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RECENT POSTS
This Just In : Charlton Heston’s Gun Taken From His Cold, Dead Hands
The World We have Known is Vanishing Before Our Eyes
Recession, Depression, Collapse: What’s Fear Got To Do With It?
By Carolyn Baker / April 13, 2008
Interesting, isn’t it, that mainstream economists need a so-called economic guru like Alan Greenspan to confirm that the U.S. economy is in recession? If the maestro says it is so, then it is. If he doesn’t, then the “downturn” has a silver lining. And now we have the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, stating what the American public has known all too well during the past year: “The economy has taken a sharp downturn.” Gee, Mr. Paulson, you get the understatement of the year award because what Americans have also discovered is that the middle class is now almost extinct after only a few decades of having one-thanks to you and your friends at Goldman Sachs.
No one walking away from a foreclosed home, no one declaring bankruptcy, no uninsured person staring in the face tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills needs a maestro or any other member of the ruling elite to tell them that not only are we in a recession, but we are on a fast-track to a depression that is going to make 1929 look like living in the lap of luxury. It’s called the collapse of Western civilization, and it is well underway.
Oh, you don’t like my use of the word “collapse”? Then please listen up.
One of the most inspiring but also heart-wrenching stories I’ve seen this past week when Truth To Power was in the midst of its spring fundraiser and was not reporting much news was the CBS report on Tennessee-based Remote Area Medical’s efforts to bring health and dental care to the uninsured or underinsured not only throughout the world, but now more than ever, in the U.S. As I watched this must-see video clip, my heart soared, even as I wept. What was confirmed in every cell of my body was that the American healthcare system has already collapsed, and that every other institution in this nation is rapidly succumbing to the domino effect of empire’s unequivocal unraveling. Watch the CBS report for yourself, and I’m certain you will agree.
In looking honestly at these realities, it is impossible not to feel fearful, and some may once again accuse me of fear-mongering. However, I argue that fear is not necessarily a negative emotion or an unproductive waste of energy. I’m not talking about fear for the sake of fear, but rather, fear as a motivator-fear as a force that compels us to act.
Gavin De Becker’s 1997 book The Gift Of Fear was written to assist readers in detecting violent behavior in the workplace, in the street, or in the home, for the purpose of protecting themselves. In contemplating collapse we are not dealing up close and personal with violence-at least not in this stage of collapse, as much as we are attempting to read the signals it is sending so that we may wisely prepare ourselves for navigating it. Among the author’s suggestions are:
* Recognizing the survival signals that warn us of impending danger
* Relying on our intuition
* Separating real from imagined danger
* Moving beyond denial so that one can tune in to one’s intuition
As we witness collapse and experience its impact on our lives, the fundamental concept of De Becker’s book may serve us well. He argues that fear is an evolutionary gift imbedded in our DNA for the purpose of assisting our survival. Becoming overwhelmed with it or wallowing in it is indeed not useful, but neither is attempting to hermetically seal ourselves off from it. In fact, as De Becker argues, fear helps us move out of denial so that we can really tune into our intuition which facilitates our becoming proactive on our own behalf. What we need is not exemption from fear but a way of integrating it into our current reality in balance with other emotions.
Read the rest of it here.
Information Clearing House / The Rag Blog
Calling to Task Those Who Disregard the Constitution
Cheney, Torture and the Chance to Restore the Rule of Law
By John Nichols / April 12, 2008
The Constitution of the United States is absolutely clear when it comes to matters of torture.
Amendment 8 specifically states that, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Acts of torture are by definition and common understanding — certainly at the time of the drafting of the nation’s essential document and arguably even in this less-enlightened era — cruel and unusual punishments.
Vice President Dick Cheney, when he assumed the second most powerful office in the land after the disputed election of 2000, swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
Any reasonable reader of that oath would conclude that Cheney bound himself to abide by the Constitution — and thus to avoid any involvement with the promotion of acts of torture upon detainees of the United States government.
Yet we now know from revelations made by former senior intelligence officials to ABC News and the Associated Press that Cheney and other members of the administration — who apparently took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods were discussed — authorized the use of waterboarding and other generally recognized torture techniques.
There is no question that Cheney violated his oath of office, which bound him to support and defend a Constitution that he disregarded.
The question is: How will responsible Americans respond?
The power to hold Cheney to account rests with Congress.
