The Rag Blog

TONY Blair was today branded a “dangerous warmonger” as anti-war activists called on his successor to pull troops out of Iraq.

Thousands of people staged a noisy demonstration outside Labour’s special leadership conference in Manchester, marching with banners which read: “Troops Out”.

The Stop The War Coalition said one of the first announcements by Gordon Brown when he becomes Prime Minister on Wednesday should be the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chairman Andrew Murray said at a city centre rally: “We are here to wave goodbye to the most dangerous and warmongering prime minister in modern British history and to demand that he takes his policies with him.

“The Pope may forgive Tony Blair but the British people will not. We are demanding that Gordon Brown gives us a fresh start by pulling troops out of Iraq and breaking with George Bush’s foreign policy.”

The Coalition’s convener Lindsey German said: “Four million Iraqis are now refugees and the number of deaths in that country is now greater than all the British civilian and military casualties in the Second World War, so I say good riddance to Tony Blair.

“Our message to Gordon Brown is that he cannot carry on with the same disastrous policies. The so-called war on terror has created two failed occupations which has led to incredible instability across the Middle East.

“We have to change course, otherwise the war will simply go on with many more deaths.”

Kate Hudson, chairwoman of CND, said: “Of all the morally reprehensible things that the Labour party has done in the last 10 years, going to war in Iraq and deciding to replace Trident nuclear weapons are the worst.

“With a new leader we need a new foreign policy.”

The names of soldiers killed in Iraq were read out at the rally and organisers were planning to hand in a letter to the Labour conference, signed by thousands of members of the public, actors, musicians and other celebrities, urging Mr Brown to pull troops out of Iraq by October at the latest.

Thousands of people joined the march from across the country.

Two people, a 32-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman, were arrested for public order offences but police said the march passed off peacefully.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case — a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights.

Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002.

Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation’s highest court.

The justices ruled 6-3 that Frederick’s free speech rights were not violated by his suspension over what the majority’s written opinion called a “sophomoric” banner.

“It was reasonable for (the principal) to conclude that the banner promoted illegal drug use — and that failing to act would send a powerful message to the students in her charge,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.

Roberts added that while the court has limited student free speech rights in the past, young people do not give up all their First Amendment rights when they enter a school.

Roberts was supported by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito. Breyer noted separately he would give Morse qualified immunity from the lawsuit, but did not sign onto the majority’s broader free speech limits on students.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message.”

He was backed by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

At issue was the discretion schools should be allowed to limit messages that appear to advocate illegal drug use. “Bong,” as noted in the appeal filed with the justices, “is a slang term for drug paraphernalia.”

The incident occurred in January 2002 just outside school grounds when the Olympic torch relay was moving through the Alaska capital on its way to the Salt Lake City, Utah, Winter Games.

Though he was standing on a public sidewalk, the school argued Frederick was part of a school-sanctioned event, because students were let out of classes and accompanied by their teachers.

Morse ordered the senior to take down the sign, but he refused. That led to a 10-day suspension for violating a school policy on promoting illegal drug use.

LOS ANGELES (June 24) – All of her life, Zoila Meyer believed she was an American. She even won election to the City Council of Adelanto.

But now she is facing a threat of deportation for illegally voting, because she never became a citizen after being brought to this country from Cuba when she was 1 year old.

“To be honest with you, I’m scared. How can they just pluck me out of my family, my kids?” the 40-year-old mother of four said in a telephone interview Friday.

“If they can do this to me, they can do it to anybody,” she said.

After Meyer was elected to the council in Adelanto in 2004, someone told officials that she was born in Cuba, prompting an investigation.

Eventually, “the police came to me and said, ‘Zoila, you’re not a citizen. You’re a legal resident but you’re not a citizen,”‘ said Meyer, who now lives in the San Bernardino County desert town of Apple Valley, near Adelanto.

She resigned after 10 weeks in office in Adelanto, a town of about 23,000.

