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AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

Don't Sit on the Sidelines -- This Saturday, Be Part of the Uprising Sweeping the Country from Wisconsin to Your Home Town

A huge coalition of progressive groups have organized rallies across the country to stand up against harsh budget cuts and tax cheats, and protect the middle class.

February 25, 2011 |

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Noam Chomsky was asked in a recent interview whether it's possible to make our government work for ordinary Americans rather than a rarified elite. “What has to be done,” he replied, “is what’s happening in Madison, or what’s happening in Tahrir Square in Cairo. If there’s mass popular opposition, any political leader is going to have to respond to it, whoever they are.”

Today, we may be seeing the emergence of just such a force in American politics. This Saturday, the sleeping giant will stir as progressives across the country rally in solidarity with public-sector workers and in opposition to the draconian cuts to our already threadbare safety net proposed by the Tea Party-infused GOP.

There's a new militancy in the air. Inspired not only by the protesters standing tall in Wisconsin, Ohio and a half-dozen other states but also by the seismic upheaval taking place around the world, progressive America, long overshadowed by the media-friendly Tea Parties, will show up in force in all 50 states this Saturday to demand that budgets aren't balanced on the backs of working people and the most vulnerable among us.

In Wisconsin, there has even been talk of organizing a general strike, an event not seen in this country since the 1930s, if right-wing Governor Scott Walker manages to push his union-busting bill through the legislature. Labor hasn't flexed its muscles like that for generations, but there is a growing sense that we, as working people, face a defining moment in our democracy.

On Saturday, there will be two opportunities to make your voice heard above the astroturfed right-wing din. First, a coalition of grassroots progressive groups are staging a nationwide “Rally to Save the American Dream” in front of every state house in the country at noon local time to express support for the working people of Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin and around our country, the American Dream is under fierce attack. Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich—and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response, and vital human services.

But this weekend's rallies won't be the end of this effort. Taking a page from the noisy town-hall meetings that marked last year's health-care reform debate, an unnamed labor organizer told Politico that union members “have been urged to attend congressional town hall meetings to ask Republican lawmakers 'pointed questions' about the cuts they supported last week. ...We are targeting various House Republicans in town hall meetings during the recess to let them know these budget cuts are beyond the pale,” the organizer said.

You can find out more about the Rally to Save the American Dream, and get involved in the action, here.

The other major actions this weekend are being organized by US Uncut, which is targeting the corporate power behind the elites' assault on our middle-class. Modeled on the UK Uncut movement that was organized to push back against the “austerity” measures being imposed by the Cameron government (and inspired by an excellent essay by Johann Hari titled, “How to Build a Progressive Tea Party”), they have an exceedingly simple yet powerful message: there is a simple alternative to imposing economic pain on working people to balance budgets: make corporate tax cheats pay.

The questions US Uncut is trying to inject into the discourse are: “If we pay our taxes, why don’t they?” and “If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?”

Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this studyfrom the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America’s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.

US Uncut is a decentralized operation, and local activists can choose their own targets. But the main event this Saturday will be at Bank of America branches across the country. It's an appropriate choice, as the organizers explain:

Despite ruining the economy with their reckless greed, Bank of America has consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer. In fact, in 2009, Bank of America actually received a net tax benefit. Yes, last year, the federal government gave Bank of America $2.3 billion.

That money alone could almost completely cover the proposed $2.5 billion cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills and affects 34 million households.

Learn more about US Uncut, and sign up to protest outside of BofA, or another corporate tax cheat of your choice, here.

But the most militant response to the Right's push came from Madison, Wisconsin this week, when the local AFL-CIO federation voted to make preparations to hold a general strike if Walker pushes his bill through the legislature. This is a big deal -- a sign of how threatened the American labor movement feels after seeing its representation in the private sector fall under a withering campaign of union-busting from a third of all wage-earners 30 years ago to just 7 percent today.

General strikes don't target a single company or industry; they're an expression of power by all workers in a region or country. Greece had a one-day general strike this week, but in the U.S., the last one occurred in San Francisco in 1934.

So far, they are only threatening to call a general strike. Actually doing so – having unions walk out in support of other organized workers – has been illegal since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in the 1940s. The law, called the “slave act” by opponents, outlaws all strikes by workers who don't have a direct interest in the issue at hand.

As such, it would be a powerful act of civil disobedience. But violating Taft-Hartley exposes unions to costly judgments that could potentially wipe out some of the smaller unions. Nevertheless, labor journalist Mike Elk reports that some public employee unions – with their backs against the wall -- may take that risk.

It's important to understand that only labor unions are barred from organizing a general strike, and around 90 percent of American workers don't belong to a union. When the Wisconsin labor federation adopted its resolution, one long-time progressive activist remarked that it was “the most exciting idea I've heard in a long time.” With the power of online organizing, perhaps the next iteration of progressive power will be a general strike not of union workers, but of ordinary Americans who are sick of a government that's done everything for Wall Street while practically ignoring a 9 percent unemployment rate and a devastating foreclosure crisis.

It looks increasingly likely that we will see a government shutdown over the GOP's proposals to kill any economic progress we've made since the crash with their draconian cuts. Why not shut down the private sector in response? It's hard to imagine a more full-throated rejection of the political games being played in Washington.

All of this energy may be short-lived, but it could be the start of a more active progressive movement in the U.S. By and large, progressives have held their fire since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Organizers of the protests spreading across this country in a decaying economy are tapping into a deep reserve of frustration with the status quo, and resurrecting a populist tradition long missing on the American Left.

This Saturday, we might witness the beginning of some real push-back against the plutocracy from a newly energized progressive movement. This is something you really shouldn't miss.

US Uncut

Rally to Save the American Dream

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Top 5 Reasons Why Wisconsin Matters To Us All

CAMPAIGN FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE

Today's Ideas & Actions

Wisconsin Matters To Us All
Public workers in Wisconsin and in several other states where they are under assault are fighting for the dignity of every worker. If these workers lose their ability to fight for fair wages and decent working conditions, we all lose

Top 5: Why Wisconsin Matters To You

By Bill Scher

February 22, 2011 - 3:14pm ET

Thousands are rallying in Wisconsin and across the nation to oppose conservative governors who are attacking the collective bargaining rights of our civil servants. And the people in the streets are not just public sector union members.

Why? Why are so many who are not part of a union so committed to protecting the role of organized workers in our government and our economy?