The power to get Congress to act rests with the American people.
Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, a respected lawyer who has been working with a number of other Constitutional experts and activists, has responded — not just to Cheney’s trashing of the Constitution but to the long list of Bush administration wrongs.
Anderson is circulating a letter that reads:
As patriotic Americans, we believe in knowing the truth about our government. Regardless of political affiliation, we believe in our constitutional democracy. We believe in the rule of law – that no person, regardless of position, is above the law.
We believe in respecting basic human rights – and have been proud to distinguish our nation from those countries where people are kidnapped, disappeared, and tortured.
We believe that in a democracy likes ours, citizens are entitled to know whether government officials are living up to their oaths to defend and preserve the Constitution, and whether they are abusing the human rights of people here or elsewhere in the world.
This is not a partisan matter. It is a matter of responsible citizenship.
Recently, several conscientious members of the House Judiciary Committee, including the Chair, Congressman John Conyers, have indicated support for public hearings to investigate and disclose the facts concerning claims of illegal conduct and other abuses of power by members of the Executive Branch. If misconduct has occurred, the American people are entitled to know. If misconduct has not occurred, hearings will determine and disclose that as well.
By showing that the American people – without political partisanship – support the disclosure of the truth through public hearings, we can make a difference, together standing up for the truth, the rule of law, and our Constitution.
• We are entitled to know whether members of the Executive Branch misrepresented the facts and withheld crucial information, thereby deceiving our nation and the international community before the invasion of Iraq.
• As American citizens who value the system of checks and balances among the three branches of government, we are entitled to know whether that system has been seriously undermined. We are entitled to know whether the courts and Congress have fulfilled their important constitutional roles in investigating and disclosing the misuse of Executive power.
• Our nation has engaged in the unprecedented, illegal, and immoral kidnapping, disappearance, and torture of human beings around the world (some of whom have been proven to be innocent of any wrongdoing), with no due process, in complete secrecy, and with no accountability. Even US citizens have been held in prisons indefinitely, with no legal counsel, no trial, and no charges filed against them. As Americans, we are entitled to know what has occurred in connection with these human rights abuses. In our democratic system of government, there must be full accountability.
Speaking out together, as concerned, patriotic Americans, we can send a clear message to Congress: In the United States, the rule of law must prevail, our Constitution cannot be disregarded, and the fundamental morality to which our nation has always laid claim will be restored.
Anderson asks that Americans who support the principles outlined in this letter — as I do — go to his Restore the Rule of Law website and sign on.
Signing this letter, says Anderson, who has opened an important dialogue about the Constitution and White House accountability with Conyers and other key players on the Judiciary Committee, “indicates to Congressman Conyers, other members of the House Judiciary Committee, and Congress as a whole that you support efforts to investigate and disclose any illegal acts and abuses of power by the President and others in his administration. Declare to the world, and to our posterity, that, as a US citizen:
• You proudly support our long-held constitutional principles.
• You are speaking out to reaffirm our democracy.
• You demand accountability for those in our government who have disregarded our Constitution, violated statutory law, or engaged in immoral human-rights abuses.”
Anderson’s is an authentic patriotic response to the latest revelations about Dick Cheney’s disregard for the Constitution.
Go to the Restore the Rule of Law website and sign on and do what Cheney did not: support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Source / The Nation / The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Cheney, Civil Liberties, Congress, Human Rights, Justice, Torture
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Maoists Take Elections in Nepal
Communist party of Nepal, Maoist, president Prachanda, who uses only first name, gestures after winning his seat in recent heldelections, in Katmandu, Nepal, Saturday, April 12, 2008. Former rebel Communistparty of Nepal is leading in most of the constituency, where vote counting hasbegan for the Thursday election that will rewrite its constitution, the latesteffort to transform a troubled, near-medieval land into a modern democracy. Redcolor on the faces is the scented powder which also signifies the color of theparty flag. AP Photo by Manish Swarup / AP
Maoist Leader Wins Seat in Nepal
By Binaj Gurubacharya / April 13, 2008
KATMANDU, Nepal — After spending a decade leading a communist insurgency in the mountains of Nepal, former top rebel Prachanda became the newest member Saturday of an assembly that will chart the Himalayan country’s future.