Meyer, whose story was first reported in the Victorville Daily Press, applied to become a naturalized citizen and continued with her life: raising her children and attending two local colleges to earn degrees toward her goal of working in the justice system as a forensic nurse.

In April 2006, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent voting and was placed on probation, fined and ordered to pay restitution.

What Meyer didn’t realize is that fraudulently voting is a deportable offense.

On June 18, Meyer said, immigration officials showed up at her home and told her to appear at their San Bernardino office.

Her husband drove her to the office on Tuesday, “and they handcuffed me,” Meyer said. “They put me in jail and they frisked me and processed me.”

“I said ‘You’re doing this because I voted?”‘

The case is unusual but immigration officials were just doing their job when they arrested Meyer, said Lori Haley, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“People are arrested on immigration charges from all walks of life,” she said. “She can plead her case before an immigration judge, if she feels that she has reason to seek release for removal. … Everybody has due process when they’re arrested.”

Meyer was released pending a July 18 appearance before an immigration judge who will determine whether she will be deported to Canada, the last point of entry into the U.S. recorded in her immigration record.

Meyer said she and her parents had visited Canada and she had gone many times to Mexico without anyone ever asking her to prove her citizenship.

Meyer said she does not support illegal immigration but she thinks immigration procedures should be changed to prevent misunderstandings.

“It makes me feel like we’re all just numbers,” she said of her case. “I see people writing ‘this is my country.’ It really isn’t. It belongs to the government and they decide who stays and who goes …. You think you’re free; you’re really not.”

Josh Marshall publishes an e-mail from a reader who identifies what is one of the most astonishing instances of mindless, pro-government “reporting” yet:

It’s a curious thing that, over the past 10 – 12 days, the news from Iraq refers to the combatants there as “al-Qaida” fighters. When did that happen?

Until a few days ago, the combatants in Iraq were “insurgents” or they were referred to as “Sunni” or “Shia’a” fighters in the Iraq Civil War. Suddenly, without evidence, without proof, without any semblance of fact, the US military command is referring to these combatants as “al-Qaida”.

Welcome to the latest in Iraq propaganda.

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term “Al Qaeda” to designate “anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq” is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as “Al Qaeda.”

But what is even more notable is that the establishment press has followed right along, just as enthusiastically. I don’t think the New York Times has published a story about Iraq in the last two weeks without stating that we are killing “Al Qaeda fighters,” capturing “Al Qaeda leaders,” and every new operation is against “Al Qaeda.”

The Times — typically in the form of the gullible and always-government-trusting “reporting” of Michael Gordon, though not only — makes this claim over and over, as prominently as possible, often without the slightest questioning, qualification, or doubt. If your only news about Iraq came from The New York Times, you would think that the war in Iraq is now indistinguishable from the initial stage of the war in Afghanistan — that we are there fighting against the people who hijacked those planes and flew them into our buildings: “Al Qaeda.”

What is so amazing about this new rhetorical development — not only from our military, but also from our “journalists” — is that, for years, it was too shameless and false even for the Bush administration to use. Even at the height of their propaganda offensives about the war, the furthest Bush officials were willing to go was to use the generic term “terrorists” for everyone we are fighting in Iraq, as in: “we cannot surrender to the terrorists by withdrawing” and “we must stay on the offensive against terrorists.”

But after his 2004 re-election was secure, even the President acknowledged that “Al Qaeda” was the smallest component of the “enemies” we are fighting in Iraq:

A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein — and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group. . . .

The second group that makes up the enemy in Iraq is smaller, but more determined. It contains former regime loyalists who held positions of power under Saddam Hussein — people who still harbor dreams of returning to power. These hard-core Saddamists are trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community. . . .

The third group is the smallest, but the most lethal: the terrorists affiliated with or inspired by al Qaeda.

And note that even for the “smallest” group among those we are fighting in Iraq, the president described them not as “Al Qaeda,” but as those “affiliated with or inspired by al Qaeda.” Claiming that our enemy in Iraq was comprised primarily or largely of “Al Qaeda” was too patently false even for the President to invoke in defense of his war.