1. Weak Economies Need More Demand: Our economy is struggling and our state budgets are distressed because increased unemployment and falling home prices have reduced economic demand. Weakening the ability of any workers to negotiate fair pay and secure retirements will only weaken demand further, hurting the overall economy.

2. Strong Standards Strengthen The Middle Class. When public sector workers can negotiate for fair pay, healthy workplaces and secure retirements, that puts pressure on private sector CEOs to do the same, or else they risk losing talent to the public sector. Making public sector work less inviting does nothing to make private sector jobs pay better. We need to raise the bar, not lower it.

3. Decent Government Pay Means Decent Government: Most everyone wants our federal, state and local governments to function effectively. That means being able to attract skilled, productive workers with fair pay, healthy workplaces and secure retirements, all of which will be lost if public workers can no longer bargain for their compensation packages.

4. Public Employees Are Not The Problem: Study after study shows the public employees do not receive extravagant compensation, and that the problems with state public pension systems are largely overblown. State budgets are reeling from an economic recession caused by reckless Wall Street speculators, top end tax cuts and corporate tax avoidance. The projected shortfalls in public retirement benefits derive mostly from skyrocketing health care costs thanks to private insurers, and poorly performing pension investments thanks to deregulated Wall Street firms.

Furthermore, civil servants in Wisconsin and elsewhere have repeatedly said they are willing to make concessions regarding pay and benefits. Unlike conservative corporate executives, they have proven their willingness to share the sacrifices. What we can't negotiate is their right to negotiate.

5. Scapegoating Lets The Culprits Get Away: Right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers are pumping millions into a nationwide effort to break the public employee unions. Why would they bother? Because if they can get most people to blame public employees for the nation's economic ills, they won't hold irresponsible corporations accountable and force the ultra-rich to make any sacrifices, such as higher taxes and tougher regulations.

Now that you know why the assault on public employee unions affects us all, what can we do about it?

Sign The Petition: The AFL-CIO has a petition supporting fair pay and worker rights, to be delivered to all 50 state legislatures

Attend A Rally: SEIU and Jobs With Justice both have compiled lists of rallies taking place all across the country this week.

Share This Blog Post: Share with your friends, neighbors and colleagues the reasons why we all should care about the attack on our civil servants.

This is a critical moment in our nation's history. Will we be a nation where workers can thrive, or where workers are nickel and dimed? Will we have a vibrant economy that works for all, or will we have a stagnant economy that serves the few?

Now's the time to stand up.

First, they attacked PBS and NPR. Now AmeriCorps

First, they went nuclear on PBS and NPR. Now, they have voted to totally shut down AmeriCorps -- the groundbreaking national service program that has transformed the lives of millions of Americans.

In the dead of night on Saturday, a Tea Party-driven group of House members voted to kill AmeriCorps, completely eliminating all funding. With a potential government shutdown looming on March 4th, the fate of 85,000 AmeriCorp community organizers, teachers, and tutors will now be decided by the U.S. Senate.

Here is the heart of the matter: AmeriCorps volunteers help and protect our country's most vulnerable. Every day, AmeriCorps organizers work in many of the poorest communities in America, lessening the pain of those suffering in this brutal economy. As their work rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina exemplifies, these organizers are the backbone of our country’s service community -- a Peace Corps for our own country.

After hearing the shocking news, former AmeriCorps volunteer Caleb Jonas decided he had to do something. From a coffee shop in Massachusetts, Caleb logged in to Change.org from his laptop and created a petition asking Congress to "Save AmeriCorps." Caleb’s inspiring action has already been signed by 17,266 Americans -- without significant promotion from any major organization. Until now.

Click here now to quickly sign your name to Caleb’s "Save AmeriCorps" petition to the Senate. Your signature will help Caleb reach his personal goal of 85,000 signatures -- one signature for every AmeriCorps member currently serving their country. DEADLINE: Thursday, 5 p.m.

Why does Caleb care so much about AmeriCorps? Because he spent a year improving the quality of tutoring programs for low-income kids in Minnesota -- and witnessed AmeriCorps members build houses for Habitat for Humanity, help political refugees start new lives, improve reading test scores for elementary school students, and help disadvantaged high school students get into college.

As Caleb told us over the phone, it breaks his heart that this vital national service program could be shut down at a time when people in the most marginalized communities in America need it the most. That’s why Caleb was inspired to start his "Save AmeriCorps" petition from a coffee shop -- and why AmeriCorps supporters are sharing it on Facebook and forwarding messages like this to their friends around the country.

With AmeriCorps on the chopping block, it’s time for us to stand up for Caleb and thousands of other volunteers who have committed years of their lives to community service. Will you click here now to sign your name and tell the Senate not to kill AmeriCorps?

http://www.change.org/petitions/save-americorps?alert_id=NNHcGQVECl_BqLSMFmEBk&me=aa

Thank you for joining Caleb and Change.org members across our country fighting to save AmeriCorps before it’s too late.

-- Patrick and the Change.org team

Reopening Health Care Reform

Reopening Health Care Reform

Daniel Greenwood

While the constitutional challenges to last year’s health care reform act barely pass the snicker test, the fact remains that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is badly flawed.

We have two existing, popular, successful, and relatively efficient government-based health care plans: Medicare, which provides nationalized medical insurance for all Americans over sixty-five; and the VA system, which provides nationalized medical care for veterans.

The simplest form of national health care reform, thus, would have been simply to extend one of these existing systems to all Americans. Better still, we could have retained both the advantages of those reasonably well-run systems and added competition and choice by offering all Americans the option of choosing one of the two government-run systems or a nongovernmental, for-profit alternative.

Instead, the Obama Administration decided to take a fundamentally Reaganite approach. The PPAC Act imposes privatization without true competition, by subsidizing customers rather than creating a cheaper provider without the excess layers of costs and inefficiency that private insurance imposes. Despite its significant cost-reduction provisions, its fundamental structure was designed to overcome insurance company and GOP opposition by protecting the profits of incumbent insurance companies and, to a lesser extent, care-providers, at the expense of the taxpayers. The basic problems of private insurance—the strong incentives to cherry pick customers and deny needed care in order to protect executive pay and shareholder profits—remain in place, and regulation can only do so much to counteract them.

