All Americans

American Hypocrisy
by George A. Polisner on Monday, May 2, 2011 at 9:33am

While I'm pleased that the families of the many victims of horrific violence may now have closure I cannot yet join many Americans in this celebration of Osama bin Laden's death.

I can join the celebration if our Government responds by:

• Allowing extradition of Bush, Cheney and key leadership that invaded a sovereign nation on a false pretense resulting in the deaths and casualties of American soldiers and the Iraqi people. If we are a nation of laws -we must respect the law.
• Ceasing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and bring our personnel home safely.
• Closure of Guantanamo Bay and while we are at it -The School of the America's too (check out http://www.soaw.org/).
• A dramatic reduction of conventional military spending while placing emphasis on intelligence and our ability to respond to threats in a rapid, surgical manner.

Special to The Bee
By Saree Makdisi

The current obsession with state workers' wages and benefits, which has been sweeping the nation from the Midwest to California, is distracting Americans from the real economic questions we should urgently be asking ourselves.

In view of the enormous – and growing – inequalities in incomes and wealth in this country, it is nothing short of astonishing that so much resentment, to such a broad extent, has been generated over the benefit packages promised to teachers, firefighters, DMV staffers and highway repair crews, that there is no resentment left over for the real beneficiaries of our broken social and economic system. State workers are being held responsible for a wide range of budgetary and economic problems, whereas those who bear actual responsibility for those problems have been able to evade scrutiny, let alone being asked to pay any kind of price.

The result is the growing rallying cry that state workers should be stripped of pension and health care benefits that most private sector workers lost many years ago, so that they too can join the race to the bottom of wretchedness to which more and more Americans seem committed.

(554 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

1. What country does the vast majority of terrorists in Afghanistan come from?

a) Afghanistan

b) Other

c) USA

“The U.S. war in Afghanistan is a terrorist enterprise. By employing these tactics of terror, the Pentagon seeks to force Afghan peasants to end their resistance to foreign occupation. They are succeeding in creating oceans of suffering among people, most of who have never heard of the World Trade Center or the September 11 attacks. In fact, a 2010 survey conducted by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) showed that 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar provinces knew nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks in 2001.”(Brian Becker)

(556 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

Wow, I thought the biggest hit to social humanists was when the “two Americas” populists of John Edwards’ campaign had their call to a moral high ground silenced when their passionate and articulate for political ethics leader was found guilty of cheating on his cancer-stricken and dying wife.

That sucker punch to human and social rights advocates seems like nothing upon reading the breathtaking headlines about Gaddafi’s alleged capacity for evil -- mandating mass rape and supplying Viagara to his fighters. A veritable HITLER ... IF the story is true.

Protesting the US and NATO waging an illegitimate war with Libya certainly has become far more awkward for myself as a feminist and peace activist.

I don’t know a lot about Gaddafi. In the best reports he is a very troubling and dangerous-sounding man. But we are all relentlessly saturated with corporate media propaganda daily. Hard to figure it all out, and dig out reality in this say-anything post-Bush but still neocon powered Obamaworld of gamesmanship, not truth and honor.

(557 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

The corporate-media-beloved and ever-present neolib and neocon war-hawk gamesters are tasting blood and lusting to “FINISH THE JOB” in Libya, a job that on the surface was supposed to be humanitarian in nature, to SAVE CIVILIANS. But, really folks, who doesn’t know the faux-humanitarian intervention “NO FLY ZONE” R2P was in reality just the first step on the American and cronies' slippery slope of high-handed non-humanitarian regime change and aggressive occupation for control of oil, other resources, finances and a punishment of uppity Libyan nationalistic and African-centric activities.

After two surreally grim and failing -- FAILING -- wars in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military, political and media architects and cheerleaders of these failures are still around to jump up and down heatedly and rue the word “STALEMATE” over the “No Fly Zone” result and INSIST ON STEAMROLLING DOWN THE SAME IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN DOOMING GARDEN PATH.

(558 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

Get your vomit buckets ready.

Oil, drugs, weapons. Supposedly the three hottest commodities on the planet right now.

We know the lengths corporate-controlled governments will go to follow through on their lust for oil. Illegitimate wars and assassinations. 1 million plus human beings dead. 4 million plus displaced.

Jeremy Hammond’s recent expose discusses how drug laundering was common and vital in giving shameless ballast to the world’s most powerful banks during the economic crisis.

Now, Tim Hepher of Reuters spotlights one more HUGE example of grotesque amorality to fathom. The sub-basements of evil our global leaderships have been frequenting for cold-blooded “advertising” and profit-making of the armaments trade. Heads of states have become the front-line hawkers the competition is so fierce.

(562 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

So the disasters of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars are not enough for America.

And calling out for the assassination of a legitimate sovereign head of a country and encouraging civil war bloodbaths from our senior US Senators has gotten as American as apple pie! The blood-letting mood begun earlier by a craven corporate media and a mendacious administration demonizing Gaddafi and myopically generalizing and romanticizing the strange and troubling rebellion coalition challenging him. Once again in American media, profound truth black outs, this time of barbaric racist violence against non-Libyan Africans wrongly accused of being mercenaries.

What does the Military Industrial Security Complex care, ultimately? They -- pro or anti-Gaddafi Libyans and millions more ultimately in Africa -- will all be toast eventually. Desperate and traumatized, those who manage to live from “Obama’s days not weeks humanitarian intervention" (HAH!) and the African bloodbaths to come. All bowed to the will of the Western corporatism colonization. Control of Africa, and all its juicy resources. Col. Gaddafi is an obstacle to that, so anything goes in oil, money and war.