But now, support for the war is at an all-time low and war supporters are truly desperate to find a way to stay in Iraq. So the administration has thrown any remnants of rhetorical caution to the wind, overtly calling everyone we are fighting “Al Qaeda.” This strategy was first unveiled by Joe Lieberman when he went on Meet the Press in January and claimed that the U.S. was “attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy that we’re fighting in Iraq today”. Though Lieberman was widely mocked at the time for his incomparable willingness to spew even the most patent falsehoods to justify the occupation, our intrepid political press corps now dutifully follows right along.

Here is the first paragraph from today’s New York Times article on our latest offensive, based exclusively on the claims of our military commanders:

The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.

Washington’s fingerprints are all over the chaos that has hit Palestinians. The last thing they now need is an envoy called Blair

Did they jump or were they pushed? Was Hamas’s seizure of Fatah security offices in Gaza unprovoked, or a pre-emptive strike to forestall a coup by Fatah? After last week’s turmoil, it becomes increasingly important to uncover its origins. The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas’s victory in last year’s Palestinian elections. Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid. Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale. The aim was to turn voters against Hamas – a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender.

The policy shocked even moderate western officials like James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank chief, whom the Americans had appointed to help Gaza’s economy before the Hamas election victory. “The result was not to build more economic activity but to build more barriers,” he said this week while explaining why he resigned in disagreement with US and Israeli strategy.

It is also well known that Hamas was as surprised by its election victory as everyone else and that it offered its rival, Fatah, a coalition government of national unity. The offer was refused. If this was done initially out of wounded pride, Fatah’s rejection of Hamas’s regularly repeated overtures increasingly appeared to be coordinated with Washington as part of the boycott strategy.

Reports have been circulating for months of a more sinister side to the boycott. According to them, the US decided last year on a plan to arm and train Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard in a deliberate effort to confront and defeat Hamas militarily. Israel has already locked up several dozen Hamas legislators and mayors from the West Bank. The next stage was to do the same in Gaza but have Palestinians, rather than Israelis, run the crackdown.

Arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan’s supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua’s elected government in the 1980s.

Documents doing the rounds in the Middle East purport to have evidence for Abrams’s “hard coup” strategy. One text recounts Washington’s objectives as expressed in US officials’ conversations with an Arab government. These are, among others, “to maintain President Abbas and Fatah as the centre of gravity on the Palestinian scene”, “avoid wasting time in accommodating Hamas’s ideological conditions”, “undermine Hamas’s political status through providing for Palestinian economic needs”, and “strengthen the Palestinian president’s authority to be able to call and conduct early elections by autumn 2007”.

The document is dated March 2, less than a month after Saudi Arabia brokered the Mecca agreement under which Abbas finally agreed with Hamas on a unity government. The deal upset the Israelis and Washington because it left Hamas’s prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in charge. The document suggests the US wanted to sabotage it. Certainly, according to Hamas officials whom a depressed Abbas later briefed, Abbas was told to scrap Mecca at every subsequent meeting he has had with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert or with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Abrams.

Most ominously, the document of US objectives outlined a $1.27bn programme that would add seven special battalions, totalling 4,700 men, to the 15,000 Abbas already has in his presidential guard and other security forces, which were also to be given extra training and arms. “The desired outcome will be the transformation of Palestinian security forces and provide for the president of the Palestinian Authority to able to safeguard decisions such as dismissing the cabinet and forming an emergency cabinet,” the document says.

Alastair Crooke, a former Middle East adviser to the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and current head of a research institute in Beirut, points out that Israel blocked some arms deliveries. It was wary of sending too many into Gaza for fear Fatah might lose them, as indeed has happened. In this sense, only part of the plan went ahead. (Britain has played a small part in helping Abbas’s security forces. It has provided about £350,000 of “non-lethal” equipment this year for protecting the Karni freight crossing between Gaza and Israel.)