Now is the time to preempt GOP claims that health care finance reform is a disguised attack on Medicare, Tea Party attempts to repeal all forms of reform, court attacks on the constitutionality of this particular system, and insurance company attempts to enhance profits by capturing the regulators entrusted with resisting their pursuit of profits at the customers’ expense.

The Democratic leadership should propose the reform we really needed and that polls suggest Americans really want: a simple statute, mandating that every American have medical insurance, but offering every American the opportunity to enroll in Medicare or the VA system at the current fee schedule. If private companies can compete, let them do so. Don’t repeal, replace—with Medicare for all.

Health Care Reform, Health Care, Medicare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

February 11, 2011 at 22:17:15

Our Founding Fathers Would Be Proud of the Egyptian People & Disgusted at the Spineless Sheep Most Americans Have Become

By Richard Clark (about the author)

opednews.com

America 's founding fathers stood up for their freedom, winning it from the British. The Egyptian people have stood up for their freedom, too, winning it from the Mubarak dictatorship, finding their courage even when Mubarak's thugs flew fighter jets low over their heads, beat and murdered protesters, and otherwise threatened violence.

The American people, on the other hand, have been cowed into passivity by an irrational fear of terrorism, laziness and mindlessness .

Some would point out, however, that the American government is nothing like the Egyptian government. So let's make some comparisons:

• There is a stunning amount of inequality in Egypt. But America is even worse

• Mubarak stole billions from his people, while the American oligarchs have stolen trillions. See this, this, this and this

• Egypt has been living under a state of emergency for 30 years, yes. But Americans have been living under a continuous state of emergency for 10 years straight.
  

• Mubarak was supported by the military. But the military-industrial complex has taken over America as well (moreover, there is a tradition in countries like Turkey for the military to ensure that religious fanatics do not take over the country)

• Mubarak ignored the wishes of his people. But has the American government been listening to its people? Consider the 2010 Rasmussen poll which found that "just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed." A 2010 Gallup poll determined that nearly half of all Americans believe "the Federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens." Poll after poll shows that "both national parties are deeply unpopular with an electorate looking for something new and different." Polls reveal that 82% of all Americans wanted Wall Street to be reined in, in a substantial and meaningful manner, and yet our government has let Wall Street have its way on all the important issues. Polls find that Americans want the big financial players who acted with fraud to be punished, and yet our government has let all of the big fish off the hook. In fact, our government has ignored many other desires of the American people, as well, including investigations into torture and spying on Americans, impeaching George W. Bush if he lied about Iraqi WMDs (which he did).

• Mubarak repressed his people and stifled dissent. Bush and Obama have haven't been all that protective of liberty either

• Mubarak murdered and tortured people without following the rule of law. America hasn't been exactly saintly in this regard over the last 10 years either

And if you think our problems started on 9/11, remember that virtually all of the current domestic and foreign policies were already in place, or planned, before 9/11.

Unlike the Egyptian people, however, Americans have become scared of their own shadow. We have forgotten that courage and hope are choices -- which do not have to come from JohnWayne levels of testosterone, but can simply arise from loving something enough to want to protect it.

How Did We Turn Into the Oppressor?

England oppressed America. We were the downtrodden who broke free. But now, America has helped to repress the Egyptian people (see this and this).

So how did we get on the wrong side of history?

Minister Jim Wallis provides some answers in an open letter that he wrote to the Egyptian protesters. Here are some excerpts:

"The United States was not talking about democracy in Egypt, not advocating it, not saying a transition is necessary and urgent, UNTIL you risked your security, safety and lives for the sake of democracy. You changed the conversation, a conversation that would be the same as it has been for decades if you hadn't done what you did. Your generational peers are now watching what you are doing in countries across the Arab world, and beyond. This is the moment for you and for us."

"You represent a new generation, a new leadership, and a new hope for the possibility of real democracy. So keep leading. My government, which still calls itself the beacon of freedom, has sacrificed democracy in your region of the world (and many other places) for the sake of American "interests": Our foreign policy around the globe has put our interests before our principles. But they are not really the interests of the American people, but of oil companies, big banks and corporations. Their interest in "stability" and continuity is very different from ours in democracy. So don't be fooled, don't listen to the so-called "wise" voices that have been part of the old reality and want to now thank you for your service to democracy, but are offering to take it from here."

"Don't let them. Keep demanding democracy -- real democracy. Because, for the rest of us, democracy is the best defense of our interests, and the best path to genuine stability. And, for our part, we will do our best to stand with you."

* * *

With thanks to "George Washington" at Zerohedge.com.

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Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always (more...)

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Ain't That Good News!

CounterPunch Diary

Ain't That Good News

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

“Ain’t that good news,
Yeah, ain’t that news.”

-- Sam Cooke.

We need good news. When was the last time we had some, here in this country? The Seattle riots against the WTO? That was back in 1999. Around the world? Hard to remember – it’s been a long dry spell. It reminds me of the old Jacobin shivering in the chill night of Bourbon restoration, and crying out, “Oh, sun of ’93, when shall I feel thy warmth again!”

We raise our glass to the Egyptian people. In the end Mubarak propelled them to irresistible fury with his dotty broadcast on Thursday. It seems that for some years now he’s been drifting in and out of senile dementia, same way Reagan did in his second term. The plan had been to run his son Gamal in the last elections, but that turned out to be a non-starter so they rolled the semi-gaga Hosni out one more time and fixed the results, ringingly endorsed by the US. On Thursday morning Mubarak probably told Suleiman and the US that he was going to quit, then forgot and, braced by a supportive call from the Israelis and a pledge by the Saudis to give him $1.4 billion if the US withheld it, announced that he would be around till September.

The talk about the US calling all the shots, including a final peremptory injunction to the Army chiefs to dump Mubarak is surely off the mark, part of a tendency to deprecate any notion that the Empire has hit a bump in the road and is in total control. Most of the time the current executives of Empire have been panting along, trying to stay abreast of events.
Obama’s call for “clarity” on the part of Mubarak on Thursday didn’t do it. Phone calls from the Defense Department and Langley and the National Security Council didn’t do it.

The brave Egyptian demonstrators did it. Conscripts ready to mutiny if ordered to fire on the crowds did it. Immensely courageous Egyptian union organizers active for years did it. Look at the numbers of striking workers enumerated by Esam al-Amin on this site today. This was close to a general strike. It reminds me of France, its economy paralysed in the uprising in the spring of 1968. That was when President de Gaulle, displaying a good deal more energy and sang-froid that Mubarak, flew to meetings with senor French military commanders to get pledges of loyalty and received requisite assurance.

