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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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 | Politics: Our Prisons Don't do us Justice |
 By William A. Collins
Lock the prisons,
Toss the key;
Just don't send
The bill to me.
Prison numbers are tough to pin down. There is the federal system, there are 50 state systems, and no one is just sure how many local jails or military brigs. All told, professionals estimate that one in every 100 Americans resides in one of them.
To observe that this figure sounds surprisingly high badly understates the point. It's totally obscene. We have replaced Russia and China as the world's incarceration powerhouse. And whatever else you may think of some of our allies, our incarceration rate is six times that of Canada and eight times that of France.
No, nothing special has happened to our actual crime rate to cause this jump. The difference is politics. President Ronald Reagan decided that wars on drugs and crime would be good vote-getters and his idea stuck. Then, to consolidate the change, along with all the new prisons came a slew of new guards. To protect their jobs they have quickly become a potent lobby against any sort of criminal justice reform. What a mess! ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, August 02 @ 22:04:42 EDT (80 reads)
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| Peace News: We've Got Empire Stress Disorder |
By William A. Collins
Keep those Stars
And Stripes unfurled;
Wave them high and
Rule the world.
It's a lot of work being an empire. Expensive, but well worth it. Americans make up only 4 percent of the world's population, but we get to use up 25 percent of its resources. That's pretty high living and you don't get to pull it off by being a wimpy socialist nonentity. We also get to spew 25 percent of the earth's unsustainable pollution. Sure, this all has to come to an end eventually, but no matter; it's been a great ride.
And at least it won't come to an end militarily. Our army puts Rome to shame. We have 865 foreign bases, and blanket every continent with soldiers and CIA nests. ESPN World Cup announcers "welcome our men and women in uniform serving in over 175 countries and territories." Japan hosts 47,000 of our troops, paying $2 billion for the privilege and annoying its own citizens no end. It just ousted a prime minister over that spat. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, July 20 @ 22:24:46 EDT (101 reads)
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| Rants: Cowardice, American Style |
By Sherwood Ross
Too little has been written about the cowardice of CIA and Pentagon torturers and even less about the stoic courage of their victims. Irrespective of what they might have done, there can be no question that those suffering illegal and criminal tortures are, in fact, more courageous than their tormentors. After all, how much courage does it take to pummel a man tied to a chair or chained to a wall? Answer: a lot less than it takes to withstand the blows you know that are coming.
CIA interrogators don’t have even the “sporting” attitude of the schoolyard bully who attacks a weaker child. That might be called a “fair fight” as the weaker could put up a defense. But those five-man teams that torture the defenseless, by definition, have got to be the most cowardly thugs on the planet. Somehow, this perspective has eluded the “24” fiction writers at Fox television network who extol U.S. torturer Jack Bauer the way Goebbels once extolled the SS. It has also eluded President Barack Obama, a former employee of a CIA-front organization, who lavishly praised the CIA in a speech at its Langley, Va., headquarters last year.
According to one reliable published report, more than 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody since President Bush launched his “War on Terror,” yet this figure may be a pale shadow of the ugly reality, for there are repeated tales of prisoners dragged from their cells in the dead of night and “disappeared”---men whose murders may not appear in any Pentagon or CIA box score. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, July 01 @ 22:29:38 EDT (96 reads)
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| War News: 1980s Time Warp: The Time Is Right, Again, for DoD Reform |
by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
There have been a series of events and reports in this past month that has sent my brain into a 1980s time warp. There is a recent report on wasteful spending on Department of Defense (DoD) spare parts, a very conservative senator is calling for a defense budget freeze, a task force is calling for the Pentagon to simply try to pass an audit, there are calls not to proceed with a weapon unless it can pass its operational tests and officials are saying that we have too many officers for our troops, planes and ships.
In the 1980s, I founded and ran a nonprofit organization, the Project on Military Procurement (now called the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), where I serve on the board of directors), which exposed weapons that didn't work, cheating on weapons testing, excessive numbers of officers, a Pentagon with severe audit and estimating costs problems and, yes, we also exposed the unforgettable overpriced spare parts such as the $7,622 coffee brewer, the $435 hammer and the $600 toilet seat. These exposés, especially the spare parts scandals that hit home with the public, led conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley to call for and succeed in getting a one-year budget freeze on the DoD budget in 1986, in the middle of the Reagan military buildup and at the height of cold war rhetoric. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, June 25 @ 22:23:03 EDT (88 reads)
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| International: We Have Lost Our Way |
by: Julia Chaitin Ph.D., t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
I have been trying to get my head around what happened on the Gaza flotilla, with no success.
When I turned on the Israeli news at 6:40 AM on Monday morning, knowing that the flotilla must be nearing our shores, the broadcaster's first words were a knife to the heart: "Something very bad has happened. The commanders knew ahead of time that this was a lose-lose situation ..." I could not help but wonder why the naval commanders (and obviously the higher-ups in the government) would knowingly go into a situation that was "lose-lose." I could not help but wonder why, once again, we had thrust ourselves into an impossible situation, endangered so many lives, perpetuated violence and severely damaged our relations with the world community in a nonsensical effort to enforce the unjustifiable blockade of the Gaza Strip.