But Crooke says Hamas was irritated that the Mecca deal was being sabotaged, notably by the refusal of Mohammed Dahlan, Fatah’s long-time Gaza strongman and head of the Preventive Security Forces, to accept the authority of the independent interior minister appointed to the unity government. “Dahlan refused to deal with him, and put his troops on the streets in defiance of the interior minister. Hamas felt they had little option but to take control of security away from forces which were in fact creating insecurity,” Crooke says.

Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas spokesman, confirms the movement thought it had to move fast. In his words, last week’s events were “precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office”.

While Hamas has successfully blocked the US-Fatah plans for Gaza, Abbas is trying to implement them in the West Bank by forming an emergency government. The policy is doomed since the constitution says such a government can only last 30 days. Parliament has to renew it by a two-thirds majority, and parliament is controlled by Hamas. The only sensible policy for Abbas must be to end the effort to marginalise Hamas. He should go back to the Mecca agreement and support a unity government. Even now, Hamas says it is willing to do so.

Where does all this leave the White House idea to involve Tony Blair as a Middle Eastern envoy? It creates a “coalition of the discredited” – Bush, Olmert and Blair – and sounds like something from a satire since Blair has no credibility with Hamas or most other Palestinians. Better to leave it to the Saudis to revive the Mecca deal, or wait until Abbas realises he has fallen into a trap. Neither common sense nor democratic principles, let alone time, are on Fatah’s side.

America is the richest country in the world — so why does this country deny its workers mandated paid vacations and sick days?

Last year Mary Lou Eckart took her first vacation in five years, a trip from her home in Decatur, Ill., to see her grandchildren in Florida. But the Illinois state government, which pays her to care for a severely disabled teenage girl, provides her no paid vacation time. So Eckart took the girl — and her work — with her.

She faces a similar bind if she gets sick. “I just had an incident two weeks ago,” she says. “I had an inner ear infection that I didn’t know about, and I passed out. My 17-year-old daughter covered for me while I recovered. I get no paid vacation, no time off, no sick leave. But if they put these clients in a nursing home, I know that is very expensive. I’d love to have a vacation. I’d love to be able to get away. I’d love to have someone fill in for me. I feel like we deserve more than what we’re getting.”

Eckart’s story is all too common: Nearly one-fourth of American workers have no paid vacation or holidays, according to a recent study from the D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and nearly half of all private sector workers have no paid sick days. But if Eckart were living in any other industrialized country, she would be legally guaranteed at least two weeks paid vacation and — in 136 countries — from seven to more than 30 paid sick days. The United States is the only rich country that does not mandate paid vacations and paid sick days, and Americans who are afforded such benefits enjoy far less time off than workers in other wealthy nations.

Americans now work more every year, on average, than workers in any other industrialized country (except for a virtual tie with New Zealand). With women working longer hours each year, the average annual work time for a married couple is growing steadily, and family time — including the crucial bonding experience of vacations — has suffered. Full-time workers in much of Europe typically take seven to eight weeks of vacation and holidays each year — that’s double the American average for full-time workers.

Overall, the average private sector worker in the United States gets about nine paid vacation days and six paid holidays each year. Low-paid, part-time or small-business workers typically get far fewer, sometimes none. The same holds for paid sick leave: 72 percent of the highest-paid quarter of private sector workers get paid sick days compared to only 21 percent of workers in the lowest-paid quarter.

Intercontinental disparity

Why do workers in other rich countries have more paid time off? Mainly because laws demand employers provide it. The European Union requires its members to set a minimum standard of four weeks paid vacation (covering part-time workers as well). Finland and France require six weeks paid vacation, plus additional paid holidays.

Most countries require workers to take the time off and employers to give them vacation at convenient times. Some governments even require employers to pay bonuses so workers can afford to do more than sit at home on vacation. On top of that, unions in Europe and other rich industrialized countries — whose contracts cover up to 90 percent of the workforce — typically negotiate additional time off. Meanwhile, the standard workweek is slightly shorter in many European countries, and workers retire earlier with better public pensions.