And next for Egypt? These chapters are unwritten, but the world is bracingly different this week than what it was a month ago. The rulers of Yemen, Jordan and Algeria know that. Rulers and tyrants everywhere know that. They know bad news when they see it, same way we know good news when we hear its welcome knock on the door of history.

The Reagan Cult

The Reagan cult celebrates the centenary of their idol’s birth this month, and the airwaves have been tumid with homage to the 38th president, who held office for two terms – 1981-1988 – and who died in 2004. The script of these recurring homages is unchanging: with his straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering terms he and his pr crew catered expertly to the demands of the American national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the vigor of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.

When he took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed off.

The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or fiction in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they made training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe. "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that, unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.

The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the truth of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told you." He went one better that George Washington in that he couldn't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two.

His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF magazines (the origin of “Star Wars”, aka the Strategic Defense Initiative) lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday supplements.

Like his wife Nancy, he had a stout belief in astrology, the stars being the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market," with whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was right around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle once said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a kindly, avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was so profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a tv set on the blink and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that tortured Tantalus.

It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it I can think of is the hysteria over Princess Di.

The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986,, which disaster prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."

In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a presidential greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.

Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward through a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog. Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Earlier this month his sons disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer’s began when he was president. “Normalcy” and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.

As an orator or "communicator" he was terrible, with one turgid cliché following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical artifice was terribly limited.

The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he “ended the cold war”. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union’s sclerosed economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president.

He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position. It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a pr man, it was Reagan's role, to reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was on their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly malign.

How the Empire Screwed Up

Fresh off the presses and off into the ether or the US mail goes our latest newsletter. It’s another crackerjack issue, Subscribers get a piercing investigation by Stan Cox.

Here’s how it begins:

“Late on the night of December 22, 2001, a mammoth merchant vessel, the Christopher, was caught in a North Atlantic storm. Captain Deepak Gulati radioed to shore that his ship was “taking a beating” from 15-meter waves but otherwise was in good shape. On that or a later call, he said the hatch cover closest to the ship’s bow had become dislodged. Soon after, contact was lost; no mayday call was ever received.

“It is hard to believe that a ship the length of three football fields could have gone from fully afloat to completely submerged in as little as five minutes, but that could well have been what happened. Once the storm had moved out of the area, a helicopter search was ordered. But there remained no trace of the accident beyond an oil slick, an empty lifeboat, a raft, and one lifejacket. The search was called off on Christmas Day. The Christopher’s twenty-seven crew members – citizens of Ukraine, the Philippines, and India – were all presumed dead.

“Deepak Gulati was my brother-in-law. A resident of Mumbai, India, he had been guiding the Greek-owned, Cyprus-flagged, coal-laden bulk carrier from Puerto Bolívar, Colombia, to a steelworks in the north of England when, west of the Azores, he and his crew ran into the storm that ended their lives…

“As I learned more about the world in which Deepak had lived and worked, I came to realize just how wrong I had been, not only about the fate of the Christopher but also about the fragility of merchant shipping in an age of uninhibited globalization. Meanwhile, bulk carriers keep sinking and seafarers keep dying.”

Cox takes us into the deadly world of international shipping, where speed-up, slack regulation and “flags of convenience” are turning bulk carriers into death traps that can and have doomed crews to drowning in as little as five minutes.

Also in this issue, Kathy Christison takes us through more secret State Department cables acquired by CounterPunch showing how obsession with Israel prompted US policy makers to utterly misunderstand Egypt’s situation.

Finally, Larry Portis contributes a powerful essay on “sociocide”. He writes,

“I am convinced that genocide now must be recognized as mainly a means of committing another, and even more fundamental, international crime – ‘sociocide.’

“The ultimate aim of sociocide is not the physical destruction of peoples, or of a loosely defined culture, or of a state, as it is sometimes confusedly said, but rather the destruction of the relationships between the different groups constituting a society. This is what governments of the United States have done in Iraq, what Western governments encouraged in ex-Yugoslavia, what the Zionists did in Palestine. If “ethnic cleansing” in all its physically and culturally destructive forms can contribute to sociocide – the destruction of social bonds between diverse groups – the way is clear for colonial or imperialist domination and exploitation of a region, whether it be for expropriation of the land, exploitation of its economic resources or occupation of its strategic location.”

Read his important piece in our newsletter.

Subscribe now! And have this newsletter in your inbox, swiftly deliveredas a pdf, or – at whatever speed the US Postal Service first-class delivery system may muster – in your mailbox.

And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA) and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

AlterNet.org

MEDIA

AlterNet / By Megan Driscoll

Ethos: New Documentary Calls for Consumers to Reclaim Power

In his new documentary, Pete McGrain details the ever-expanding systemic quandaries that plague our society and the steps necessary to resolve them.

January 31, 2011 |

From left to right: Director Pete McGrain, host Woody Harrelson, co-executive producer Isabella Michelle Marles

“The romantic idea of revolution with riots in the streets and heroic deeds that our children will sing songs about in years to come is just that - a 'romantic myth' - it has never worked,” explains film director Pete McGrain. “The real revolution will be an evolution. No bloodshed, just common sense, people learning the facts and then acting accordingly. Not as romantic, but effective and sustainable.”

Common sense progression is precisely the idea that the documentary filmmaker hopes to rouse audiences with through his new film, Ethos, a compelling picture that offers an inside look at some of society’s most daunting problems. Hosted by Woody Harrelson, the documentary is supported by an array of interviews from several of the world’s leading thinkers, including Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, to whom the film is dedicated. Tackling a slew of issues – from the U.S.’s current state as a plutocracy to the military-industrial complex – the documentary highlights numerous examples that illustrate the demise of governmental power and the mounting corporate takeover.

Free enterprise has permeated every facet of life, Ethos explains, as Big Business now appears to maintain total control, from the major media conglomerates to the White House. Sam Gibara, chairman and former CEO of Goodyear says, “Governments have become powerless compared to what they were before,” citing the evolution of corporations and their expansion into major political players. Another commentator notes that this realization of power is largely due to the very basis of corporations, as protected by the government, stating, “[Corporations] are required by law to please the interests of their owners above all else, even the public good.”

As a result, corporations, and the politicians who financially depend on them, function with a singular purpose: to make the rich richer.

