Now is the time to come to the aid of your country! Our democracy is being bought by the highest bidder. Only an American Spring can take it back!
With Al Gore and Keith Olbermann calling for the same thing that we are calling for, the time is upon us. We are recruiting volunteers to help organize a march in Washington and local satellite rallies all across America. Please use the online form below to sign up. We are going to have a conference call for our local volunteers on Saturday at 3pm ET. We'll send you details by email.
We plan to announce the date on Sunday. CALL TO ACTION: If you do not consent to being governed by corporations or billionaires...If you want to be heard by your government..If you're ready to stand up for America's democracy and your dignity as citizens...Join us. Let's build America's Tahrir Square. We are calling for is a peaceful and decisive demonstration to restore democracy in America. We want to see a million Americans turn up for a march in Washington with satellite rallies in every town and city. As many acknowledge, we are on the cusp of losing our democracy. As everyday Americans, we just don't feel heard by our government or mainstream media. Representation has broken down.
The fall of a great country is upon us. And who would think that Obama would help us get there. Incredibly, it was his admiration of Lincoln that brings us to the precipice. Compromise, the basis of our legislative process, has brought the great Democratic Party to a Faustian bargain with the Tea Party. Read this whole article. Not surprisingly, its from a non-western source, the center of what's left of the international free press, Qatar's Aljazeera.
The irony is that the West brought us empire on a global scale and drew its cultural, economic, and political strength from interconnections with all parts of the world. The cosmopolis of New York, London and Paris - a "brown" not a "white" West - are more appropriate beacons of a West flush with power and confidence in its values than the imaginary purification achieved through concentration camps and closed borders.But just what might be corroding values in the West?Image via Wikipedia
This was one of the questions that animated the Frankfurt School and those who influenced it. They focused on the interaction between capitalism and culture. They noted the ways in which capitalism progressively turned everything into something that could be bought or sold, measuring value only by the bottom line. Slowly but surely such measures came to apply to the cultural values at the core of society. Even time, as Benjamin Franklin told us, is money, a doctrine which horrified Max Weber in his searing indictment of the capitalist mentality as an "iron cage" without "spirit".
Note for example the ways in which the great professional vocations of the West - lawyers, journalists, academics, doctors - have been co-opted and corrupted by bottom line thinking. Money and "efficiency" are the values by which we stand, not law, truth or health. Students are imagined as "customers", citizens as "stakeholders". Professional associations worry about the risk to their bottom line rather than furthering the values they exist to represent. Graduates of elite Western universities, imbued with the learning of our great thinkers, are sent off to corporations like News International. There they learn to shut up, obey, and collaborate in the dark work of exploitation for profit, for which they will be well rewarded, at least financially speaking.
Thanks in part to the grip of corporate power on the media and on political parties, few today in the West can imagine any other politics than those of big money. In the US, and increasingly even in Europe, the income differential between the poor and the wealthy already resembles that of banana republics. The downtrodden are asked to bear the burden of a financial crisis created by bankers. America's wealthy fly their children to summer camp in tax-free private jets amid a real rate of unemployment of over fifteen per cent.
Neoliberalism has only accelerated these processes at the heart of capitalist society. Here is a far more convincing threat to Western values and "social cohesion" than the lunatic fears of fascists. Notably, this is a threat that emanates from within, not without. It is precisely social democratic parties like Norway's Labour Party - Breivik's target - which have sought to contain the corrosive effects of capitalism and ensure the survival of the West's most humane values.
The scary part of Starve the Beast conspiracy threatens now the stability of the economy of the whole western world. Protests about the on-going class warfare on the poor and yes even the middle class have been routine for years. Riots have broken out in Greece and will likely soon come to Spain. Its not inconceivable that we'll see similar riots in Britain and even the US.
People are tired, hungry and too many are unemployed and homeless. The 40 hour week has all but disappeared in the non-union work place in a blizzard of salaried and contract positions. It's only a matter of time before something more serious happens. The results of more serious consequences could be catastrophic.
