you might say that today life is imitating art, because that’s essentially what’s happening in America, except in this case it’s the president impersonating the president.
Our President, George W. Bush is not at all the man he once was, but he’s pretending nothing is wrong. We keep hearing rumors of “psychological” abnormalities presumably the result of stress related to wars in the Middle East and perhaps the White House boudoir, which is now reportedly not co-occupied. We hear George and Laura are having problems and no longer sleep together. Books are piling up replete with his verbal gaffes and unending malapropisms. Rumors abound that he has fallen off the wagon and is drinking and doing cocaine again as in the past. His aides every day brief one another as to the “weather” around the Chief Executive, collaborating to warn one another as to whether GW is having a lucid interval or a regular…demented day.
He no longer “jogs” but rides a bicycle and crashes it nearly every time. He’s “acting out” in weirdly inappropriate ways, such as suddenly appearing behind the female German Chancellor and mock choking her. He did a similar thing in scaring the hell out of a female student musician in a marching band recently parading before a State event in Germany. The German TV media covered and released it, but American media are keeping the lid on this political pandora’s box, and clearly for good reason… after all, all that’s at stake is the …FATE OF THE FREE WORLD.
If all this smacks to you of liberal “conspiracy theory”- that is, an incumbent administration’s concealing from the public medical realities that might undermine confidence in their chief executive, especially in time of war, please remember your history, and the fact that F.D.R.’s staff and a sympathetic wartime media kept the majority of the American nation ignorant of the fact that its paralytic president couldn’t stand, walk, or eventually breathe without assistance, and his mortally-degraded state of cardiovascular health was discovered by most of us in either his obituary or at Truman’s swearing in.
I have decided NOT to do all the research for you about this , except to review and point out what you have already seen, and then refer you to the on-line resource material you will want and need to read, view and hear, that will make it all too frighteningly clear to you that we have an imbecile running our country…and why.
Why is there such diversity of opinion on whether this guy is smart or stupid? Because both arguments are true. It’s all , as Einstein would counsel us, “relative.” Relative to TIME. Ten years ago, when GW Bush was about 50, he was of very sound mind. A little “hyper” like his dad maybe, because both suffer from the same metabolic disorder—hyperthyroidism (“Graves disease”) although only one of them reputedly dosed himself regularly with cocaine and alcohol.
This disease is not uncommon, and about 1 in 100 have it to one extent or another. But it sometimes becomes life-threatening and disabling, and with Bush, it apparently has. Often, Graves can cause the upper chambers of the heart to beat irregularly and this arrhythmia (called “atrial fibrillation” or “AF”) can cause small mini strokes (transient ischemic attacks–“T.I.A.’s”) and fainting spells because of the sudden loss of blood pressure.
Those who suffer from AF, secondary to Graves Disease, often wear a portable defibrillator machine so they can “defib” (establish regular heart rhythm) when they experience an attack. The defibrillator machine, then, is a form and system of very necessary life support for the disease sufferer.
George Bush wears one of these machines, and that’s the bulge in his clothing that we have, in the past, mistaken for 2-way radio equipment we knew he needed (whether he wore it or not) to keep his thoughts and words straight in debate or public address forums. How naïve we were to think that. But, then again, we were on the right track. We all know, as does his staff, that every time he speaks in public he blunders in one form or another. He can no longer articulate and string together 3 sentences that have any cohesive continuity. Last week, without batting an eye, he publicly rued the fact that , due to rising health (liability insurance) costs, OB/GYN doctors were “no longer free to perform love on their patients.”
Ladies and gents and fellow citizens, our President has lost it. He is brain damaged and no one in authority is being permitted to talk about it. And talk about it we’d better, because brain degeneration due to T.I.A.’s does not get any better, and while our President is demented and disabled because of it, there are certainly others who will be behind his desk pulling his, and our strings.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at, examine and research the evidence yourself. I’ll give it to you in two computer-linked bundles. The first is a narrated video comparison of GW’s verbal skills ten years ago and now. Ten years ago, no one (including me) would dispute that he was one very-glib and verbally-gifted thinker and debater. Today he can’t put two sentences together and is constantly making jokes about “not being an intellectual”, and “not being able to spell”, etc., all compensatory methods of glossing over what he clearly knows to be the true case….he’s lost it.
Today, the chief executive of the world’s most powerful nuclear power probably has the intellectual quotient and discretion of a 10-year old child. A ten-year old child in the most powerful office in the world. It is an absolutely terrifying scenario. But, again, don’t take my word for it; just hit on this link and listen to the man himself…first ten years ago debating educational issues in the Governor’s race in Texas, and now…trying to remember from one sentence to the next what he has just said.