Such corporate reliance can be observed in a plethora of ways. The military has rendered itself dependent on private defense contractors and the media remains all but entirely governed by a small collective of firms that aim to serve their own interests. Ira Jackson, director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, says, “Capitalism today commands the towering heights and has displaced politics and politicians as the new high priests.” The result of such a concentration of control has inevitably led to a grave exploitation of power and the use of the public as passive consumers.

Ethos, however, is not simply a film designed to show viewers what is wrong with society. Rather, McGrain uses his medium as a platform of motivation. Though capitalism appears to be the root cause of many of the world’s problems, it also supplies populations with the tools needed to resolve them: power. Power of the people, that is. With such an emphasis on consumerism, corporations inevitably find themselves dependent on the consumers themselves. It is because of their capacity to manipulate populations into herd mentalities that they have been able to control the thoughts of the masses. If the consumers themselves become aware of these tools of manipulation, they can reclaim that power and force Big Business to listen to their wants and needs. Conscious consumerism is what is required to overcome the status quo.

To bolster the movement of conscious consumerism, McGrain, in association with Media For Action, has opted to provide Ethos to viewers for free online and available for download. The film’s Web site is also filled with ideas for action – from purchasing sustainable products to utilizing the range of alternative media sources (such as AlterNet) available to the public.

While so many seemingly independent and progressive modes of media turn out to be essentially profit-driven, McGrain offers Ethos simply as a means of motivation and empowerment to his audience, hoping to spread the word and ultimately affect change.

Visit www.ethosthemovie.com to watch Ethos and learn more.

Megan Driscoll is the editorial and communications assistant at AlterNet.

We Need to Swap Obama for Chavez

Can We Swap Obama for Chavez?

by Mike Whitney / February 9th, 2011

On Monday, while Barack Obama was hob-nobbing with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hugo Chavez was busy handing out laptop computers to second graders at a school in Caracas. After that, the Venezuelan president rushed off to a meeting at a food distribution plant which is providing $110 million in prepared meals for Venezuela’s poor. Finally, he ended his afternoon by making an appearance at one of the many construction sites where new homes are being built for the victims of January’s massive floods.

It’s all in day’s work for Hugo Chavez.

While Obama has turned out to be the most disappointing president in the last century, Chavez continues to impress with his resolve to improve the lives of ordinary working people. For example, in just 12 years, Chavez has created a thriving national public health care system with 533 diagnostic centers and medical facilities spread throughout the capital. Health care is free and there have been over over 55 million medical consultations since Chavez launched the Misión Barrio Adentro program. Compare that to Obama’s wretched cash-giveaway to the giant US HMO’s which he has tried to promote as universal health care.

What a joke!

Chavez has also led the way to greater political engagement and activism by establishing over 30,000 communal councils and 236 communes, all focused on entering more people into the political process and empowering them to bring about change. In the US, grassroots organizations are shrugged off by party leaders who take their marching orders from the deep-pocket elites who control both parties. And, as far as Obama is concerned, he could care less what his supporters think, which is why he went groveling to the Chamber of Commerce.

And what has Chavez done to loosen the stranglehold that corporations have on media? Here’s what Gregory Wilpert says in his article titled “An Assessment of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years”:

With regard to the media, ordinary Venezuelans now participate in the creation of hundreds of new and independent community radio and television stations across the country. Previous governments persecuted community media, but state institutions now actively support them – not with ongoing financing, but with training and start-up equipment.

The combination of greater inclusion and greater participation has led to a greater acceptance of Venezuela’s democratic political system, according to the annual Latinobarometro opinion polls, which allow for comparisons with other democracies in Latin America. That is, more Venezuelans believe in democracy than citizens of any other country in Latin America. Eighty-four percent of Venezuelans say, “democracy is preferable to any other system of government.

Last week, Chavez joined the battle against Coca-Cola by attending a rally of striking workers in the city of Valencia, home to the main Coca-Cola bottling plant in Venezuela. Chavez blasted Coke saying that if they didn’t want to follow “the constitution and the laws” then Venezuela could “live without Coca-Cola”.

Right on, Hugo! Tell Coke to pack sand!

The 1,300 striking workers are only asking for a meager raise to meet their growing expenses, but, of course, that cuts into corporate profits, so Coke is fighting their demands tooth-and-nail.

Try to imagine a scenario in which “business-friendly” Obama would take-on a major corporation?

Last week, Chavez announced that his government would spend another $700 million to fight homelessness and build another 40,000 houses. The president has stepped up his efforts since floods ravaged the country earlier in the year leaving tens of thousands without shelter. Chavez is determined not to make the same mistakes George Bush made following Katrina, when disaster victims were left to fend for themselves forcing a third of the New Orleans population to flee to other parts of the country.

And what effect has Chavez had on the Venezuelan economy? Here’s Wilpert again:

“Just as the Chavez government has democratized Venezuela’s political system over the past 12 years; it has done the same with its economic system, both on a macro-economic level and on a micro-economic level.

On a macro-economic level this has been achieved by increasing state control over the economy and by dismantling neo-liberalism in Venezuela. The Chavez government has regained state control over the previously quasi-independent national oil industry. The government nationalized private sub-contractors of the oil industry and incorporated them into the state oil company, giving workers full benefits and better pay. It also partially nationalized transnational oil company operations so that they control no more than 40% of any given oil production site. Then, the government eliminated the practice of “service agreements,” whereby transnational oil companies enjoyed lucrative concessions for oil production. Perhaps most importantly, the government increased royalties from oil production from as low as 1% to a minimum of 33%.

In the non-oil sector the government nationalized key (previously privatized) industries, such as: steel production (Sidor), telecommunications (Cantv), electricity distribution (production was already in state hands), cement production (Cemex), banking (Banco de Venezuela), and food distribution (Éxito).”

So, dear reader, are people better off with the telecommunications and electric companies privately owned by cutthroats like Enron (and the other Wall Street pirates) or should they be turned into public utilities?

How about oil? Are BP and Exxon better suited for the task than the public sector?

And what about banking: Would you feel safer with Uncle Sam or Goldman Sachs?

Chavez has slashed the poverty rate in half, lowered unemployment from 15% in 1999 to 7% today, and shrunk inequality to the lowest level in Latin America. In Venezuela people are getting healthier and living longer. They’re better paid and more politically engaged. “84% of Venezuelans say that they are satisfied with life, which is the second highest level in Latin America.” And guess what? Chavez is strengthening social security and retirement programs, not trying to destroy them by handing them over to Wall Street in the form of private accounts.