Prachanda, whose rebel nom de guerre means “the fierce one,” led a powerful showing by the former Maoists rebels in early results from Thursday’s elections. The vote is expected to usher in sweeping changes to the Himalayan country and likely signals the end of a 239-year-old royal dynasty.
The Maoists, who are still considered a terrorist group by the United States, have so far won 44 seats out of the 79 where counting has been completed. The ex-rebels, formally known as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), were leading in most of the other areas where votes were still being tallied, the Election Commission said Sunday.
“This victory is a command by the Nepali people to establish lasting peace,” Prachanda, 54, told reporters after the result was announced. “We are fully committed to the peace process andmultiparty democracy and to rebuild this country.”
On Sunday, two people were seriously wounded in gun fight between supporters of the rival Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) and Rastriya Prajatantra Party, said Kavilashi Panthi, chief government administrator in the southeastern Siraha district.
King Gyanendra, who is set to lose his throne soon after final election results are announced, praised the election’s turnout in a brief message issued Sunday, the Nepalese new year.
“The enthusiastic participation of the Nepalese people in the Constituent Assembly elections,through which they have emphatically reiterated their firm resolve not to compromise the nation’s existence, independence and integrity under any circumstance, is a source of satisfaction for us,” the king said.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center sent 62 observers to monitor the election, described the election as one of the “most profoundly important” ones he has witnessed. He said it marked the end of a decade of political violence and the likely transformation of Nepal from a Hindu kingdom to a democratic republic.
“If the Maoists do gain a substantial share of power, I hope the United States will recognize and do business with the government,” Carter said at a news conference in Katmandu.
Complete results for the 601-seat Constituent Assembly were not expected for a few weeks, though officials said they should have a clear picture of what the assembly will look later this coming week.
None of the parties who contested the vote — from the Maoists to centrist democrats to old-school royalists — are expected to win a majority. But the Maoists’ strong early showing has surprised most observers, who before the vote had them placing third behind the country’s traditional powers.
The election has been touted as the cornerstone of the 2006 peace deal with the Maoists, whose 10-year-long insurgency left about 13,000 people dead. The agreement followed weeks of unrest that forced Nepal’s autocratic king to cede absolute power, which he had seized a year earlier.
Prachanda, whose real name is Pushpa Kamal Dahal, got almost twice the number of votes than his closest competitor, said election official Devendra Parajuli after declaring him the winner of one of Katmandu’s constituencies.
Afterward, supporters covered him with flower garlands and chanted slogans hailing his victory. Hundreds crowded the Birendra Convention Center in Katmandu where the votes were counted, waving red-and-white flags bearing the hammer and sickle.
“I want to assure the international community, especially India and China … that we will have good relations with them and work to secure all cooperation for Nepal,” Prachanda said.
Scattered shootings and clashes that killed two people on election day and eight others in the days leading up to the poll did not deter millions of Nepalis from casting ballots in the country’s first election in nine years.
Along with the Maoists’ 44 seats, the centrist Nepali Congress won 12 and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) took 14 by Sunday, the Election Commission said.
Another small communist party, the Nepal Workers and Peasants’ Party, won two seats, and the Madeshi People’s Right Forum, a party that wants greater autonomy for southern Nepal, won six. Another ethnic rights group in southern Nepal, the Tarai Madesh Democratic Party, had won one seat.
A complete count of votes in all 240 constituencies was expected to take weeks because of Nepal’s rugged, mountainous terrain. Another 335 seats are being chosen through a nationwide proportional representation system with quotas for women and Nepal’s myriad ethnic and caste groups. The remaining 26 seats are reserved for major politicians who don’t win seats.
Nonetheless, the Maoists were already predicting a complete victory.
“We will get a clear majority in the final results,” said Hisila Yami, a senior Maoists member. “This is a reflection of the people’s desire for a republic that our party has always stood for.”
The Election Commission said there would be re-polling in at least 60 locations because of voting irregularities. That number could rise as election complaints are investigated, it said.
Source. Associated Press
Bush must recognise Maoist’s victory in Nepal: Carter
The Times of India / April 13, 2008KATHMANDU: Criticising the Bush Administration’s policy not to engage in parleys with the Maoists in Nepal, former US President Jimmy Carter on Saturday said that if Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) does well in the Constituent Assembly, the US must recognise it.
He also said that the outcome of the elections would “truly represent the aspirations of the people”.