BUSH 10 YEARS AGO AND NOW…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw4Bhmm22xo
(If link above fails, copy and paste it for on-line video).
THE DISORDER, AGAIN IS “AF”
Before you hit the next link (to the defib machine he wears), read this excerpt from the same website on Atrial Fibrillation:
ATRIAL FIBRILLATION (AF)
In the January 2002 pretzel-choking episode, according to President Bush, the period of unconsciousness was brief — a few seconds. When fainting begins and ends suddenly, the cause of fainting usually is not what his doctors reported (vaso-vagal syncope) but instead is an abnormal heart rhythm such as atrial fibrillation (AF). Chronic AF is consistent with Mr. Bush’s requirement for constant monitoring and immediate access to defibrillation. Atrial fibrillation can lead to disastrous consequences if the patient is capable of sustaining a very rapid preexcited ventricular response with conduction over the accessory pathway. The rapid heart rate can produce syncope (fainting); or, more important, AF may cause ventricular fibrillation and sudden cardiac death. The LifeVest the president wears terminates ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia (overspeed) to prevent sudden cardiac death. This may be the reason the president wore the device during the debates, even though he risked exposing his vulnerability, especially if the device alarm sounded.
According to the Framingham Offspring study of AF, a person whose parent had AF is 50 percent more likely to have it than the general population. President Bush’s father had it during his presidency. While jogging at Camp David on a Saturday afternoon (May 4, 1991), Bush Sr developed shortness of breath, chest tightness, and a general feeling of fatigue. A White House physician discovered Bush had a rapid irregular heartbeat, ultimately diagnosed as atrial fibrillation caused by Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid).
NOW HIT THIS LINK TO REMOVE ALL DOUBTS…
http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2004/12/35839.php
(If link doesn’t work, copy and paste this … and be patient while the photos are loading, as this site is likely being hit from all over the world as we come out of the ether and this story unfolds.)
http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2004/12/35839.php
Two weeks ago, I wrote (along with Professor Leonard Carrier) an article listing the reasons why “I hate George Bush.” The revelations I have since received regarding his medical status, that is—his obvious dementia , have altered my attitude toward his previous and present irrational conduct in the realms of foreign and domestic policy.
It was my previous view that GW Bush bore the moral responsibility for having permitted corporate and Zionist fundamental neo-cons to lead him and us into our catastrophically ill-advised wars of pre-emptive aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Lebanon (through our carte-blanch allegiance to and alliance with Zionist Israel and the oil industry). I now realize that GW Bush is arguably innocent morally, because he’s evidently incompetent mentally. You can’t really blame a man with the intellectual capacity of a ten-year old for being misled by his mentally normal (if morally aberrant) adult entourage, and political party.
Having said that, and viewing Bush morally from his relatively-impaired present IQ level, I’ll still think and say that when our President and his physicians claim he is enjoying “perfect health”, they are both, regardless of mental age, reprehensible liars.
But moral issues aside, we are still confronted by the same nightmare scenario dramatized in the movie “Dave”. There is presently a president impersonating our former President, George W. Bush. And that person is the new, and dangerously-demented, George W. Bush.
So, help us, God.
War is the only enemy, but Ignorance, it’s principal Lieutenant is equally
dangerous.
Dusty Schoch
Posted in Bush, Bush Lies, Political | Leave a comment
TOOTHPASTE AND TERRORISM…
Can a History Lesson Show Us How They Are
Related?
By this time, we have all read… and cringed at headlines informing us that the Twin Tower airborne terrorists of bin Laden’s al Qaeda are at it again. Tony B and GWB will be taking credit for “saving us” from the Islamic Terrorists who were thwarted in their recent attempt to smuggle explosives aboard commercial airlines concealed in innocuous cosmetic containers. Which means, we fearful passengers will now be flying our unfriendly skies without shampoo, deodorant or… toothpaste.
What’s it all about, Alfie?
In this topsy-turvey world, could it be that what appears up is really down, and those who appear to be our “saviors” are actually the source of our collective torment and “code orange” endangerment?
Dr. Leonard Carrier, DW’s In-House Philosopher and Historian
Leads our Editorial Commentaries on Our “Code Orange”
Fear of Reprised Al Qaeda Terrorism.
Are These “I.C.B.M.’s” (InterContinental Ballistic Muslims)
The ones to fear, or is it rather the Statesmen whose Foreign Policy Incites them…
Or is it …both?
Can History Repeat Itself?