And Chavez’s generosity has not been limited to Venezuela either. In fact, he was the first world leader to offer medical and food aid to Katrina victims. (Although you won’t read that in an American newspaper!) And he still provides free heating fuel to poor people in the northeast United States. Venezuela-owned Citgo joined with Citizens Energy “to provide hundreds of thousands of gallons of free and low-cost heating oil to needy American families and homeless shelters across the US.” According to Citizens Energy President Joseph P. Kennedy, “Every year, we ask major oil companies and oil-producing nations to help our senior citizens and the poor make it through winter, and only one company, CITGO, and one country, Venezuela, has responded to our appeals.”

That’s right; no other oil company has given even one stinking dime to the charity. Chavez has provided over 170 million gallons of heating oil since 2005.

In contrast, Barack Obama has done nothing for the poor, the homeless, ordinary workers, or the middle class. Zilch. He’s been a dead-loss for everyone except the richest of the rich. Maybe we should swap him for Chavez?

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com. Read other articles by Mike.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Obama, Venezuela.

Walk Like An Egyptian

Courage is standing in the streets demanding the end of a thirty year despotic dictatorship, in a country with no tradition of democracy or the protection human rights.

Cowardice is talking about how other people should have human rights delivered to them by foreign militaries.

Courage is risking your life to bring democracy to your country.

Cowardice is talking about democracy for others while actually undermining it when you don’t like the results.

Courage is walking like an Egyptian.

Cowardice is talking like a neocon.

It’s impossible not to admire the courage of the Egyptian people, walking daily into the maws of a repressive regime and its violent goon squads, willing to sacrifice everything in order to end decades of American-backed autocracy in their country.

And it’s impossible not to be embarrassed by the silence of the American right, who bloviate endlessly about bringing democracy to the Middle East, but have gone somehow all quiet lately. These folks couldn’t have been more excited two years ago when the Iranian public was doing exactly what the Egyptians are doing now, but for some reason they aren’t out there cheering this time. Hmm. I wonder, what could be the difference?

Actually, it’s just most of them that are silent. We should be so lucky where the others are concerned. Glenn Beck is completely out of his tree, although that’s about as surprising as stink on a turd, and about as pleasant. He has decided that the democracy movement in Egypt is the beginning of the much-predicted and much-feared rise of the Muslim caliphate. Um, even though it is being led by young people with a secular agenda, and the Muslim Brotherhood has been on the sidelines. He has declared that this is part of some great big ol’ conspiracy that involves jihadists and socialists and lesbians and Barack Obama. Um, even though, those aren’t crowds who normally have lots to do with one another. Oh well, if his (thankfully diminishing, not to mention diminished) audience can buy the fantasy that the secularist Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and thus belly up for a ten-year war on that basis, why not see Obamacare-death-panel-commie-pinko-fag conspiracies on the streets of Cairo as well? It makes about as much sense. It’s about as contradictory as Jesus supporting capitalism, a notion which any good regressive will be happy to argue today. Logic never before stopped that locomotive from going off the rails at a hundred miles per hour, and it isn’t now.

Okay, well, Beck is sorta sui generis (or so it’s a bit comforting to think). What’s happening on the ‘sane’ right, where politics is only sometimes based on wild conspiracy theories? The answer that they don’t know what the hell to do with themselves. Egypt has exposed them as liars, hypocrites and autocrats, and it ain’t exactly a comfortable place to be in.

Take the exquisitely appropriately named Charles Krauthammer (please) as an example. You won’t need to devote a whole lot of processing cycles from the CPU between your ears to figure out what he’s up to once you see the title of his latest piece: “Egypt's Dangerous Road Ahead: The Muslim Brotherhood's A Force, ElBaradei's A Useful Idiot”. Just the same, he starts off the piece by asking “Who doesn't love a democratic revolution? Who is not moved by the renunciation of fear and the reclamation of dignity in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria?”

Great question, but guess who, after all, it turns out doesn’t seem to love a democratic revolution so very much?!?! Instead of waxing joyous about the redemptive delivery of democracy to the Middle East – you know, like he did when Iran’s public was rising up, or like when he was justifying the Iraq invasion – Herr Blitzkrieg is instead all full of warnings, danger signs and bogeymen. ‘Cause, you know, we all remember how the French Revolution went awry: “The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.”

Wait, didn’t the Americans once have a revolution too? Would Krauthammer have warned against that one? You bet. As a matter of fact, just about the only thing that allows regressives to continue to exist at all is the severe historical amnesia of the American public. The plain truth is that the right opposes every progressive movement in its time – just as they oppose gay rights today, and women’s rights yesterday, and racial civil rights just before that – and then pretends to celebrate it a generation or two later. Of course they would have opposed the American Revolution. We know that because: They did! They were called tories, and they in fact sided with the monarchical, repressive Brits. No doubt Hamiltonians would have been seen as the surreptitious Muslim Brotherhood equivalents of the time, threatening the freedom that monarchy provides, with George Washington playing the role of their useful idiot. He’d be even more ‘idiotic’ if, like ElBaradei, he also happened as head of the IAEA to have committed the cardinal sin of making the WMD-chanting neocon lunatics who demanded the Iraq adventure look like, well, idiots.

The right gives themselves away when they are confronted with the possible outcome they claim to desire in the public interest, but which turns out to be nothing more than marketing blabber. Why, for example, do their tax cuts for the wealthy always seem to be paramount, even when they result in a massive increase to the national debt that regressives are so fond of ranting against? Why must Cuba be strangled, but China traded with? And why does Krauthammer write, concerning Egypt, that “We are told by sage Western analysts not to worry about the Brotherhood because it probably commands only about 30% of the vote. This is reassurance? In a country where the secular democratic opposition is weak and fractured after decades of persecution, any Islamist party commanding a third of the vote rules the country.”

The bloody truth is that these regresso-monsters couldn’t possibly care less about democracy, except to be sure to block it wherever it interferes with their real agenda. In the case of Egypt, the exposure of their hypocrisy could not be more complete if we had video from a neocon nude beach party. Wait, never mind. Dick Cheney and Peggy Noonan in the buff? Euw. Some metaphors are too horrible to contemplate, despite their illuminating power.