(567 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

Sometimes I come across an electrifying article that inspires simultaneous dread, enlightenment and validation. An article providing that AHA moment, confirming my worst suspicions and connecting some troubling, global-big-picture dots. Dots-connecting that the pen-flashlight narrow, manipulatively selective, milli-second illuminations by Western corporate media don’t begin to help ordinary Americans or other Westerners achieve.

The last article that gave me the big AHA moment was by Ellen Brown in Asia Times entitled “Libya All About Oil, Or Central Banking?” Ms. Brown revealed that Libya it turns out is a threat to all those private international banksters out there because it, and Gaddafi, had the AUDACITY to establish a state-owned banking system. The outrageousness of such a legitimate act of economic independence!!!! Off with their heads!! (Which apparently is happening, since Geneva Conventions stopped mattering long ago and we are backing some unknown barbaric entities over there, but this is the era of “pragmatism” a/k/a America so on the wrong the side of history, but as long as the media calls our convenient proxies the good guys who seriously gives a shit any more? Might, after all, makes right. Gangsta rules.)

Some members of the Manhattan Greens compiled the comparative issues checklist below. I have also included thereafter some platform stances made by Howie Hawkins in 2008 while running for Governor, a statement taken off the national Green Party website about the profound economic inequality in America, and a list of the 10 key values of the Green Party.

Howie Hawkins (who ran against the craven Democratic winner, Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is every bit as seemingly Republican as Obama) recently revealed at a Manhattan forum that he achieved 60,000 votes in New York State. 50,000 were from Westchester County and above. Only 10,000 votes from beneath Westchester County. This includes Manhattan, mind you. HOW SHAMEFUL for this city's residents, so many who consider themselves sophisticated and educated. Progressive? HAH!!!

I remember as we passed out flyers last November before the election, there was a lot of disdain for us Green Party members. There was a lot of mumbling of "but you won't win" as an explanation for the unwillingness to vote Green. "Pragmatic" Democrats who were willing to, maybe hold their noses, but still vote for the sell-out Dems with their clear corporate, anti-humane values.

I

Congress Defunds Wasteful Catch Shares Program

by Dan Bacher

Washington, DC – In a big victory for commercial and recreational fishermen, the U.S. Congress on April 14 voted to defund the "catch shares" program, a controversial and wasteful fisheries management fiasco.

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, said the program has been "blocking access to fish for thousands of smaller scale fishermen, destroying eir livelihoods and our coastal and fishing communities."

The widely-contested "catch shares" program on the East and West Coasts, a pet project of Dr. Jane Lubchenco, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, serves to privatize public trust resources by concentrating ocean fisheries in a few corporate hands.

This amendment, offered by Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina, is part of the FY2011 budget that President Barack Obama signed into law on April 15.

(572 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

My Green Party friend, Daniel, encouraged me to write a blog about Obama’s budget speech for his website. I gulped. Just as with W, sustained Obama viewing makes me nauseous.

Except for a few enraging excerpts of the speech I glimpsed, provided by gaga MSNBC anchors, I thought I had escaped having to endure this particular pile of Obama say-anything bullshit. But I made myself sit down and listen to it on youtube last night. Every last, saccharine, mendacious word of it.

It gave me nothing. No hope. If Obama wanted to make a profound step, he would launch a WPA to fight unemployment. He would stop droning. He would end the ritualized torture of Bradley Manning. Reinstitute habeas corpus. End the corporate-agenda wars.

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis had this to say about the seeming Obama doctrine in an article entitled "Endless War and Empire: Your Tax Dollars at Work":

Does hidden white privilege exist? Allan Johnson provides an alternative way of thinking about issues of privilege by examining what keeps us from seeing our own privilege and how that privilege harms others.

After 30 years of college teaching, Allan G. Johnson now devotes himself entirely to writing and public speaking. He has worked with more than 200 schools and organizations in 36 states.
Source: Leading From Where You Are: Unraveling Privilege, Power and Difference with Allan Johnson

Music includes Earth Anthem, All the Pretty Little Horses, Cisco Houston, Mariachi Tamazula-Alma Llanera, the day they caught Saddam Hussein, We'll Meet Again

Ellen Brown in Asia Times brings up some incredible and sensible revelations about the present demonization of Libya and the motivations for the western faux-humanitarian efforts to topple Gaddafi.

She begins her article, “Libya All About Oil, Or Central Banking?” with the interesting observation:

Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.

Lawrence Davidson in his article “The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Walks the Land” writes of an indifferent public and the potential motivation on moderate conservatives to question their Republicanism:

Part III – The Indifferent Public

Behind the conservative attack on academic free speech is a broader phenomenon. The reality that most people do not partake of free speech or even appreciate its value. Think of this situation in terms of a bell curve. Those in the main bulge of the curve are people who live their lives in near total compliance with the attitudes and beliefs of their culture. They rarely if ever venture beyond those parameters and they usually are suspicious and fearful of those who violate these boundaries. That means the practice of meaningful political and cultural speech is carried on mostly by the outliers of this bell curve, both on the left and the right. However, what happened during the Cold War and after is that, through the process of historical distortion and propaganda, the entire curve was shifted to the right. So now centrists can be labeled as liberals and liberals can be called socialists, etc.