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"Scum always rises to the top, but instead of scraping it off and discarding it, most people follow it!?!"
--Sherlyn Meinz, 2008
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 | Peace News: Are you a whistleblower for peace? |
 Democracy Needs Whistleblowers
From: CodePink
At our rally for Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning last weekend, journalist and activist Phyllis Bennis said "Wars need secrets. Illegal wars need illegal secrets…Democracy needs whistleblowers." Democracy also needs us to continue to raise our voices to end illegal occupations.
August 31st marks the drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq to 50,000. While this is a step in the right direction--no doubt inspired by the tireless push of the peace movement--Iraqis will continue to suffer from the presence of 50,000 U.S. troops and 75,000 private contractors in their country. Many of our troops may be redeployed to Afghanistan. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, August 13 @ 19:14:44 EDT (70 reads)
(Read More... | 2060 bytes more | Comments? | Peace News | Score: 4)
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| The News: Danger Of Establishing "New Normal" With Worst Bush-Era Policies |
Group Releases 18-Month Review Of President's National Security Policies And Civil Liberties
From: aclu.org
NEW YORK – The Obama administration has repudiated some of the Bush administration's most egregious national security policies but is in danger of institutionalizing others permanently into law, thereby creating a troubling "new normal," according to a new report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration," an 18-month review of the Obama administration's record on national security issues affecting civil liberties, concludes that the current administration's record on issues of national security and civil liberties is decidedly mixed: President Obama has made great strides in some areas, such as his auspicious first steps to categorically prohibit torture, outlaw the CIA's use of secret overseas detention sites and release the Bush administration's torture memos, but he has failed to eliminate some of the worst policies put in place by President Bush, such as military commissions and indefinite detention. He has also expanded the Bush administration's "targeted killing" program. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, July 30 @ 20:08:14 EDT (75 reads)
(Read More... | 5781 bytes more | Comments? | The News | Score: 0)
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| Politics: It Takes too Much Money to Run |
Who are we to tell other countries how to manage their elections?
By William A. Collins
Our elections
Run on lies,
Best distortions
Bucks can buy.
There's no small irony in the United States forcing "democracy" down the throats of our adversaries around the world while our own democracy is teetering on so many perilous brinks. Given the shaky system here, what nation abroad would want to take direction from us?
We seem to feel that the American system is above reproach because that's essentially what we learned in school. But the rest of the world is not so easily deluded. There's widespread understanding that money rules Congress, both by promoting specific candidates and by fawning over them when they win. That's why a few enlightened lands have imposed strict contribution limits and much shorter campaigns. They view our experience with horror. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, July 27 @ 21:42:58 EDT (79 reads)
(Read More... | 4371 bytes more | Comments? | Politics | Score: 0)
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| History/Culture: Blessed Are the Peacemakers ... but Not in America |
by: James E. Jennings, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Last month's 6-3 Supreme Court decision in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project found that humanitarian groups can be judged guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism merely by holding peaceful dialog and engaging in political discussions with proscribed organizations. Those convicted may be sentenced to up 15 years in prison.
On its face, this is an infringement of the constitutional right of free speech. It means that people engaged in such contacts can be jailed for meeting with, providing humanitarian aid to or discussing political goals and activities with groups that are on the terror list. The decision also affects Americans' rights of freedom of travel, association, conscience and religion when dealing with banned or so-called "terrorist" organizations. This ruling disallows such contacts, even if the intent is peaceful. Blessed are the peacemakers, but not in America!
The law as interpreted specifically limits the freedom of action of humanitarian aid and peacemaking dialog groups such as the ones I head. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, July 17 @ 14:14:47 EDT (105 reads)
(Read More... | 3661 bytes more | Comments? | History/Culture | Score: 0)
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| Labor News: When Teachers Unions Back War Escalations |
By David Swanson
On July 12th I received an Email from the American Federation of Teachers with a soft pink headline
and an image of a heart. It said: "Pink Hearts. Not Pink Slips." That sounded nice. The text continued:
"Now is the time to tell the Senate to put our children first. The House of Representatives approved an
emergency spending bill that included $10 billion to save educator jobs and $5 billion for Pell Grants. It is now up to the Senate to do its part and approve the same level of assistance when it returns to Washington, D.C., this week."
That was true, I suppose, in as far as it went, but horribly misleading because of what it left unsaid. Congress had not passed an emergency bill to save teachers' jobs. Congress doesn't treat such things as emergencies. This was a bill that had been sat on for half a year, and the teacher funding was an amendment tacked onto it. The bill itself served primarily to dump $33.5 billion into escalating a war in Afghanistan by sending 30,000 more troops plus contractors. It was called an "emergency" bill purely in order to keep war spending off the books and make the government's overall budget look less imbalanced than it is.