“The Carter Centre found that the majority of Nepali voters participated in a remarkable and relatively peaceful constituent assembly election on April 10, 2008. Preliminary reports indicate that the administration of this election was well executed, bearing testimony to the hard work of election officials and the determination of Nepal’s people to ensure that their country continues on the path to sustainable peace and democracy,” the former US President said reading out from a statement issued by the centre.
Carter further said that for Nepal it is essential “to remain calm, to await final results, and where there are disputes, to follow appropriate legal procedures.”
He added that his centre would continue to observe the district counting and national tabulation until they are complete.
“We encourage all Nepalis to remain actively involved in the drafting of the constitution to ensure that the process is transparent, accountable and inclusive,” nepalnews.com quoted Carter, as saying.
Maoists emerge major force, The Times of India / The Rag Blog
Nepal’s Maoist leader speaks to Al Jazeera – 09 April 08
Rear Offensive
Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog
Ex-CIA analyst McGovern on Petraeus and Cheney
Ray McGovern: Was Cheney behind Iraqi army’s failed Basra offensive?
April 11, 2008
Raymond McGovern is a retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many of them. McGovern was born and raised in Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.
Transcript:
Does Sen. Kennedy know something we don’t?
MATTHEW PALEVSKY,PRESENTER: Here on Capitol Hill, both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker had testified to Iraq several times over the last couple of days. To better understand their testimonies, I spoke with former CIA official Ray McGovern. McGovern worked for the federal government for over 27 years and under seven different presidents, presenting the morning intelligence briefing at the White House for several of them.
RAY MCGOVERN, RETIRED CIA OFFICER AND POLITICAL ACTIVIST: Mostly it was entirely predictable. What shocked me was how Senator Kennedy, at the very end of his remarks, apropos of nothing, asked Petraeus and Crocker, “Tell me, General, and Ambassador Crocker, when the vice president was in Baghdad, were you in any meetings where the offensive against Basra was discussed with the vice president?”
(CLIP BEGINS)
TED KENNEDY, US SENATOR (D-MA): Were you at any meetings with the vice president or Ambassador Crocker where the issue of the Basra invasion took place?
RYAN CROCKER, US AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ: It was not discussed.
KENNEDY: It was not discussed at all during the vice president’s visit to Baghdad? The possibility of Maliki going into Basra was not discussed? You were not at any meetings where the vice president was present or where this was discussed in his presence?
CROCKER: It was not discussed in any meeting I attended. No, sir.
KENNEDY: General?
DAVID PETRAEUS, COMMANDING GENERAL, MULTINATIONAL FORCE IRAQ: Same, Senator.
KENNEDY: Thank you. My time’s up.
PETRAEUS: Thank you, sir.
(CLIP ENDS)
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, I thought Petraeus was going to have a little conniptionary. He turned a little bit white and looked at Crocker, and Crocker, ashen as he was for the whole time, even paled the more, and he thought really quick, and his eyes sort of went like this, and he said, “No, sir. I was at no meetings, no meetings where Basra was discussed with the vice president.” “And you, General Petraeus?” “Same.” I think Kennedy knows more than the rest of us know. I think it’s very clear that if you’re looking for why Maliki went off half-cocked for a big offensive down against Muqtada al-Sadr in southern Iraq, it was because Cheney told him to. And I would be shocked if Cheney didn’t tell Petraeus and Crocker what he was going to tell Maliki—not only Cheney, but McCain.
They were both there just days before. Petraeus has hundreds of troops there embedded with the Iraqi forces. He had to know exactly what was going on. He just couldn’t stop it. Why? Well, he didn’t want to stop it, because Cheney is running things. The plan was to get down there into the south, to (A) show that this fellow could take the initiative and be—well, the president was instructed two days later to say this is a defining moment, a defining moment in the leadership of Prime Minister Maliki. Oh, yeah, it sure was, but not the way they meant. And so Petraeus and Crocker could come before Congress and say, “Look, you told us,” you know, “you told us last time that the Iraqis had to take more initiative so that we’re not doing the fighting.” Well, look—just what happened. You cleaned out the whole of southern Iraq.