On and on went the likes of Wolfowitz and Rice and Krauthammer about the need to bring democracy to the Middle East, even if that meant launching a war in Iraq which was disastrous in every way imaginable. But, of course, democracy was neither the goal nor outcome in that country, which today has three far more likely scenarios in front of it: either a reversion to Saddam-like dictatorship, civil war, and/or centrifugal explosion into at least three countries instead of one.

Similarly, the Bush administration went on and on about the need for the Palestinians to embrace democracy, until they actually did it. Lo and behold, when elections were held and Hamas won a crushing defeat, the US immediately began undermining the new government’s legitimacy. But that’s hardly news. American efforts to undermine democracy in the Middle East date back to at least 1953, with the toppling of the democratically elected Iranian government, whose great crime was to piss-off British Petroleum by asserting the ludicrous notion that Iranian oil should belong to Iranians. What cheeky little brown bastards, eh?!

But killing Iraqis to set them free was always logically absurd, anyhow, for anyone who doesn’t take their politics as a religion (literally and figuratively), and is willing to examine with even the slightest scintilla of scrutiny the right’s daily dose of dogma for dummies. Iraq was supposed to be a model in the region, which other states would then follow. But that concept was always idiotic from the get-go because the model was already there – indeed, had been there, more or less, for a century – right next door. Turkey was and is a majority Islamic state that is nevertheless pretty solidly democratic and mostly secular, often quite adamantly so. Why did perhaps a million people have to die in order to have a democratic model in the Middle East when there already was one, right there?

Even more ludicrous was the continuing close relationship between the United States – especially Republicans, and especially especially the House of Bush – with the autocracies of the Middle East we’re supposedly meant to be democratizing. I mean, really, if the US government wanted to democratize the Middle East, why not just pull a Saudi prince or two aside for a chat at the next family barbeque? Why not pick up the phone, call Mubarak and tell him to quit screwin’ around with his whole secret police thing? And, if he didn’t get the message, why not just stop sending him gobs of money? Or stop training those very secret police? You know, why not apply a little of that much-vaunted conservative tough love?

The reason is the same explanation for why no one on the right is embracing real democracy as it is occurring right before our eyes in Egypt, right now. It isn’t democracy that is desired by these chickenhawk cowards, who all seemed to have been quite preoccupied with studying Machiavelli or business administration when the US was ‘bringing democracy’ to Vietnam during their era, and thus, goshdarnit, unfortunately had to miss the war. Despite the breathtaking bravery of the Egyptian public seeking to overthrow their American stooge-tyrant and his violent squads of mercenary goons, regressives don’t seem quite moved, other than to cynicism. And as for Nobel Peace Prize winners who are out on the streets risking life and limb, and who might be the perfect match for the moment, they are “useful idiots”. Instead, says Krauthammer, let’s have a military dictatorship to replace the political one, and give us what we really want: “The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The U.S. should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife – and then guarantee – what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.”

The military? Does Krauthammer mean the same military that has been propping up the Mubarak regime for thirty years? The one with deep ties to the US and even Israel? The one that seems to be doing little of use during the current crisis? Gosh, I’m confused. Maybe he’s thinking of a different Egyptian army.

Did I mention Israel? That is, of course, one of the main – if not the top – reason that neocons hate the idea of democracy in region, and undermine it everywhere they can, except in places like Iran. What is happening in Egypt is brilliant and inspirational for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it will effectively knock the stool out from underneath the arrogant, repressive and petulant foreign policy of the Israelis. Their ongoing unwillingness to forsake a transparent colonialism project in exchange for peace in the region will now likely be far less sustainable. As long as Israel no longer had to worry about neighbors like Egypt and Jordan reacting to their land-grabs and wholesale human rights violations, they could act with impunity. For years, everyone has been waiting for an American government to clip Israel’s wings, as seemingly the only solution to the protracted crisis, but it never happened. No one ever thought about the other fundamental assumptions on which Israeli policy is predicated. Now they are.

Which is, also, no doubt why Barack Obama is once again playing the role of historical bystander he seems to find so comforting. Mr. Incremental. Mr. Behind-The-Scenes. Mr. Change-You-Believe-In-As-Long-As-You-Do-It-For-Yourself. It’s disgusting. Look, you’re either the bat or you’re the ball, and Obama’s got plenty of stitches to show emphatically which side of the equation he’s on, despite the awesome powers of the American presidency that he possesses, something none of the rest of us have at our disposal. Including every one of those kids on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez getting their heads cracked open. They know a thing or two about the effect of baseball bats. And they know which side America has always been on, and which side it is on now. Is this supposed to be prudent, realist, foreign policy? Just exactly how do they think a new regime is going to treat America after decades of US sponsored repression and then hostility to a liberating revolutionary movement at the moment when crunch time hits? Gee, I dunno. Can you say ‘Iran’? Why does ‘Mubarak’ all of a sudden improbably rhyme so well with ‘Pahlavi’?

The train of liberation has left the station, and may traverse across much of the Middle East before all is said and done. The question is not whether the train will roll, but only whether each of us will be on board, on the platform, or digging up the rails.

Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, these are our moral choices:

Walk like an Egyptian.

Talk like a Neocon.

Gawk like an Obama.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m with the kids on the streets of Cairo.

As for the United States and its leadership of old men dressed in young people’s clothing, the world is passing us by.

It should. We’re dinosaurs.

On a good day.

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People: Gun Owners

Change.org

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People

Targeting: The U.S. Senate and The U.S. House of Representatives

Started by: Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund

Every day, 34 Americans are murdered with guns, and we can't accept the flaws in our background check system that lead to these tragic deaths.

The recent shooting in Tucson is another tragic reminder of how easy it is for dangerous people to get their hands on guns.

Our gun laws are designed to prevent felons, the mentally ill, and drug abusers from purchasing guns. But the background check system is broken, and loopholes in the law allow criminals to buy guns with no questions asked.

Please join 550 Mayors from around the country in sending a message to Congress to Fix Gun Checks by taking two important steps:

1) Get all the names of people who should be prohibited from buying guns into the background check system.

2) Require a background check for every gun sale in America.

Targeting: The U.S. Senate and The U.S. House of Representatives

Started by: Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund

Every day, 34 Americans are murdered with guns, and we can't accept the flaws in our background check system that lead to these tragic deaths.