By: Len Carrier
Here’s a quotation to ponder:
“…we can see at work such internal psychological components as xenophobia, racism, and violence, interacting with such external social components as a rigid hierarchical social structure, a strong central power, intolerance of diversity (religious, racial, ethnic, sexual, or political), built-in mechanisms of violence to handle dissenters, regular use of violence to enforce laws, and a low regard for civil liberties.”
Can you guess the subject matter? The words appear on p. 227 of a book titled, Why People Believe Weird Things, written by Michael Shermer (2002). If you guessed that Shermer is talking about the Bush administration’s attitude about, and treatment of, Middle East Muslims, you would be wrong. Shermer is talking about the forces behind what happened when the Nazis took power in 1933, “…and began passing legislation against Jews, to Kristallnacht and other acts of violence against Jews, to the deportation of Jews to ghettos and labor camps, to the extermination of Jews in labor and death camps….”
Fast forward to the 21st century. Jews are no longer proper scapegoats for the failures of our authoritarian government, nor can world-communism be blamed for its inadequacies. The new bete noir is “Islamo-fascism.” This is the term now used by our kingly president and his court to whip public opinion to a frenzy before the November elections. Aided by right-wing fundamentalist Christians who call Islam “an evil religion,” supported by war-mongering government officials who never served a day of military service, and fueled by corporations that profit from war, we have an government that desperately needs a raison d’etre. All of Shermer’s descriptions of the Nazi mentality can be used to explain our treatment of Muslims under our occupation in the faraway Middle East, and in the not-so-far-away reaches of Guantanamo Bay. But, of course, it could never happen here. Or could it?
Thomas Jefferson said that every so often there should be a revolution, when the blood of patriots and tyrants needs spilling to nourish the tree of liberty. I’d like to think that he was speaking metaphorically, and that the tyrants are Bush and Cheney and their dissembling minions; the patriots are the ones who speak out against the tyranny; and the blood is the crop of new statesmen and stateswomen who will lead our Republic out of the desert and back to its constitutional principles. The revolution is completed, of course, after we’ve counted the all the ballots, and the election shows that we’ve thrown the rascals out.
Dusty (DW Foreign Policy Editor) opines:
Len, your words reminded me of what Bob Herbert wrote in the NY times only 90 days ago… I’ll excerpt some consonant language and resume my reflections afterwards…
NY TIMES:
May 15, 2006
OP-ED COLUMNIST
America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
“In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public’s fear is this president’s most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.
If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known…”
Dusty Concludes….
Len, I continue to appreciate your cautious optimism and balanced moderation, and concede there appears now some basis for it. Patriots may in fact not be totally powerless even in today’s world as we face the juggernaut power of combined corporate and fundamentalist distortion of Constitution, statute and verse for the service of the munitions, energy and power brokers of the world united in the now critically-massed core of Middle Eastern war. Wasn’t a turncoat hawkish neo-con Democrat in Connecticut just defeated by patriots including blog-warriors like Move-On.org and us… the key-tapping warriors of Democratswrite.com? An incumbent war-monger was defeated even as Middle-Eastern missiles (and Twin Tower terrorists) were flying!
But, while there is room for hope, let’s not forget that while we’re hoping, praying and tapping, we must continue to row towards shore. The point I would make is the point I made immediately after the Twin Towers were toppled on 9/11/01—we need to keep our eye on what’s actually happening, because, as in Orwell’s “1984”, we read one man presage a time which I submit has arrived, when there is a Big Brother combination of government and politically-controlled media sufficiently powerful and determined to make black appear white…and yes, by analogy, act as terrorists and yet cause us, through fear and constant utterance of the “BIG LIES” make innocents appear as though they are enemy…by assigning to them the same nature and name… “ TERRORIST’.
On 9/11/01, without doubt, Islamic terrorists bombed NY’s Twin Towers with our own airplanes. But, from the viewpoint of the terrorists themselves, ask yourselves whom they were bombing and burning? The answer is chilling but instantly clear and certain: “Western Terrorists”. They killed 3,000 of us because, in their hearts and minds, (AND IN OUR OWN HISTORY BOOKS) we, in alliance with Israel, since 1948, had mercilessly killed tens of thousands of them, and each time, using weapons of mass destruction: F-16’s (well, after the French fighters were either shot down or retired by 1950) tanks, smart bombs, missiles… good-old-innovatively-trustworthy western technological war machines. All with our blessings—and names—one them.