And they still played that theme, bring several changes on that theme. Here Maliki finally took the initiative, “Iraqis are doing—you know, we supported them.” But that was only an half-truth. The other truth was he lost miserably. Muqtada al-Sadr has 70,000 people under arms with better arms than Maliki had. And if it weren’t for the US air force and US ground troops to bail them out, not only down there in Basra but out from Sadr City, you know, he would have had even a bloodier nose. Right after it became clear that, you know, it’s a great initiative, but it was going to lose, you know, they distanced themselves from it and they told all the press people, you know, “We didn’t know anything about [inaudible].” I mean, Hayden, the head of the CIA, goes on Meet the Press and says, you know, “I didn’t know anything about it, and neither did Petraeus or Crocker.”
(CLIP BEGINS)
TIM RUSSERT, HOST, MEET THE PRESS: The United States was not informed by the Iraqis that he was going to do this?
GEN. VINCENT HAYDEN, CIA DIRECTOR: I don’t know what went on on the ground in Baghdad prior to the operation. I do know that this was a decision of the Iraqi government by the prime minister, and personally by the prime minister, and that he’s relying on Iraqi forces, by and large, to take this action.
RUSSERT: Were you aware of it?
HAYDEN: I was—. In terms of being pre-briefed or having, you know, the normal planning process, in which you build up to this days or weeks ahead of time, no, no, I was not.
RUSSERT: You didn’t know it was going to happen?
HAYDEN: No more so than Dave Petraeus or Ambassador Crocker did.
(CLIP ENDS)
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, you know, that’s a crock. And in the Bronx, where I come from, we say “that’s a crock,” okay? Because [inaudible] Petraeus has got people all over that Iraqi army, and there’s no way that he could not have known. And I’m sure that Cheney told him, included him as well. Maliki can’t scratch his nose without asking Petraeus to make sure there are some bodyguards around.
So it was very much a joint operation. Ironically, they wanted to give the initiative to Maliki because they thought it might succeed, and then they wanted to give the initiative to Maliki because it failed so miserably. You know. This is a great crew, you know. Those of us who are old enough to have been through Vietnam, you know, this is an old tactic. You can construct a concept out of language: “special group” can be brought to mean whatever you want it to mean, okay?
And so in this case it’s always Iranian-influenced, nefarious influence from Iran, and all these adjectives that were used yesterday to blame what’s happening on—you know. I mean, you really need to be able to blame somebody. And as has been pointed out ad nauseam, the Iranians are indeed involved with all these groups, including Maliki, including the other part of the government, so to speak. And so to the degree things are going a-¬shambles, well, it must be the Iranians. How do we say the Iranians if they’re involved with everybody? Ah! How about “special groups”? Do you think that will work? Well, it seemed to work yesterday, because some of the congress people were using the same thing.
And so, you know, those who were more perspicacious or could see through this stuff [were] saying, “Wow, this is really quite a dog and pony show.” Petraeus talked about battlefield geometry; I’ll talk about arithmetic. Okay? Look at his own manual about insurgency. There’s no ratio that can ever cope with a country. He talked about 27 million. There aren’t 27 million Iraqis anymore, only 23 million, ’cause four [million] are outside in diaspora, four [million] refugees, okay?
But you can’t occupy a country that doesn’t want to be occupied with the ratio of troops that we have. And the reason we don’t have more troops is because there are no more troops. And so what you have is very similar to Vietnam. We have even US colonels—at the very end of Vietnam, Colonel Harry Summers, who was the army colonel who was sent to Hanoi to negotiate the final withdrawal of US and other troops—okay? So he goes there and he makes the big mistake of saying, “Colonel Tu”—that was his opposite number—”Colonel Tu, you have to admit that you never beat us at a pitched battle.” And Tu looks at him. He says, “That is correct. It is also irrelevant.”
Pitched battles don’t happen in insurgencies. And so, as somebody pointed out yesterday—I guess it was said at a Web—here we have taken the most sophisticated, maneuverable forces that have ever been created in the world, and wasted them, squandered them on an enterprise that has no chance of being won. And I have been saying that, personally, for four and a half years.
Source. / The Real News Network
Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog
Skeletor Is Gonna Be Watching You
Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in US
by Spencer S. Hsu
The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department’s new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities — such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.
Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.
“There is no basis to suggest that this process is in any way insufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans,” Chertoff wrote to Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee and its intelligence subcommittee, respectively, in letters released yesterday.
“I think we’ve fully addressed anybody’s concerns,” Chertoff added in remarks last week to bloggers. “I think the way is now clear to stand it up and go warm on it.”