Now, it's hard to blame teachers unions for promoting a bill, any bill, that saves teachers' jobs. The National Education Association, too, has been promoting the same bill. It's easy enough to blame the peace movement for not building relationships with the teachers unions. And no doubt the Democratic House Leadership gets the lion's share of blame for packaging teacher funding together with war funding. But there's something extraordinarily revolting about an Email that asks us to "put our children first" by escalating a criminal foreign war. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, July 15 @ 18:01:35 EDT (93 reads)
(Read More... | 7570 bytes more | Comments? | Labor News | Score: 0)
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| The News: The Anti-Empire Report - July 2010 |
by William Blum, killinghope.org
Some thoughts on "patriotism" written on July 4
Most important thought: I'm sick and tired of this thing called "patriotism".
The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from "communism".
General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, mass murderer and torturer: "I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country." [1]
P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: "I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country." [2]
Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country." [3]
Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: "I did what I thought was right for our country." [4] ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, July 06 @ 20:42:17 EDT (125 reads)
(Read More... | 21919 bytes more | Comments? | The News | Score: 0)
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| Opinion: Restoring the Fourth Amendment: |
How We, the People, Can Win Over Washington
by: Shahid Buttar, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Despite promises of change, the Obama administration has proven itself either unwilling - or unable - to shift the paradigm driving increasingly invasive surveillance or increasingly pervasive profiling according to race, religion and national origin. Nearly halfway through the Obama administration's term, the battle to banish the Bush administration's policy legacy remains largely unfought, let alone won.
But this is no time for progressive and libertarian constitutionalists to throw in the political towel. While "change you can believe in" may have been a premature promise from our president, we at the grassroots enjoy ample opportunities to shift the landscape in DC.
Whether concerned by government spying or the guilt by association apparent in profiling Latinos, African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs and South Asians for various so-called "signature crimes," limits on local law enforcement authorities offer the potential to galvanize solidarity among communities of color. Measures restricting domestic intelligence operations can also attract the support of libertarians - including some elements of the Tea Party - disaffected by the Washington consensus favoring expanding executive power. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, July 03 @ 22:52:03 EDT (110 reads)
(Read More... | 14902 bytes more | Comments? | Opinion | Score: 0)
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| The News: Leaving Granny Behind |
Will the Fiscal Commission vote to impoverish older women?
By Martha Burk
President Obama's Fiscal Commission--a group of lawmakers, former officials, and other experts charged with developing a bipartisan plan to stabilize our soaring national debt--is primarily holding closed-door hearings. The commission's co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently became an instant YouTube star with his rant against seniors as he exited one of the panel's sessions. That put Social Security defenders on high alert about what's going on in these meetings.
Simpson, who is nearly 80, has maintained that the founders of the program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. "People just died," he has said. "Social Security was never [for] retirement."
The program has always been an easy target for deficit hawks and budget cutters because it's so big--the government's largest expenditure, just ahead of the Pentagon. But setting up a target isn't as easy as actually hitting it. George W. Bush found that out when he proposed privatizing the system so we could all invest in the likes of Enron, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, and Goldman Sachs. Thanks to a massive campaign by progressive interest groups, that proposal was shot down. But like Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, the nightmare of cutting Social Security never dies --it just returns in a new form every few years. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, June 29 @ 22:07:38 EDT (99 reads)
(Read More... | 4076 bytes more | Comments? | The News | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: "Free-Market Fundamentalism" Is an Invention of Progressives |
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
The right showed once again that they have no allegiance whatsoever to the free market when House Republicans pushed through a bill that would prohibit the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) from insuring the mortgage of anyone who had "strategically defaulted" on an earlier mortgage. The intention was to punish people who had taken advantage of this option and, therefore, make it less likely that others would go this route in the future.
A strategic default is when a person stops paying a mortgage even when they can still afford it, and, instead, turns the house back to the lender. This can be a desirable move for borrowers if the price of the house has fallen below the value of the home due to the collapse of the housing bubble.
In many states, a mortgage is a nonrecourse loan. This means that, under the terms of the contract, the return of the home ends any commitment to the lender. Even in states where the loan is a recourse loan, it is unusual for lenders to pursue actions against borrowers after a foreclosure, even if they have not recovered the full amount of the mortgage by reselling the house. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, June 14 @ 20:38:30 EDT (91 reads)
(Read More... | 6716 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| Opinion: The Anti-Empire Report - June 2010 |
by William Blum
The worst thing that ever happened to the Jewish people is the Holocaust. The second worst thing that ever happened to the Jewish people is the state of Israel.
Things internationally are so dispiriting there's nothing left to do but fantasize. I picture Turkey, as a member of NATO, demanding that the alliance come to its defense after being attacked by Israel. Under Article 5 of the NATO charter an armed attack on one member is deemed to constitute an armed attack on all members. That is the ostensible reason NATO is fighting in Afghanistan — the attack against the United States on September 11, 2001 is regarded as an attack on all NATO members (disregarding the awkward fact that Afghanistan as a country had nothing to do with the attack). The Israeli attack on a Turkish-flagged ship, operated by a Turkish humanitarian organization, killing nine Turkish nationals and wounding many more can certainly constitute an attack upon a NATO member.