Until the early ’70s, European and American workers logged similar hours. But the pattern then drastically diverged, with Europeans getting more vacation time, around the same time that U.S. income inequality began growing. In the United States, corporations gained the upper hand against workers and their declining unions, and the Democratic Party started shifting away from working class concerns.

In Europe, stronger unions and left political parties pushed for shorter work hours. In some cases, as jobs were lost when traditional industries restructured or work was outsourced, unions saw reduced work time as a way to share work.

But more often, unions were continuing the battle to share wealth in the form of more leisure, which had started a century earlier with the movement for an eight-hour day — the goal of Chicago protestors in May, 1886, that ended in the Haymarket Massacre, repression of the labor movement, and creation of May 1 as the international workers’ holiday.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I gratefully received advice about the danger of personality cults. My enthusiasm for the vision of Hugo Chavez made me forget that I witnessed as a child popular enthusiasm for the good things Mussolini was doing for the people until power went to his head and lead Italy to war. No human is immune to pride and the seduction of success. Chavez is doing good things, but he is a mortal, and I believe he would admit that he is not perfect. Respect for dissent and respect for the Constitution are the first things Hugo Chavez spoke of upon returning to Caracas after being kidnapped during the 2002 coup. The dangerous suppression of the U.S. Constitution by G.W. Bush with the excuse that he is the Commander in Chief in an oil war of aggression stands as a warning to all who love Democracy to keep their eyes open, no matter who is in power.

“Democratic Socialism is love of the people.” These words of Venezuela’s President announced the birth of a different world – a just and peaceful world the youth of the entire planet believes is possible.

Hugo Chavez’ speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations inspired my article, “Hugo Chavez and the Devil’s Recipe,” which first appeared in The Lone-Star Iconoclast of Crawford, Texas, on January 29, 2007, and later in Venezuelanalysis.com on March 15, 2007. That story compared the vision of Mr. Chavez to the worldview of Federico Fellini, the great Italian film director. Both Fellini and Chavez express love and empathy for the people with their work. Fellini, as a cine-magician, helped give birth to a more human culture, and Chavez, as a revolutionary liberator and statesman, is creating a different world that may save the planet from destruction.

“Hugo Chavez and the Devil’s Recipe” attracted so much international attention that people from all over the globe asked: How is it possible to compare a great Italian film author to a visionary South American statesman? The answer: Hugo Chavez shows by his actions that he not only loves the people, but fully understands the needs and aspirations of the world’s youth.

Like Fellini, Chavez does not hate the rich, but knows that they are psychologically deformed by excessive and un-earned opulence and by the guilt that being oppressors of millions festers in their hearts.

The lunacy and cruelty of the global situation is caused, therefore, by the fact that both oppressors and oppressed are dehumanized by the odious reality of fear, greed, and an absurd spiritual myopia that the natural abundance of the Earth is not enough for all to share.

The rich are making themselves sick and dangerously unsafe by inflicting criminal misery on others. The oppressed and poor are sickened by lives turned into miserable destitution and hopelessness from birth to death.

Both ‘haves” and ‘have-nots” are in different ways completely dehumanized and evermore hateful of each other. The unhappiness of the rich and powerful is well known to the psychiatric profession. The poor’s sickness is evident in our crowded prisons and slums. This expanding evil eventually erupts in crime, suicidal terrorism, the reactive police state, and criminal wars of aggression. The obscene plunder by a ravenous and blind few results in universal wage slavery and/or desperate poverty for millions, making this world dangerous and unhappy.

Chavez’s enlightened peaceful revolution is reversing this global lunacy and will even help the rich from becoming further mentally retrograde, like medieval lords. The Bolivarian revolution will help many of these pathetic materialistic souls regain a sense of proportions, become human again, and meet life with renewed hearts. Only a socially responsible democracy and economic justice can bring about this kind of renewal. Such a renewal will protect reformed oppressors from the danger of growing resentment and outrage of the majority as abuses become increasingly transparent to a larger and larger portion of the world population.