The recent shooting in Tucson is another tragic reminder of how easy it is for dangerous people to get their hands on guns.

Our gun laws are designed to prevent felons, the mentally ill, and drug abusers from purchasing guns. But the background check system is broken, and loopholes in the law allow criminals to buy guns with no questions asked.

Please join 550 Mayors from around the country in sending a message to Congress to Fix Gun Checks by taking two important steps:

1) Get all the names of people who should be prohibited from buying guns into the background check system.

2) Require a background check for every gun sale in America.

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People

Greetings,

The recent shootings in Tucson have once again exposed flaws in America’s efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, drug abusers, the mentally ill and other dangerous people.

I am joining more than 550 U.S. Mayors in calling on Congress to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people by taking two critical steps:

1) Get all the names of people who should be prohibited from buying guns into the background check system.

2) Require a background check for every gun sale in America.

Every day in America, 34 people are murdered with guns. We can't accept the flaws in our background check system that lead to these tragic deaths.

[Your name]

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• 15,000 signatures and counting! Let's go for 25,000. · 4 days ago
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Sign the Petition

February 6, 2011 at 09:13:25

How Wikileaks could Enhance Our Collective Awareness

By Joan Marques (about the author)

opednews.com

The recent disclosures on Wikileaks about alleged pre 9/11 awareness from top government officials about the pending calamities in 2001 has stirred up a wide array of emotions among many, varying from disbelief to anger, sadness to skepticism, contempt to despair: no sentiment is left behind. While the story validates suspicions that had lived within many through the years, there are also skeptics who question the credibility of the source.

The question about credibility of Wikileaks informants actually came up in a workshop on ethical leadership among MBA's, mostly working adults, the night before Wikileaks posted the report on the 2001 occurrences. A student asked how readers would know whether the leaked information is truthful, and not merely conjured up by some melodramatic, disgruntled, or malicious-minded individual or entity who wants to stir up turmoil or, in the case of 9/11, tear open old wounds.

The response to this question was practically unanimous among the workshop participants: any source could be questioned on legitimacy if we choose to go that route, because every piece of information we receive through any medium is based on one person or group's perspectives, often driven by particular interests, while there are almost always other perspectives and interests that are in direct opposition to that one. We experience it all the time in all settings. When it comes to media releases we even know which station to tune to or newspaper to read when we want to hear criticism, and which one to find when we want to hear or read about praise for any given subject. The truth we ultimately adopt depends on our capacity to engage in critical thinking, because the is how we weave together a story that sounds acceptable to us.

Wikileaks: some perspectives

There is still quite some confusion about Wikileaks. The source is gaining attention from increasingly larger crowds, thanks to the widely diverging exposure it receives from the media. Nonetheless, many still seem to struggle with their opinion about this emerging giant that has been rather latent in its first few years of existence, but is now steadfastly demanding attention of all who have even the slightest interest in the whereabouts of our world and its occupants.

Asking around in the earlier mentioned ethical leadership workshop with about 20 working adults in grad school what they thought of Wikileaks, some interesting statements surfaced. Some admitted that they were curious about many things throughout history that were never clearly addressed, and hoped Wikileaks would shine some long withheld light on these matters. Others questioned the driving motives behind Wikileaks and its operators. Yet others expressed their caution about the disclosure of government secrets. One participant stated that exposure of sensitive information may not only embarrass governments and other powerful sources, but can actually disrupt relationships between nations and even lead to new wars.

This point was, of course, as sensible as the others. Disclosing sensitive material is never enjoyable or appreciated by all, especially when reputations and multilateral relationships are involved.

Conscious question

A serious question we should ask ourselves, however, is: should we continue to hush matters for the short-term sake of what is usually a small group of powerful manipulators? Admitted: when the many secrets that undoubtedly exist in all governments, big businesses, and other powerful entities, will first be divulged, we may expect some turbulence. There may even be some disturbing events erupting from these disclosures. Nonetheless, the long term advantages should also seriously be considered:

1. Fewer manipulative practices. With the arrival of Wikileaks, a powerful outlet has been established for whistleblowers worldwide. The psychological effect is that decision-making entities may think more carefully before engaging in practices that shun the light of day from now on, as the chance is imminent that these practices could leak out and place these entities in the dreadful position of losing more than they could possibly win with their act.

2. Increased collective intelligence of the human race. If we can achieve a point where there is sufficient transparency in the reasons and outcomes of things, we would simultaneously have established a more equity based availability of information to all who want to know, instead of the current situation in which much information is sealed in the hands, minds, or vaults of a small elite.

3. End of global segregation. When there is nothing to hide, openness is not a problem. Greater openness encourages increased mutual acceptance and tolerance. Increased mutual acceptance and tolerance results in elimination of anger and hate, since there is no reason for "us" versus "them" thinking. On the long run, then, we could reach a point of greater integration, ensuing from the awareness that, once all barricades have been pulled down, we are more alike than we have admitted or realized for centuries.

4. Enlarged mental horizons. Supported by the unstoppable trend of social networks, the openness that Wikileaks can instigate may lead to a broader mindset within human beings, in which mainstream thinking patterns will no longer be limited to cities, states, countries, or continents, but in which the wellbeing of all living beings worldwide will be considered as easily as we now consider the wellbeing of our families or communities. This may finally give way to a global compact which is not just an ethereal dream, but actually the 8th Millennium Development Goal as formulated by the United Nations under leadership of Kofi Anan in 2000.

5. Restoring of global balance. This may sound farfetched, but is a consequence of the four previous points. With more caution in decision-making, greater transparency and increased average human intelligence, end of segregative practices, and enlarged mental horizons, we could attain a point of expanded awareness on the fulfillment of a larger purpose than mere individual gain and grandeur.

Wikileaks Cycle of Collective Awareness by Dr. Joan Marques

Reviewing the long-term possibilities that could be achieved when using Wikileaks properly, I couldn't help but think of John Lennon's almost 40 year old "Imagine":

Imagine there's no countries.

It isn't hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for.

And no religion too.

Imagine all the people living life in peace"

I guess I could be considered just as much a dreamer as Lennon was, but my dream seems to be closer to reality than his. Time will tell.

Joan Marques is the author of "Joy at Work, Work at Joy: Living and Working Mindfully Every Day" (Personhood Press, 2010), and co-editor of "The Workplace and Spirituality: New Perspectives in Research and Practice" (Skylight Paths, 2009), an (more...)

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