Starving the beasts is the Republican conspiracy to bankrupt the US government to force downsizing government as well as shrinking the middle class in the interest of lower wages until the US can compete against China and India in manufacturing. Paul claims he said it first, but no, I've been talking about it since 2004. Ronald Reagan sold it to the country during the John Anderson debate. A staffer is credited with coining the term. Grover Norquist convinced Double Think Dubya to implement the strategy big time (Wikipedia)
OK, the beast is starving. Now what? That's the question confronting Republicans. But they're refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.
For readers who don't know what I'm talking about: Ever since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?
The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed "starving the beast" during the Reagan years. The idea -- propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol -- was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government's fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.
And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year's budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and unfunded wars. In addition, the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.
So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Barack Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.
Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse -- in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn't have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.
Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they're adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they're still not willing to do that.
In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: "I don't think anybody's gonna go back now and say, 'Let's abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.' "
What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because "middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes." (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the GOP is the party of the affluent?)
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated but they're not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they're not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan -- and there isn't any plan, except to regain power.
But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: In effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn't enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.
There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I'm talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It’s a war that's poised to topple what's left of American democracy.
...It used to be that citizens in large numbers, mobilized by labor unions or political parties or a single uniting cause, determined the course of American politics. After World War II, a swelling middle class was the most powerful voting bloc, while, in those same decades, the working and middle classes enjoyed comparatively greater economic prosperity than their wealthy counterparts. Kiss all that goodbye. We're now a country run by rich people.
Not surprisingly, political power has a way of following wealth. What that means is: you can't understand how the rich seized control of American politics, and arguably American society, without understanding how a small group of Americans got so much money in the first place.
That story begins in the late 1970s and continues through the Obama years, a period in which American policy has been so skewed toward the rich that we're now living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history. Consider the statistics: 50 years ago, the wealthiest 1% of Americans accounted for one of every 10 dollars of the nation's income; today, it's nearly one in every four. Between 1979 and 2006, the average post-tax household income (including benefits) of the wealthiest 1% increased by 256%; the poorest households saw an increase of 11%; middle class homes, 21%, much of which was due to the arrival of two-job families.
Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its forty-fourth president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.
Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the 'era of colorblindness' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have 'moved beyond' race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
• There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste--not class, caste--permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era."
There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African-Americans during the past thirty years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades--they are currently at historical lows--but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.
The drug war has been brutal--complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers and sweeps of entire neighborhoods--but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African-Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African-American counterparts.
That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African-Americans comprise 80 percent-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.
This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.
Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."
A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.
The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes--sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.
Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've been labeled a felon.
Facing Facts
But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.
The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.
The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s--the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war--nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.
In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time--a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.
Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers--not to mention president of the United States--causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.
Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African-Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African-Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!
When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure--the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.
This is not Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.
More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.
What they haven't seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.
There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.
There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren't among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.
"A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process," said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.
The absence of what many would call justice stands out all the more because past financial crises always had their villains. The depression-era had electricity and railroad magnate Samuel Insull, who partly inspired the movie "Citizen Kane." The savings and loan crisis of the 1980's had banker Charles Keating. Energy giant Enron Corp.'s spectacular collapse offered the late CEO Kenneth Lay, a Texas crony of President George W. Bush.
Yet there's no such poster child for the Great Recession, as today's crisis is now called.
One may yet emerge. The FBI has more than 580 large-scale corporate fraud investigations under way. At least 40 of them are scrutinizing players in sub-prime mortgage lending, which was the first domino to fall and triggered a global financial crisis.
"The investigations are very complex; it's not something that's going to turn overnight," said Bill Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters. "They are labor intensive. They involve a review of records."
It's hard to believe that this country can tolerate this scale of problem without taking action. 45000 died each year due to lack of healthcare. Healthcare debt figures into most every bankruptcy. The time for action is now!
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.
Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.
[..]
The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.
An similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25 percent greater risk of death, according to the Harvard group. The Institute of Medicine later used that data in its 2002 estimate showing about 18,000 people a year died because they lacked coverage.