I can turn off the radio and television and Internet, but I cannot turn off my thoughts about all that has happened this week. My thoughts revolve around the steady stream of disturbing news and articles, interviews, photos and videos broadcast on the radio, television, Internet, and Youtubes. Each new photo, video, interview and article purports to give the "facts" of what happened in the dark, early morning hours of Monday. Each new photo, video, interview and article from outside of Israel puts the blame on my country. Each new piece of news from inside of Israel puts the blame on the "terrorists" on the boats, on the Hamas, on Iran, and on the Turkish government. Each new "fact" widens the chasm between Israel and the rest of the world. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, June 21 @ 21:41:44 EDT (80 reads)
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| The News: Respect Immigrants, Deport BP |
by: Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
My family and I joined tens of thousands in the streets of Phoenix this weekend to march against SB 1070 and for the human rights of immigrants in America. The crowd was ethnically diverse, filled with righteous indignation, creatively colorful and utterly without the fear that has plagued them for years. It was a remarkable demonstration at a critical time and I am more convinced than ever of the basic decency and common humanity of those being demonized by some factions as criminals and undesirables.
The signs and chants were telling in their essential tragicomedy. "Undocumented and Unafraid." "We've read the law and it sucks." "Don't separate my family" (held by a small child). "Somos Arizona, No Nazizona." "1070 = 1984." And of course, "Si se puede." Politics aside, this rally served as a powerful reminder that, behind the abstractions of debate, there are real people struggling for dignity, survival and respect. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, June 04 @ 21:50:32 EDT (109 reads)
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| Reviews: The Case for Socialism |
by: Eleanor J. Bader, t r u t h o u t | Book Review
Alan Maass’ The Case for Socialism
"Afterword" by Howard Zinn
Haymarket Books
$12.00, 173 pages
It’s obvious that if you repeat something often enough, in an authoritative voice, listeners will begin to believe what you say. That’s the theory behind both advertising and conservative media.
The oft-repeated barrage of verbal assaults lobbed at Barack Obama - that he’s a commie/foreigner/infidel/Nazi - confirm this. Indeed, an April 2010 CBS/NY Times poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe that the president is moving the US toward socialism, something they clearly regard as bad, and maybe even dangerous, for the US and its people. What’s more, The Huffington Post reported in February that 78 percent of Republican leaders consider the Commander in Chief to be a full-blown pinko.
That these assertions are insane - and more than a little frightening - goes without saying. But they also reveal a profound lack of knowledge about socialism, the class struggle, and theories of governance. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, May 26 @ 20:53:47 EDT (105 reads)
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| Politics: Kagan's Troubling Record |
by: Marjorie Cohn, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
After President Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, he made a statement that implied she would follow in the footsteps of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights giant and first black Supreme Court justice. Kagan served as a law clerk for Marshall shortly after she graduated from Harvard Law School. Specifically, Obama said that Marshall's "understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena's career." Unfortunately, history does not support Obama's optimism that Kagan is a disciple of Marshall.
Kagan demonstrated, while working as his law clerk, that she disagreed with Marshall's jurisprudence. In 1988, the Supreme Court decided Kadrmas v. Dickinson Public Schools, a case about whether a school district could make a poor family pay for busing their child to the closest school, which was 16 miles away. The five-justice majority held that the busing fee did not violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. They rejected the proposition that education is a fundamental right, which would subject the statute on which the school district relied to "strict scrutiny." The court also declined to review the statute with "heightened scrutiny" even though it had different effects on the wealthy and the poor. Instead, the majority found a "rational basis" for the statute, that is, allocating limited governmental resources. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, May 15 @ 18:50:39 EDT (135 reads)
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| Politics: Worse Than 1789? |
by: James Howard Kunstler, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Sen. Carl Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach's (GS) Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS's head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment "products" as "one shitty deal." Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called "family" newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least 20 times before the day was over. It was like the climactic scene in that old Hammer Films classic, "The Horror of Dracula," where Professor Van Helsing moves from coffin to coffin pounding stakes through the hearts of Drac and all his fellow bloodsuckers.
It's hardly the climax of our story, though. Ours has barely started. It seems to me, lately, that the crack up we've entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled, social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land royal palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a nonstop, mega house party. They must have thought they were safe 12 miles outside Paris. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, May 03 @ 17:23:08 EDT (114 reads)
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| Politics: Housing is a Human Right |
by Saul Landau
Our nation is running a $1.4 trillion-dollar budget deficit this year. So why is Congress on track to approve more than $1 trillion for "defense" spending, while cutting back services that most countries think of as human rights? Even in the wake of Obama's landmark health-care legislation, our priorities are out of sync with what the public needs.
Consider this: About 3.5 million Americans--including 1.35 million children--are homeless for significant periods of time over the course of a year, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Under U.S. law, American citizens don’t have rights to shelter, food, medical care, or a decent old age. Yet these are human rights, and they’re etched into the United Nations’ Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Albania, Tunisia, Finland, and dozens of other countries have signed on to this document, which of course has gone unratified by the U.S. Senate.