Unless change comes fast enough, it will soon become self-evident — even to the simplest minds — that all of us have been fleeced of our universal birthright to share equitably in the bountiful commonwealth of this planet. Some believe that –as the current insurgencies in various parts of the earth evidence — heightened awareness may bring back the revival of the guillotine (to use a stark illustration) as an expeditious instrument for cutting down to size despots, exploiters, oil and gas gougers, highway robbers, and all high ranking thieves in the military industrial complex. That would restore our Republic and bring an end to the Evil Empire as fast as France got rid of its crowned heads and aristo-pigs feeding at the royal trough.

Recently, President Chavez has attracted world attention and become the recipient of increasingly vicious attacks from neo-fascist media whores in direct proportion to his growing fame as a great leader. He is gaining a reputation as the uncompromising and outspoken nemesis of the troglodytes that turned the White House into a fetid Neolithic cave.

“Troglodytes” is a fitting offence that must be clearly understood (Thomas Paine, one of the fathers of our Republic, wrote: “He who dares not offend cannot be honest”), so here are four dictionary definitions of “troglodytes” that prove it to be an the ideal insult for the current White House simians dragging their knuckles on the carpet at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: 1. Pre-historic cave dwellers; 2. Persons of degraded, primitive, or brutal character; 3. Persons unacquainted with affairs of the world; 4. Animals living underground. Hence, President Chavez was perfectly correct to call the troglodyte-in-chief an “ass,” a “coward,” and the very incarnation of evil: “the devil.”

On Monday, December 5, 2005, the following posts appeared on an anonymous blog: Planetofa$$holes, run by political satirists who target traitors, religious fanatics, and other lunatics — like the recently departed Jarry Foulwell (good riddance) — from an underground wine cellar named: In Vino Veritas. Their therapeutic use of insults to retain a sense of reality in our 21st Century bedlam is refreshing.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched. ~Aldous Huxley

On March 2, 2004, in Caracas, Hugo Chavez wisely proclaimed: “George W. Bush is an IDIOT!” With this truthful pronouncement the great President of Venezuela launched a new era of outspoken honesty in international relations, making it easier for decent people everywhere to see what global oppressors and phonies really are and to properly frame them as miserable idiots.

When a head-of-state who loves his people, as Hugo Chavez does, uses the most popular and versatile of all insults: “IDIOT” to describe the perverted liar-in-chief of the most powerful empire on earth, the time for praising the great Latin American President has come.

Hugo Chavez holds in contempt the excessive desire for private wealth, the criminal culture of corruption, and unregulated materialism that grips the vast majority of human beings in hopeless poverty. No one has the right to own in excess, he believes. Opulence in a world so full of poverty is obscene, degenerate, and criminal, no matter how much fat cats protest about having earned their billions legally, even if immorally. Legality is not equivalent to honesty.

Understanding this about Chavez and watching Fellini films like “La Strada,” “Nights of Cabiria,” and “La Dolce Vita,” it becomes easy to see that both Fellini and Chavez are clearly aware of the soulless cruelty and brutal dishonesty of unregulated capitalist-corporate systems that are devouring the earth before our very eyes.

With their great hearts, Fellini and Chavez saw that it is the goodness of simple people — working very hard just to have enough to feed their own families — that keeps the world from collapsing into utter chaos. Both saw the limit of tolerance getting very close and the failure of social compassion.

The vision that makes millions of hearts beat with great hope is Hugo Chavez’s mission for a world without oppression and poverty. Chavez is one of the few statesmen with an understanding of history and realism about the future. Demonic materialists are afraid that he may wake up the sleeping masses to see the nakedness of their blood-soaked oppressors. Their mad hatred of Chavez is like the screeching reaction of a hyena caught by a sudden spotlight in the act of trying to devour a sleeping child. The innocent child represents the TV-hypnotized millions, watching meaningless crap that prevents them from noticing that the hyenas are devouring their country. Chavez understands all this.