Part of the increased risk now is due to the growing ranks of the uninsured, Himmelstein said. Roughly 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week, up from 45.7 million in 2007.
Another factor is that there are fewer places for the uninsured to get good care. Public hospitals and clinics are shuttering or scaling back across the country in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and others, he said.
Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
Slavery still exists in this world, in the guise of loan repayment, men women and children become indentured slaves bonded to their owners until the "debt" is paid. Some end up contracted out to serve in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tens of thousands of people are working as bonded labourers in rural Bangladesh, say activists. Even though it is illegal, entire families, including children, are bonded to their employers while they struggle to pay back loans.
"Thousands of children are being forced into bonded labour every day because of poverty and their parents' unemployment," Sumaiya Khair, a human rights activist and researcher into child labour in Dhaka, the capital, told IRIN.
"The biggest tragedy is that it all seems to go unnoticed," she said.
According to Anti-Slavery International, bonded labour - or debt bondage - is probably the least-known form of slavery and yet the most widely used method of enslaving people.
Although proscribed by international law, millions worldwide are affected, particularly in South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Nepal.
"Forced labour is the antithesis of decent work," ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said earlier this year. "It causes untold human suffering and steals from its victims. Modern forced labour can be eradicated, providing there is a sustained commitment by the international community, working together with government, employers, workers and civil society."
The face of slavery
Although rare in urban Bangladesh, bonded labour is common in rural areas.
Unlike in cities where workers are paid a daily or fixed wage, the rural workforce mostly has to make verbal arrangements for wages, which are often manipulated by unscrupulous landlords and loan sharks, known as Mahajan.
Still another way to become bonded is being forced to take out a loan due to a temporary financial crisis, often caused or aggravated by a poor harvest or family emergency.
Once bonded, the labourer is then forced to work long hours for little or no pay, often seven days a week.
Many, mostly women and children, end up as domestic servants, working in conditions that resemble servitude. Many suffer physical abuse, sometimes resulting in death, activists say.
"Domestic servants, especially the women and children, are often exposed to inhuman treatment. Few, if any, are concerned with this matter unless a tragedy like a death by torture becomes public," Nazma Ara Begum, director of the Family Planning Association of Bangladesh (FPAB), an NGO that also works with victims of domestic torture, told IRIN.
Workers drawn to the remote jungle island known as 'Dublar Char' of the Sundarbans region with false promises of lucrative jobs
Legislation
In 1972, Bangladesh ratified both ILO Convention No. 29 (1930), the Forced Labour Convention and ILO Convention No. 105 (1957), the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention.
The law prohibits forced or bonded labour and the Factories Act and Shops and Establishments Act provide for inspection mechanisms to strengthen laws against forced labour.
"Forced labour has been present in Bangladesh for centuries. After the liberation of Bangladesh, it changed its form and has taken the new face of various 'contracts' associated with loans taken by poor farmers from the usurers," Mohamad Abul Quasem, founder of the human rights related NGO Uddyam and member of the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, said.
Human trafficking
Bangladesh prohibits trafficking in persons under the Repression of Women and Children Act of 2000 (amended in 2003); however, there is extensive trafficking in women and children, primarily to India, Pakistan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and within the country, mainly for prostitution and in some instances for labour servitude.
The exact number of women and children trafficked is unknown.
In 2008, the government created a 12-member anti-trafficking investigative unit that complements the existing anti-trafficking police unit.
Last year, 231 victims of trafficking were rescued and 34 offenders convicted, of whom 26 were sentenced to life imprisonment.
In addition, Bangladeshi men and women migrating to the Middle East and elsewhere for work often face bonded labour as a result of fraud or illegal fees demanded by recruitment agents.
"It is regrettable how crooked recruitment agencies often lure young men to their doom with false promises of jobs. The victims are often unable to contact their loved ones and remain stranded in foreign lands without decent payment and [in] inhuman living conditions. This is the modern face of slavery," Motasim Billah, a manpower consultant, told IRIN.