For the whole BALANCING STORY of who were “terrorists” and who were warriors seeking reprisals for former acts of terrorism, please be referred to my 9/11/o1 nationally-archived article, or hit the “articles” link on this website and scroll down to the July 25, 2005 article entitled “Stand Behind Me, America and Take Responsibility”…
So far, no one has pointed out to these idiot Islamic terrorists the perfect way they are playing into the hands of their arch enemies. Just as America is getting fed up with the war in Iraq, to the point they are voting out hawks even in the Democratic Party, they are, with perfect timing, fulfilling the Islamic witch-hunting prophesies of Wolfowitz, Wurmser, Cheney, Bush, Kristol, Perle, and yes- Lieberman and the rest of the neo-cons who warned us …
FIVE YEARS AGO….KEEP REMEMBERING THAT….FIVE YEARS AGO… FIVE YEARS AGO….
….That they “the terrorists” ….would DO IT AGAIN….UNLESS WE GOT THEM FIRST….
On this idiotic pretext our fascist regime in combination with its fatherland (England) demonized Afghanistan and Iraq as a pretext for war and waged it. After killing between 20,000 and 60,000 innocent Islamics in both countries (the numbers are subject to conjecture and dispute because our fascist, totalitarian government forbids or otherwise prevents the reporting of an accurate tallying of the civilian dead) it has the temerity to claim that the recently-thwarted assaults on us by would-be Islamic terrorists are confirmation of what Bush warned us of five years ago. Anybody ever heard the phrase “ordaining one’s own prophesy”? As I’ve said before, when Hitler had conquered and killed enough Frenchmen, those who rose up in protest and started rolling grenades under their lorry’s, dinner tables and beds were called “patriots”, or “resistance”. When Iraqi’s act in similar fashion against the American invaders of their sovereign country, they’re called “insurgents” and, of course, more opportunistically… “terrorists”.
That, my friends, is black doing its damnedest to paint itself white. My only question is, Mr. bin Laden, what the hell took you so long? Are those rumored stories of your terminal kidney disease and dialysis true?
Please don’t get me wrong. Please don’t conclude from my writing what I just did that I condone what was certainly a terrorist plot against innocent and good Americans. What I am pointing out is that this terrorist assault which was aborted with the assistance of Bush foreign policy was clearly caused by Bush foreign policy. Those travesties we have helped our Israeli allies commit for the past half century with their “eye for a lash” policy of Palestinian reprisals, we have ourselves…preemptively and independently more than doubled in the eyes and hearts of Islamics whose kin we have slain under false pretext in Iraq and Afghanistan and now (through military alliance and aid) in Lebanon.
And the lessons from history that we should be studying at this point? Easy. The exact ones Dr. Carrier and Bob Herbert teach: We are being manipulated by fear to believe in the biggest of all lies. Just as it was done in Nazi Germany. Only the names of the scapegoat villains have been changed. The fear is exactly the same.
The biggest of all lies is that dastardly declaration that one nation has the moral reason and right to launch and wage preemptive war against another sovereign nation where there is no evidence that such nation or its peoples are in the imminent process of launching such a war against us.
America used to be the country that opposed other countries which made the cataclysmic mistake of waging preemptive war…the last instance being our defense (albeit one tainted by our need to protect our oil supply) of Kuwait. Now white has clearly transmuted to black. We are the aggressors. We–the people–have gone along with our administration’s aggression because we failed to master the history lessons that Dr. Carrier and Bob Herbert would have us tardily research and remember: Fear can make cowards of us all. When we are sufficiently cowed, we will send our children into battle whether we are right or wrong.
Thanks Len, for leading us judiciously and with circumspection back to the history books. May the shaking of our fearful hands not keep us from our appointed tasks of …grasping them.
And the answer to the prefatory question is, of course- “It’s both.”
War is still the only enemy.