His first step toward that different world is the revival of Simon Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America with democratic, social, and economic justice for its people. The union of a truly democratic Latin America will establish a shining example that can expand social progress on a global scale and spread the ideas of a sustainable way of life based on nurturing, responsibility and equity rather than hoarding and oppression by a few.

Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass.

Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.

Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.” Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.

How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?

First off, don’t give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.

In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.

But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We’ve all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.

At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called “crib babies,” those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society — or even envisage one.

Such is the extent of our alienation and it is reflected in the media clowns and confidence artists who comprise our (misnomer alert) leadership. We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters — i.e. Thompson and Obama — but we can’t rebuilt New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.

Creating mass media is not tantamount to creating society. When we live in an era wherein image trumps reality, it follows that an infantilized populace will be transfixed by the shiny objects of media culture — that the tiny dramas of shallow celebrities will work like crib mobiles to distract us from the deep anguish of being a species standing before the crumbling edifice of paradigm collapse.

If media culture seems so unreal, it is because it is a reflection of our chronic alienation — our systemic disengagement from communal involvement; so profound is our alienation — not only from our environment — but also from our inner lives that we pose a danger to ourselves and others — which is, of course, the clinical criteria describing those unfortunate souls whose sanity has deteriorated to the point in which they require institutionalization.

Conversely, a populace being in possession of an inner life would prove a dangerous development to the one percent who hold ninety percent of the nation’s wealth — those who prosper from our alienation and its attendant apathy. It is a given these corrupt elitists will try to maintain our estrangement from our inner realities — because if we were to be roused to awareness insurrection would result.

Being internally colonized by consumerism, we have lost the ability to imagine meaningful change, because our inner lives are no longer our own. Benumbed by our complicity in corporate blanding, by means of ceaseless branding, our inner beings, rather than resembling a teeming, vital polis of meaningful engagement, now seem closer in resemblance to the cold florescent light-flooded shelves of off-the-interstate convenience stores. Impulse and shallow need — in other words — utter desperation — has usurped the deepening eros of communal engagement.

Hence, the thronging avenues of imagination, personal and collective, have been replaced by a soul-numbing proliferation of Starbucks and Banana Republic outlets that serve palliative remedies masking the pain of our powerlessness to alter the tragic trajectory of the times. All transpiring as the sky burns and Arctic glaciers melt into rising seas — and we’re driven to distract ourselves from descending dread by means of another latte buzz, shopping excursion, the unreality of Reality TV, and the pathetic pandering of a political class of shallow hacks who are themselves powerless before their Thanatotic addiction to power.

Such are the colic nightmares of us cultural crib babies. What comes of this degree of alienation? Violence (from shooting sprees to perpetual war). Addiction (from mindless consumerism to prisons overcrowded with drug users). Magical thinking (from neo-con fantasies of global dominance to Christian End Time hallucinations). Paranoia (The abiding delusion that little brown people cross our borders in order to take our jobs, force us to speak their language, and blow up our malls … after, of course, they’ve swept the floors and scrubbed the toilets). Depression (from wide-spread use of anti-depressants to the massive demoralization that reveals itself in pandemic levels of social apathy).

What if the media were to begin to chronicle this collective nervous breakdown? What if we became unable to avert our gaze from the tragedies of our time? What if we were induced to not only stare into the abyss — but were grabbed by the lapels by it?

Then, I suspect, our apathy would grow unpalatable. We’d choke on our fetid self-justifications; swallowing our rationalizations would prove about as appetizing as eating a foot-long hotdog inside a slaughterhouse.

At some point, try driving out into the American countryside (as I’ve spent the last six months doing). See for yourself the drought-desiccated Everglades and Okefanokee swamps ablaze, where clouds of smoke are enswathing the states of the Deep South like a death shroud. Walk through the splintered, toxic rubble of New Orleans. Although do not go to gawk, but to grieve — and rage –and then meditate on how we came, as a people, to abandon an entire American city. Then continue, as I did, down Interstate 10, onward through the concrete-encased, “heat dome” of the stripmall archipelago that is Houston; its ugly, ad hoc architecture glazed in the Greenhouse Gas-trapped infernos known as weather in Sun Belt cities. Then proceed out into the West Texas prairielands and approach the areas where enormous, industrial livestock holding pens and slaughterhouses are located. Places, where exploded-from-high-speed-impact carcasses of swarms of black flies stipple your windshield, where the reek of death cannot be masked, even if you possess a car-deodorizer the size of Arkansas.