The truly historical perspective of world events begins with the colonial era. It tells the story of the West stealing the world's wealth and creating the so called "third world" calling it "manifest destiny" and the "white man's burden".
One billion are facing starvation due to desertification. In part it is the result of global warming, in part, poor farming techniques. Yet, we in the west have more important news to hear, the President was called a liar by a Senator.
As The New Nation anticipated, the “devastating news†released by the World Food Programme barely even reached the level of “mere ‘news.’†In The New York Times, the WFP report of the reduction in the meager Western efforts to deal with this growing “human catastrophe†merited 150 words on page ten under “World Briefing.†That is not in the least unusual. The United Nations also released an estimate that desertification is endangering the lives of up to a billion people, while announcing World Desertification Day. Its goal, according to the Nigerian newspaper THISDAY, is “to combat desertification and drought worldwide by promoting public awareness and the implementation of conventions dealing with desertification in member countries.†The effort to raise public awareness passed without mention in the national U.S. press. Such neglect is all too common.
It may be instructive to recall that when they landed in what today is Bangladesh, the British invaders were stunned by its wealth and splendor. It was soon on its way to becoming the very symbol of misery, and not by an act of God.
As the fate of Bangladesh illustrates, the terrible food crisis is not just a result of “lack of true concern†in the centers of wealth and power. In large part it results from very definite concerns of global managers: for their own welfare. It is always well to keep in mind Adam Smith’s astute observation about policy formation in England. He recognized that the “principal architects†of policy—in his day the “merchants and manufacturersâ€â€”made sure that their own interests had “been most peculiarly attended to†however “grievous†the effect on others, including the people of England and, far more so, those who were subjected to “the savage injustice of the Europeans,†particularly in conquered India, Smith’s own prime concern in the domains of European conquest. Smith was referring specifically to the mercantilist system, but his observation generalizes, and as such, stands as one of the few solid and enduring principles of both international relations and domestic affairs. It should not, however, be over-generalized. There are interesting cases where state interests, including long-term strategic and economic interests, overwhelm the parochial concerns of the concentrations of economic power that largely shape state policy. Iran and Cuba are instructive cases, but I will have to put these topics aside here.
The food crisis erupted first and most dramatically in Haiti in early 2008. Like Bangladesh, Haiti today is a symbol of misery and despair. And, like Bangladesh, when European explorers arrived, the island was remarkably rich in resources, with a large and flourishing population. It later became the source of much of France’s wealth. I will not run through the sordid history, but the current food crisis can be traced directly to 1915, Woodrow Wilson’s invasion: murderous, brutal, and destructive. Among Wilson’s many crimes was dissolving the Haitian Parliament at gunpoint because it refused to pass “progressive legislation†that would have allowed U.S. businesses to take over Haitian lands. Wilson’s Marines then ran a free election, in which the legislation was passed by 99.9 percent of the 5 percent of the public permitted to vote. All of this comes down through history as “Wilsonian idealism.â€
Michael Steele invoked class warfare in his fear mongering attempt to turn seniors against the working poor who can't afford health care by claiming the seniors will lose Medicare benefits if health care goes to the uninsured. This guy is as dishonest as anyone in the Republican Party.
The healthcare reform debate took a rather remarkable turn last week when the Washington Post published an Op-Ed piece by Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele telling retirees that his party would fight any effort to modify the benefits they derived from the government-run Medicare program in order to offer similar benefits to others. The Op-Ed was immediately supplemented by an item on the RNC Web page trumpeting a "Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights," similarly pledging the GOP to a to-the-death defense of Medicare benefits and procedures, allegedly under dire threat from universal health coverage.Steele's gambit mainly got attention because it was laughably in conflict with nearly a half century of Republican attacks on Medicare, and because he adopted every ludicrous made-up claim about the impact of this or that health reform bill on Medicare. In a disastrous NPR interview later in the week, the GOP chieftain had a predictably difficult time explaining why the GOP wanted to "protect" Medicare because it was so bad a program that it couldn't withstand any "raids."
[..]This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old "welfare wedge": the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven't.