What part of “in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone my enjoy his economic, social and cultural rights, as well as his civil and political rights and freedom” do our lawmakers reject? ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, April 21 @ 19:40:03 EDT (144 reads)
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| Politics: It’s not Government’s Size, It’s the Stupidity |
by Donald Kaul
As much as liberals would wish it otherwise, Joe Stack, the fellow who flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, TX, was no right-wing nutcase.
And despite the fervent prayers of right-wing ranters, neither was he a leftist space cadet.
He was instead a full-service, equal-opportunity misanthrope. He hated everything. Banks, governments, Catholics, corporations, accountants, politicians and the IRS--especially the IRS--were all targets of his vitriol in the five-page suicide “note” he left behind.
He wrote the missive, set fire to his home, then got in his plane and flew it into a building that housed the IRS in Austin, killing at least one person, injuring others, and reducing the building to a lot of broken glass.
A last posting on his website ended with the message: ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, April 08 @ 16:29:55 EDT (127 reads)
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| Politics: The Anti-Empire Report - April 2010 |
by William Blum, www.killinghope.org
The United States takes the matter of three-headed babies very seriously.
When did it begin, all this "We take your [call/problem/question] very seriously"? With answering-machine hell? As you wait endlessly, the company or government agency assures you that they take seriously whatever reason you're calling. What a kind and thoughtful world we live in.
The BBC reported last month that doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. "It was like an earthquake," a local engineer who was running for a national assembly seat told the Washington Post in 2005. "After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah." Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.
The BBC correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage, and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads. He added that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children. One doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 — when she saw about one case every two months — with the situation now, when she saw cases every day. "I've seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead," she said.
A spokesman for the US military, Michael Kilpatrick, said it always took public health concerns "very seriously", but that "No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues." [1] ....
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, April 06 @ 14:20:28 EDT (117 reads)
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| Politics: True Colors |
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
There was an awful lot of stupid flying around Washington, DC, in the run-up to Sunday night's historic House vote on President Obama's health care reform initiative, and it didn't stop with the dawn. A New York Times news analysis on Monday morning carried the following tidbit:
Now, armed with a specific piece of legislation that offers concrete benefits to millions of people - and that promises to guarantee insurance for many who found it unaffordable or unattainable - the White House and Democrats believe they may have gained the upper hand.
But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something - and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago - the promise of a "postpartisan" Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.
Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote.
The direct message intended by this passage is that Obama failed to follow through on a campaign and administration promise to end the madness of political partisanship and work together to get things done. Got that? It's Obama's fault that not one Republican voted in favor of this very Republican bill.
That, right there, is some magical stupidity. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, March 22 @ 20:20:24 EDT (121 reads)
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| Politics: The Sanity of Hopelessness |
By David R. Hoffman
Oh say can you see by the fluorescent light
The politicians we’ve bought at our last corporate meeting?
Whose venal hearts and deceit wrought health care’s defeat,
While from boardrooms we laughed and then raised premiums?
And the wars that were fought for the profits we’ve sought
Gave proof to our shareholders that freedom is bought.
Oh say does that banner of corporate fascism now wave,
O’er democracy’s corpse and the working class slaves?
(Anthem of the Corporate Fascist States of America)
Make no mistake about it: America is hopelessly corrupt.
If there were any doubts about this reality, they were efficiently crushed by the Congressional stalemate over health care reform and by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Citizens United, under the pretext of expanding the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” clause, continued the destruction of democracy, first spawned by the court in Bush v. Gore, by granting corporations unlimited ability to influence the outcome of political elections. Thanks to Citizens United, corporations can now buy and own politicians legally and outright, instead of concealing their purchases behind the veil of so-called Political Action Committees (PACs).
Meanwhile the almost unanimous Republican opposition to Health Care Reform has exposed just how pervasive and unifying this corruption truly is, and has made America’s so-called “two party system” unworkable and anachronistic. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, March 06 @ 21:30:55 EST (121 reads)
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| Business/Economy: Down and Out...in America |
by William A. Collins
Hard to live
On lousy pay;
All the good jobs
Went away.
Returning from Haiti makes life in America look pretty sweet…briefly. Until you read the data. The poverty rate here is up to 12 percent, or 39 million people. Unemployment hovers around 10 percent (not even counting the underemployed or those who have given up), 14 percent lack health insurance, and 15 percent endure hunger.
Well, what do you expect? It’s a recession. Indeed, it’s The Great Recession. When the economy is down, people suffer. That’s why we have safety nets: unemployment compensation, food stamps, TANF (welfare), heating assistance, etc. Each of these is now overloaded, with not enough heating fuel to go around. But at least the stigma is reduced. Most families today have someone on unemployment, and people have grown less ashamed of taking food stamps. Sam’s Club, BJ’s, and Costco now welcome them. Poverty is becoming clubby. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, March 01 @ 20:00:08 EST (134 reads)
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