So, after the United States, the UK, Germany, France and other leading NATO members offer their ridiculous non-sequitur excuses why they can't ... umm ... er ... invoke Article 5, and the international media swallows it all without any indigestion, Turkey demands that Israel should at least lose its formal association with NATO as a member of the Mediterranean Dialogue. This too is dismissed with scorn by the eminent NATO world powers on the grounds that it would constitute a victory for terrorism. And anti-Semitism of course. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, June 11 @ 22:17:08 EDT (105 reads)
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| Opinion: Revenge of the Zombies: |
Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and the Return of Dark Times
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
[H]e had found the bridge with which to span the abyss that yawns between the 'no longer and not"' yet of history, between the "no longer" of the old laws and "not yet" of the new saving word, between life and death: "Not quite here but yet at hand; that is how it has sounded and how it would sound." -Hannah Arendt
Armies of the Hyper-Dead
In the world of popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere as evidenced by the relentless slew of books, movies, video games and comics. From the haunting "Night of the Living Dead" to the comic movie "Zombieland," the figure of the zombie has captured and touched something unique in the contemporary imagination. But the dark and terrifying image of the zombie with missing body parts, oozing body fluids and an appetite for fresh, living, human brains does more than feed the mass marketing machines that prey on the spectacle of the violent, grotesque and ethically comatose. There is more at work in this wave of fascination with the grotesquely walking hyper-dead than a Hollywood appropriation of the dark recesses and unrestrained urges of the human mind. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, June 03 @ 00:10:45 EDT (109 reads)
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| Opinion: Academic Diversity on the Supreme Court |
I'm against Kagan because she went to Harvard.
By Donald Kaul
I don't think President Obama should have nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
Don't get me wrong; It's not that I think she's too conservative. That would be the granola/Birkenstock wing of the Democratic Party.
And it's certainly not because I think she's too liberal. That would be nuts.
I'm against her because she went to Harvard.
Do you realize that if she is confirmed, everybody on the Supreme Court will be a product of either Harvard or Yale? All nine of them.
That's ridiculous. I know, they're both supposed to be really good schools but, really, they're not that good. To those who think they are I have but two words: George Bush. He graduated from Yale and got an MBA from Harvard. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, May 27 @ 17:51:03 EDT (120 reads)
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| My Story: From an Eighth Grade Education to Testifying Before Congress |
By Paul Rogat Loeb, Excerpt from "Soul of a Citizen"
Too many of us hold back from community involvement because we think we don't know enough to act on our beliefs, or don't have the standing or confidence to take a public stand. When we see a woman who begins with no money, no power, no education and no status in the community, and then becomes a powerful voice for change, it should inspire us all.
* * * * * *
Virginia Ramirez, of San Antonio, Texas, could easily have lived out her days without ever discovering her ability to speak out. She left school after eighth grade to get married. "That was what most Hispanic women in my generation did. My husband, who drives a taxicab, went to work after sixth grade." Although dropping out seemed normal at the time, she felt frustrated when she couldn't help her five children with their homework.
When Virginia was 45, she realized that an elderly neighbor was getting sick every winter. The neighbor was a widow who lived in a house so dilapidated that it couldn't retain heat. "She was one of those people who always paid her taxes on time, always faithfully making out her little money orders. But she couldn't afford to repair her house, and everyone around here was just as poor. So I went with her to city agencies trying to get help. They kept sending us from place to place, from department to department. Finally she died of pneumonia. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, May 14 @ 21:13:44 EDT (127 reads)
(Read More... | 10402 bytes more | Comments? | My Story | Score: 0)
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| Opinion: The Anti-Empire Report - May 2010 |
By William Blum
Terminally-dumb people have always been with us of course. It can’t be that we’ve suddenly gone stupid.
If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ... If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist” ... If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: "I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime” ... keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as mean-spirited. Consider some of the behavior of the same types for half a century during the Cold War with its beloved -- albeit imaginary -- "International Communist Conspiracy”.
* 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party. This, and a number of other lists of “communists”, published in the mainstream media, resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other punishments. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, May 13 @ 13:30:31 EDT (139 reads)
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| Opinion: When You Meet the Bogeyman, Offer Him Your Finest Whiskey |
by: Andrew Birnbaum, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Why are so many people willing, if not eager, to oppose policy changes that would improve their lives? Why do teabaggers protest President Obama when they did not protest George W. Bush, even after President Obama lowered their taxes?
Are these people misinformed? Misled? Racist? The more generous among us theorize such people are simply afraid, and their fear causes them to behave irrationally. I believe there is something to this argument. Cynical politicians have long played on our fears to advance their own agendas, some even going so far as to feature images from 9/11 in their campaign ads. But why should these negative politicians have a monopoly on fear?
It is time to talk about our fears. As individuals, and as a nation.
We are afraid. We must acknowledge that. And we must discuss it, so we can get past it and stop making fear-based decisions. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, May 10 @ 18:53:43 EDT (136 reads)
(Read More... | 6135 bytes more | Comments? | Opinion | Score: 0)
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