[..]What's most interesting, and dangerous, about the new "welfare wedge" is that it's not about poor people who don't work for a living. After all, most very poor families often already have health insurance (depending on where they live) via Medicaid, and those who don't work these days generally don't have the option of working. The target of "welfare" shouters seems to be the working poor, or middle-class minority families who are struggling to stay in the middle class.
Anti-immigrant groups like the “Minutemen†vigilantes are not only proliferating, but are rapidly beginning to resemble the white-supremacist and anti-government militias that have populated the netherworld of the Radical Right since the early 1990s. Adding insult to injury, the farcical conspiracy theories that circulate among both extreme nativist groups and right-wing militias are now being mainstreamed by commentators on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. Although the various strains of far-right extremism have by no means coalesced into a single movement, the ideological lines that once distinguished them have begun to blur.
As a result, it is not uncommon to find Minutemen deriving ideological succor from Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Glenn Beck as they stockpile weapons to defend against what they believe to be a secret plot by the Mexican government to “re-conquer†the southwestern United States—and another secret plot by the U.S. government to impose socialism under the leadership of a president who they believe to be an “illegal alien†from Kenya rather than a native-born U.S. citizen from Hawaii.
That is the portrait that emerges from a report released yesterday by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) entitled The Second Wave: Return of the Militias. The new SPLC report comes on the heels of a June report by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Confronting the New Faces of Hate, which details the recent rise in hate crimes directed against immigrants, Latinos, and racial minorities in the United States, as well as the role of mainstream media commentators in fanning the flames of anti-immigrant and anti-Latino hatred. The SPLC report also provides details which supplement the findings of an April report by the Department of Homeland Security on the growing threat posed by right-wing extremists who are driven by white-supremacist and anti-immigrant ideology.
The image presented by these reports of heavily armed white supremacists being cheered on by a CNN commentator is terrifying enough, but even more terrifying in many respects is the fact that some Members of Congress are cheering them on as well. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) plays to delusional yet typical far-right conspiracy theories in warning that the Obama administration is engaged in a “final leap to socialism†and plans to put young people in “re-education camps.†Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) attempts to appease the so-called “birther movement†by saying that it “has a point†in claiming that President Obama is not actually a native-born citizen of the United States.
Other politicians would do well not to follow the example set by Bachmann and Inhofe of pandering to the radical right-wing fringe and validating its ideology of hate. As a new report from the Immigration Policy Center details, the ranks of Latino, African American, and Asian voters grew by nearly 5 million between the 2004 and 2008 elections. Moreover, the rapid rise of Latino and Asian voters in particular occurred in electorally important states such as Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Carolina. These newly mobilized voters are unlikely to be impressed by candidates whose campaign rhetoric is more attuned to the membership of white-supremacist militia groups than to the demographic realities of the modern United States.
It would appear that Fat Cats run our country. The rich get richer while many in the middle class fall into a growing underclass without housing, health care or a future.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]
The World Trade Organization is an undemocratic organization run by the rich, for the rich. The bylaws of the organization supersede our own Constitution . If America is to recover economically it must either renegotiate or completely withdraw from the WTO.
The Constitution states that all treaties made under the authority of the United States become supreme law of the land. The U.S. invited the WTO to rule over us when our government signed the treaty, and now we have no choice but to conform U.S. laws, regulation and administrative procedures to the agreement.
[..] Since entering the WTO in 2001, trade with China has resulted in the loss of 2.3 million jobs through 2007, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 2006 alone, the trade gap with China resulted in the loss of 366,000 American jobs. Those fortunate enough to retain their jobs witnessed their annual earnings decrease by roughly $1,400. American workers are put in direct competition with one another as more and more employers look to offshore production to nations with lower wage rates.
Those jobs losses have affected each and every sector of the economy in both white and blue-collar workers. Over that time the U.S. has lost 561,000 jobs in computer and electronic products, 153,000 in apparel and accessories, 139,000 in administrative support services and 128,000 in professional, scientific and technical services.
In all, those displaced workers lost an average of $8,146 annually - a total of $19.4 billion - as they moved into lower paying jobs.