His statements marked a fresh determination to operate the department’s new National Applications Office as part of its counterterrorism efforts. The administration in May 2007 gave DHS authority to coordinate requests for satellite imagery, radar, electronic-signal information, chemical detection and other monitoring capabilities that have been used for decades within U.S. borders for mapping and disaster response.
But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses.
Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office’s operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate.
“I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration,” said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. “I won’t make the same mistake. . . . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program.”
Thompson called DHS’s release Thursday of the office’s procedures and a civil liberties impact assessment “a good start.” But, he said, “We still don’t know whether the NAO will pass constitutional muster since no legal framework has been provided.”
DHS officials said the demands are unwarranted. “The legal framework that governs the National Applications Office . . . is reflected in the Constitution, the U.S. Code and all other U.S. laws,” said DHS spokeswoman Laura Keehner. She said its operations will be subject to “robust,” structured legal scrutiny by multiple agencies.
© 2008 The Washington Post
Source / Common Dreams
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Civil Liberties, Personal Freedom, Privacy, U.S. Government
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The Daily Iraq War Report
And to remind you of the liars that still reside in Washington, DC, with impunity, here is a link to the White House Web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein.
Courtesy of Free Iraq.
9th of April – The Fall of America
By Layla AnwarEveryone says that the 9th of April was the fall of Baghdad…And this Arab Woman says the 9th of April was the Fall of America.
At the gates of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues, hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with queues for exit visas.
Not ONE IRAQI wishes your presence. Not ONE IRAQI accepts your occupation.
And don’t give me that shit about your democratic process and elections. You brought the whores from Iran to rule on your behalf and pimp for their Persian motherland.
You are small players in a game that still eludes you…the Iraqi Game is far greater and bigger than all of your strategies. You have lost in Iraq, you have been totally defeated – Politically, psychologically and economically…
Your tanks, your weapons, your artillery, your jets are nothing for us, for we are RESILIENCE and we are RESISTANCE.
You keep hiding in your camps and your Green Zone with the few Iraqi prostitutes who are willing to work for you. They don’t represent us. They represent your brothel. And their days are numbered…just like yours.
Over 600’000 armed men; soldiers, mercenaries, contractors, intelligence, security, spies add to them the sectarian death militias that you and Iran have armed (Sadr, Dawa, Badr and others), add the Mossad, the Peshermgas of the dirty Zionist Kurds, add the ghettoes you built and where you segregated us, add the millions dead and exiled and maimed…And you still CAN’T CONTROL IRAQ.
Got news for you motherfuckers, you will NEVER CONTROL IRAQ, not in 6 years, not in 10 years, not in 20 years…
Read all of it here. Arab Woman Blues / The Rag Blog
Un-Fuck ‘Em Or Another Sign of a Sick Society
(©1970 by Ron Mesaros & Playboy)
Ignorant History: In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture
By Bill Hatch / April 12, 2008
These thoughts are provoked by Gerald de Groot’s Reflections on The Sixties Unplugged, an arrogant volume by an ignorant historian which argues that the ’60s counterculture achieved nothing of lasting importance.
There are two kinds of hypocrisy about sexual and political matters in our generation: the left hypocrisy and the right hypocrisy. Between the two, one ought to prefer the traditional approach of the right — mis-, mal- and nonfeasance in office and in bed. The left invented the dialectics of “relationship,” and while no less promiscuous than Republicans, they have proved themselves far more self-righteous about it. The left, in general, also runs the American bureaucracy and has invented an entire alternative form of English to explain what they are doing to individuals and why. Only the well-to-do escape this aberrant form of our language.
One of the great achievements of the hippies is that they have never been a part of either faction in terms of ideology, sexual or otherwise. Although they are capable of a social cohesion at times, under certain specific circumstances (from a good party to a political action), hippies are firm believers in the individual’s right to private property and will fight any timber corporation to prevent encroachment on it. I didn’t even understand Peter Coyote’s statement, quoted reverently by De Groot, “Any structure is mutable, but once you’ve chosen it, you have to accept it — if you’re ever going to get any depth. Because depth only comes in the struggle with limits.” But, I have no doubt whatsoever that Ringolevio, by Diggers founder Emmett Grogan and Coyote’s leader, was the best book ever written on the Haight Ashbury, generally considered to be the fountainhead of lamentable “anarchist excesses.” A second take always worth rereading, is the series of articles written by Nick Von Hoffman and illustrated by the great photography of Elaine Mayes, on the anarchic market in marijuana in the Haight. It could not be organized even by organized crime, which tried.