In these places, you’ll find the reek of empire; as well as, the reason the people of the world have turned their faces away from us in revulsion. This stench permeates the air of our nation and clings to the fabric of our lives. Moreover, although George Bush is a veritable idiot savant in the art of creating the stench of death, our Little Prince of Putrefaction is not taking the reek back to Texas with him when we’re finally rid of him. No, it is our own essence now. Iconography-wise: Let’s lose the imagery of noble and lofty bald eagles: rotting road kill should be proclaimed our national animal.

Yes, we’re powerless before the enormity of the age — but we cross the line into complicity when we’re oblivious to our own individual stake in it. At this point, we can no longer afford the luxury of retreating to our comfort zones. Tears must scald our eyes; horrific visions should haunt our nights. The hour has come when we must wrestle with the demon of our own indifference who gains his sustenance and strength from the bribes, large and small, we accept from this death-sustained system.

Worse yet, our pathologies are embodied in our infant/tyrant leadership who throw global-wide tantrums of mass destruction because as a people we have forgotten how to give ourselves over to the eros of engaging the world by social and political involvement.

How do we begin to restore ourselves and reclaim our nation? — First, by remembering we’re alive — and that life is finite. The awareness of the urgency of the situation at hand will quicken one’s pulse and the demon will lessen its grip as one’s blood rises in mortification and outrage.

How will we know we are turning the tide? — When our listless sleepwalking gives way to participation mystique — to vivid, waking dreams of living flesh.

How will we know if we’re losing? — Simple: We will remain as we are, at present: bloodless, wane spirits imprisoned within our own clammy skin.

This is the archetypal criteria at the root of the mythic imagery of raising the dead: The simple realization that one is alive within life; that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization has ended; and that one’s individual dreams and longings — and even one’s flesh — are not exclusively our own, but are part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet.

Accordingly, there is neither an omnipresent, ever-watchful Sky Daddy divinity above nor a Risen Son savior proffering redemption, yet there is engagement (action and inspiration) within the vastness of the world — a redemption borne of risk that serves to re-animate a necrotic heart. In short, we so love the world we give ourselves to it.

To do so, it is imperative we begin unshackling ourselves from the noxious orthodoxies of church, state, political party, and corporation, as well as from our own narcissistic strivings within those hierarchies of vampires and wean ourselves from the petty perks we garner from group approval and institutional bribes.

Accordingly, the first step is an awareness of the problem and a willingness to reveal it in all its shabby-ass human glory — even if the implications of doing so are ugly — even if to do so will be to risk scorn in one’s personal life and reversals in one’s professional standing.

Years ago, I heard the tale of a fellow, a struggling artist, who had bought an old, dilapidated house. Upon moving in, he discovered the place was infested with cockroaches. Worse, the house sat close to railroad tracks and when trains trundled by, shaking the house, its floors, walls, and ceilings literally seethed with agitated cockroaches.

Since no amount of bug spray could lessen the massive infestation, the artist began zapping the bugs with glow-in-the-dark spray paint. Later, when friends dropped by in the evening and a train rumbled down the adjacent tracks, he would switch off the lights and all present were dazzled by the moving, organic mobile of scuttling, multi-colored lights he created.

At present, this is where we find ourselves as a people: powerless before the ugliness of the age. Therefore, we have little choice other than to light the ugliness up and turn the objects of our revulsion (personal and collective) into something resembling the truth of art.

What will we gain?

Only this: the enduring beauty of ugly truth — one of the few balms available within the agonies of a dark and ugly age.