Those job losses can be directly attributed to China’s rapidly growing trade surplus with the U.S., maintained by the systematic manipulation of the Chinese yuan. By purposely undervaluing their currency, they subsidized exports - some estimates put this subsidy at nearly 30 percent. This practice has allowed America’s trade deficit with China to balloon since China entered into the WTO. In 2001, when China joined the WTO, they held a small trade surplus of $84 billion with the U.S. By 2007, that number has grown exponentially to $262 billion. On average, that deficit will increase by $30 billion each and every year.
With the U.S-China trade deficit exploding, more job losses are forecast in the future. The Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank aligned with the pro-free trade wing of the party, claims that unless the trade deficit is brought under control, 12 million information-based jobs in the U.S. are highly susceptible in the future.
[..]“The direct impact on incomes, more than $8,000 per displaced worker per year on average, is catastrophic for the individual workers and the single most visible cost of globalization for American workers,†EPI economist Josh Bivens said. “But it’s also critical to recognize the indirect impact of trade on workers. Trade with less developed countries has reduced the bargaining power of all workers in the U.S. economy who resemble those displaced workers in education, credentials and skill.â€But beyond the quantifiable numbers of economic hardship in the U.S., the WTO is inherently wrong for other reasons. The organization remains indifferent to issues of workers rights, child labor and environmental protection standards. The organization has little to no transparency as all of its hearing are closed to the public. It is no wonder then that the U.S. comes out a loser in nine of 10 trade disputes brought before the body. The corporate agenda of the organization has destroyed the developing economies of the world, exploiting cheap resources and giving them little in return. This has come to represent the most efficient form of colonization the world has ever seen - reaping all the benefits with no downsides of occupation.
G'kar, a warrior turned diplomat, after a devasting war that utterly destroyed his planet, became a social and spiritual leader for his people. Now he comments on a sister world, one who's history, values and tradition is much like his own people's.
"It is said that the future is always born in pain. The history of war is the history of pain. If we are wise, what is born of that pain matures into the promise of a better world, because we learn that we can no longer afford the mistakes of the past."
Terrans are a younger people with promising abilities and practices, a people still fresh and untarnished irreparably. Perhaps he can advise them, and save them from repeating the kind of mistakes the war-like Narn made.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security, will deserve neither and lose both."
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), First US Ambassador to France
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
- James Madison (1751-1836), 4th U.S. President and author of the U.S. Constitution
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
- Sinclair Lewis, (It Can't Happen Here, 1935)
"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd US President
"...An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire."
- John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President
"I'm the commander in chief, see, I don't need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
- George W. Bush, quoted in Bob Woodward's book 'Bush at War'
"'Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.' Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’" - Matthew 25:34-40 (New King James Version)
"A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. Free society must fertilize the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow." - Henry Commager
"I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light -- truth, understanding, knowledge -- is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it." - Alexander Papaderosby
"Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." - Herman Goering
Hitler's Reichsmarschall
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why
the poor have no food, they call me a communist." - Dom Helder Camara
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. John F. Kennedy
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
- John F. Kennedy
To announce there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, it is morally treasonable to the American public. - Teddy Roosevelt
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
- John F. Kennedy
Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
- John F. Kennedy
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
- John F. Kennedy
The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open
society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret
societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. - John
F. Kennedy
We are not afraid to entrust the American people
with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and
competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge
the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of
its people.
- John F. Kennedy
I look forward to a future in which our country will
match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with
our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
- John F. Kennedy
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution....
A little rebellion now and then ... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government....
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society" - Thomas Jefferson
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be
satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so
with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." - Albert Camus (1913-1960)
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself." - Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls 'enemy,' for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, 04-06-67
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam [Iraq]. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam [Iraq]. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. - Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967.
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964.
Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1963.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.
The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten....America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness--justice. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten....America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness--justice. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy. - Martin Luther King, Jr., The Measures of Man, 1959.
Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1964.
ished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy. - Martin Luther King, Jr., The Measures of Man, 1959.
Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1964.
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