What de Groot, no doubt irrigated by the rouge corncob placed somewhere on his person where the sun never shines, fails to see is that the hippies were and remain the only genuine working-class movement that came out of the Sixties. The other thing he fails to notice is that the hippies, as opposed to their “leaders,” transcended hippydom, in fact and later fiction on the period. At Berkeley, a friend who would definitely be classed as a former hippie, told me years ago, “You watched the anti-war speakers. When they left the podium, you left the crowd because the cops were coming.” Basic working-class wisdom as old as the Haymarket Massacre.
My finest tidbit of revolutionary romanticism from the era comes not from the hippies but from the new left, a friend announcing in a frenzy of ambition that Cesar Chavez was starting a revolution. He meant one that would bring down the state. Any movement based on people not gringos was grasped fervently by the new left to be used as a club against the hippies, those messy Americans (white, black, brown, red or yellow — whatever) having fun. And for those of us who had actually done farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, oh well, how could our opinion count? It is essential to the misappropriation of the complexities of Marx’s critique that anyone with any empirical experience with any memory of actual hard farm labor should be silenced by the terribly articulate suburban pink diaper set.
Although the hippies preferred to make love, not war, when attacked by police they exhibited excellent abilities to defend themselves. My favorite scene from the chaos of late 1968 was, during yet another SWAT invasion of the neighborhood, a fellow with a molotov cocktail alight in his hand, who streaked through several cops, threw it under a squad car and escaped as the car blew up. In the context of that and other riots of that time, it was not fundamentally an attack on the federal, state or local government; it was a statement: Get the fuck out of my neighborhood, quit beating my neighbors and scaring our women and kids. One did not have to be an admirer of either Dylan or Marx to appreciate the magnificently courageous gesture of our neighbor with the flaming cocktail that night.
As for the hippies’ contribution to the election of Nixon in 1968 and the general breakdown of the Roosevelt coalition in the Democratic Party, oh well, whatever, as the hippies would say. De Groot revises the history of the Sixties anti-war movement from the standpoint of the anti-Iraq War movement? Our academic neo-Reds are on the prowl again. The latest credit crisis provides the excuse and once again we get secondary causes as reasons to do what? Man which barricade, where? These clowns haven’t learned anything since the last depression. Socialism is the answer, right? And the question is: what government produces the happiness of its people? The three anti-war demonstrations in which I marched down Market Street, San Francisco, were as far as I could tell, organized by Palestinians. Willie controlled the cops, the Palestinians controlled the peaceful crowd, and it all worked except for the inevitable bullshit provocateurs. The press called them “anarchists,” yet an Asian hippie woman I know and met in the crowd on one march handed me a broadside of a beautiful poem written by a real anarchist postman from Mendocino County. Your basic theoretical anarchist ain’t got no experience in what he preaches.
At least from the vantage point of having worked that summer of 1968 for the US Senate candidate with the most unambiguous stand against the war, while living in the Haight, I have another analysis for the Nixon election: Larry O’Brien was the only Irishman in America who did not indulge himself in a four-month wake after the assassination of Bobby. When the Kennedy faction woke up from the hangover, it was too late. If they had been able to really mourn the man instead of the power they lost that night, they might have realized more important things were at stake than their collective self pity. One need not even mention Lyndon Johnson’s incredible legislative achievements on behalf of the American working class, the huge backlash among racists, or the totalitarian excesses of the Chicago convention to indicate that it remains a bit difficult to blame Nixon on the hippies, who took the brunt of the Daley Machine beating. By that year, out on the west coast, they were already leaving San Francisco in droves to make their amusing, profitable contributions to rural life on the north coast of California.
Read all of this great rant here. CounterPunch / The Rag Blog
Making Foreclosures into Public Events
(Chris Gardner / Getty Images)
Truckers Hit the Brakes
By Barbara Ehrenreich / April 12, 2008
Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I’ll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.
Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching “as far as the eye can see,” according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 miles per hour.
Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down the Port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to pray for the economy.”
The truckers who organized the protests – by CB radio and Internet – have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.