Dusty
August 11, 2006
Posted in Bush Lies, Political, War, War On Terrorism | Leave a comment
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Say Goodbye, Joe…
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Last Tuesday the Democratic voters of Connecticut showed that they were sick of politics as usual. They nominated Ned Lamont, a political newcomer, to run against a Republican challenger for the Senate in November. Joe Lieberman, long-time Senate fixture, is vowing to desert his party and run as an independent next fall. He says that there are things that transcend party politics. What he doesn’t say is that among those things is his enormous hubris and sense of entitlement. Another thing he doesn’t say is that the entrenched Democratic Party leadership doesn’t like newcomers throwing a monkey wrench into their well-oiled machinery. Lieberman gave it all he could, and he even got Bill Clinton to come out of the shadows to try to pump up his failing campaign. But the deal was sealed with a kiss—the one George W. Bush planted on Joe’s cheek after Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address. That kiss showed everyone the love Bush had for his “favorite Democrat,” the one who has steadfastly defended Bush’s war and who schmoozes with Republicans on a daily basis, while devoting ten minutes on weekends visiting black churches to tell them how much he feels their pain. Political pundits blame Joe’s stand on the Iraq war for his loss, and on so-called “left-wing” organizations like MoveOn.org for whipping up on Joe for it. But the reasons for Lieberman’s loss go deeper than that. It started with his vice-presidential run in 2000, when he had to debate Dick Cheney. Joe lost that debate because he came across as soft, and Cheney came across as tough. And that’s what Joe has been during his tenure in office–soft. Whenever a key vote comes up that matters to Republicans, Joe has gone soft. Support for the Iraq war has been his chief flaccidity, but there have been other compromises along the way, as well—his negative votes on universal health care and on quick contraception for rape victims come to mind. Joe talks a good game, but when the chips are down he’s not a fighter. Now he says he will be a fighter–a fighter to keep his soft Senate seat with all its perks. He’d still get his substantial pension but he’d miss the power rush, and, of course, the kisses. Some will join him in that fight, such as former New York mayor Ed Koch, but Koch is part of the old Democratic Party machinery, too. What the Democrats in Connecticut did yesterday was, not only boot out Joe Lieberman, but also tell the old hacks of the Democratic Party that they were tired of them, too, and tired of their slowly morphing into Republicans. Say goodbye, Joe. Leave the stage with some dignity, standing tall and seeming to have some backbone.
Leonard S. Carrier
…AND GOOD RIDDANCE!
(A short back spin drop shot from Dusty)
I was going to write a piece on Lieberman’s gracelessness under fire (being fired by his Democratic constituents—for multiple good causes, and most recently for insulting us with his injury by threatening to run independently), but I think Len has said enough about the long-overdue demise of this “soft” Democrat. Well, almost enough.
I’m still constrained to supplement Len’s rejoiceful sentiments with a celebrating shot of my own…to the effect that his Congressional demise eliminates one very strong Jewish (Zionist) fifth-column Israeli-supporter from our Congress. I think Joe Lieberman is and always has been (remember his Jewish faith professings and posturings in his presidential bid?) a Jew (Zionist ilk) first and a Democratic Congressman second, and a Bush lover a distant third.
As you read, please don’t make the mistake the neo-cons want you to by concluding I am anti-Semitic because I’m anti-Zionist; And, while you’re not making mistakes, please don’t make the even more common one of not knowing that Arabs are Semites too.
Want me to back up my backhand spin of Joe L as “neo-con Zionist” well-rid-of? Check this out: Joe L and John McCain were co-chairmen of the pre-Iraq war-spin machine called “The Committee for Liberation of Iraq”…one of the many political clubs involved in pro-actively launching the Zionist/Israeli program for a new Middle Eastern order (outlined in the Wurmser’s “A Clean Break” 1998). And guess who the chairman of that Committee was?! – None other than Bruce Jackson (former v/p Lockeed Martin) and still director of the PNAC (Project for New American Century…the heart of Zionist Neo-con war-mongering darkness.)
Joe Liberman’s sucking up to Bush was always simply (my opinion) a way of providing the politically Machiavellian illusion of bipartisan support for the Zionist aggressions of Israel which are symbiotically wedded to the neo-con Bush war for oil in Iraq on the short haul and Zionist (Neo-con Christian and Jew) dominion of the Middle East on the long. The most dangerous Republican in the deck of neo-con cards was this turncoat ensconced in the Democratic Party. In the hip military parlance of occupied ,“shocked and awed Iraq”, we can now say “we’ve nabbed the ace of neo-con spades”.
Hope Len doesn’t mind my coat-tailing his astute article with a little of my own spin on this thank-God-gone-for-good Connecticut neo-con. And hope you all also don’t mind my saying at this point, in the spirit Dylan sang in 1962…”Goodbye is too good a word, babe, so I’ll just say ‘fare thee well’ ” …. that where Dylan says “fare thee well” to the Babe in “Don’t Think Twice”, and Len asks Joe to “say goodbye”, I’ll just say to Joe Liberman….Good riddance.
IMPORTANT EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
As an official token and display of our considerable respect for and appreciation of Dr. Leonard Carrier for his previous (and prodigious present) contributions to the Democratswrite.com forum and website, the Editors of DW herewith designate and bestow upon Dr. Carrier the ex-officio honorable, and exclusive title of “Official In-House Historian and Philosopher” (which may be hereafter abbreviated: “Leonard Carrier, Ph.D., I.H.H. & P.” )
Having received an indication from Dr. Carrier that he has graciously agreed to accept such designation and title, I herewith declare before all, on behalf of all of us as Democratswrite.com, It’s a privilege and honor having you aboard, Professor.
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