But the truckers’ protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators’ plight – first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may imagine, here in the blogosphere, that everything important travels at the speed of pixels bouncing off of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation’s goods – from Cheerios to Chapstick – travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers’ strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to me: “If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there’s going to be nothing they can do about it.”
More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to maintain this is not just about us,” JB – which is his CB handle and stands for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs – told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. “It’s about everybody – the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”
At least one of the truckers’ tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On March 29, Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by Daimler-Chrysler – only he did it publicly, with flair, right in front of the statehouse in Augusta. “Repossession is something people don’t usually see,” he says, and he wanted the state legislature to take notice. As he took the keys, the representative of Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, “I don’t see why you couldn’t make the payments.” To which Hayden responded, “See, I have to pay for fuel and food, and I’ve eaten too many meals in my life to give that up.”
Read all of it here. / The Nation / The Rag Blog
Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups
Meet the private security firm that spied on Greenpeace and other environmental outfits for corporate clients. A tale of intrigue, infiltration, and dumpster-diving.
By James Ridgeway / April 11, 2008
A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.
In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; it handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted “surveillance,” and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.
BBI, which was headquartered in Easton, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, worked extensively, according to billing records, for public-relations companies, including Ketchum, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. At the time, these PR outfits were servicing corporate clients fighting environmental organizations opposed to their products or actions. Ketchum, for example, was working for Dow Chemical and Kraft Foods; Nichols-Dezenhall, according to BBI records, was working with Condea Vista, a chemical manufacturing firm that in 1994 leaked up to 47 million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected carcinogen, into the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.
Like other firms specializing in snooping, Beckett Brown turned to garbage swiping as a key tactic. BBI officials and contractors routinely conducted what the firm referred to as “D-line” operations, in which its operatives would seek access to the trash of a target, with the hope of finding useful documents. One midnight raid targeted Greenpeace. One BBI document lists the addresses of several other environmental groups as “possible sites” for operations: the National Environmental Trust, the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Media Services, the Environmental Working Group, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an organization run by Lois Gibbs, famous for exposing the toxic dangers of New York’s Love Canal. For its rubbish-rifling operations, BBI employed a police officer in the District of Columbia and a former member of the Maryland state police.
Beckett Brown’s efforts to penetrate environmental groups and other targets came to an end when the business essentially dissolved in 2001 amid infighting between the principals. But the firm’s officials went on to work in other security firms that remain active today.
Beckett Brown International began when John C. Dodd III met Richard Beckett at a bar in Easton in 1994. Dodd had recently become a millionaire after his father had sold an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship on Maryland’s eastern shore. Beckett ran a local executive recruiting and consulting business. Soon after they met, according to Dodd, Beckett introduced him to Paul Rakowski, a recently retired Secret Service agent, who had put in two decades protecting presidents and foreign heads of state and had become regional manager of the agency’s financial crimes division. Rakowski told Dodd he had an idea for a new security business.
Dodd subsequently received a fax of a business plan for the new company. The sender’s address at the top of the fax, according to Dodd, read: “11/02/94 USSS Financial Crimes Division/Forgery”—which suggested it had come from a Secret Service office. But Dodd was reluctant to put in the start-up money for the enterprise, because he didn’t know who all the partners were. To impress him, Dodd says, Rakowski and his former Secret Service colleagues began taking him and his friends on special tours of the White House. “This wasn’t a White House tour conducted by tour guides,” he says. “They would take us…to areas that said ‘Do not pass this line.'”
Cops and Former Secret Service Agents
At one point, Dodd says, a senior Secret Service agent named Joseph Masonis arranged for him to tour a Secret Service facility. “To encourage me to invest in this company,” Dodd notes, “they all said ‘why not go up to technical security headquarters [of the Secret Service] and you will get an exclusive tour.’…They showed me everything….They were worried about someone flying way up high in a plane, miles from the White House, jumping out of a plane, skydiving, popping the chute and getting on the White House grounds without anybody knowing it. They were working on the technology to pick that up.” Dodd says he was blown away by what he saw. (Masonis says, “I have never taken Mr. Dodd to any facility in D.C.”) And at a waterfront party, Dodd says, he was introduced to and deeply impressed by George Ferris, another Secret Service officer and an expert in demolitions.
Read all of it here. Includes supporting documents. / Mother Jones
Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog
