Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Hypocrisy/Democracy
This just in...Americans "surprised" by resistance to, "Change We Can Believe In..."
Like many of you I have been following with first interest, followed by fatigue and now disgust, the battles going on in the press and airwaves about the financial crisis and then health care crisis and then the crisis in the "intelligence community"and then the defense departments over the prosecution of the wars and that "Obama should do this" and "Obama needs to be more/less--(fill in the blank.) Now this latest--the nattering nabobs have something to gloat about. Forcing the resignation of Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Seems that Jones, widely admired as a leader in the field on developing green jobs and new technologies, said something that Republicans didn't like about...Republicans. Forget his competence, accomplishments and abilities...he was another one of those damn activists.
The Washington Post reporting that, "Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) called on Jones to resign Friday, saying in a statement, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged Congress to investigate Jones's "fitness" for the position, writing in an open letter, "Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?" On Saturday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote on his Twitter account, "Van Jones has to go.""
These Republicans??? These self-same Republicans that have called the sitting President of the United States a fraud for taking office even though he was foreign-born? These very Republicans that have lied openly and often about the President's health-care initiatives--"pulling the plug on Grandma" and "Democratic death panels?" These very charlatans who covered the Bush White House while they lied, stole, committed horrible atrocities, committed open acts of treason and usuary, all in the name of "democracy and freedom." Acts of distortion and disreputation that we paid for with blood and treasure and continue to pay for. Last week I watched a clip of a room full of people shouting down a disabled woman at a town hall meeting while she attempted to get her views out about a health care system that was victimizing her. She was in a wheelchair and they screamed at her to, "shut up and ask her question." Well I have one, "where is this democracy and American idealism that you are trying so desperately to shove down the throats of the world at the point of a gun?" Forget that Americans need these new jobs, forget that the planet is melting and the air is on fire. Forget that millions and millions of people are suffering and that all the misery coming from ignoring these various crises for decades is going to be exponentially difficult the longer we delay dealing with them.
Where is the simple, common sense and humanity required to understand that people are hurting and that unless we agree to make some changes we are doomed? Why is it that the people who have everything are fighting so desperately to keep others from having just a little? Don't they realize we pay for that cynical selfishness every day in both taxes and moral disintegration? That the insurance company we allow to game the system, the abuses we allow to be done under cover, the lies and chicanery we ignore, are all coming back to bite us in the ass one day...and that day right soon?
No, President Obama does not make every step with precision. But at the very least I can say we see the Administration move with some degree of grace and intelligence. I dare say that I have never seen that in American politics. The way to any fundamental change is fraught with rough spots and obstacles. We do want him to continue to fight for the change we need, and while I support and salute his desire to want to win consensus, doing do requires honest communication from both sides--and most of us are realizing that the right-wing of the Republican party see too much lost privledge for them to agree to do that. So, they lie, distort and like the good citizen of Lilliput...do everything in their considerable but waning power to tie President Obama down. We have lost a smart and capable leader with Van Johnson's resignation. But I can almost guarantee he is not leaving the fight, just that particular address. Even though the opponents of change are vocal, they don't outnumber the rest of us...and I for one, didn't and still don't expect the privledged to give up easily. They have been enjoying the cheese too long.
I want my President to be smart, do well and I am sure he understands that this is a marathon and not a easy sprint to the finish-line. I don't want him to fear taking the fight to them when the time comes --there does come a moment when you exhaust diplomacy and have to prepare for war. But I applaud the effort to resist fighting and to use that as a last resort. In this battle with the forces of obstruction and distortion, I am reminded of Langston's Hughes' poem, "Mother to Son"...
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
--Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now --
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
Like many of you I have been following with first interest, followed by fatigue and now disgust, the battles going on in the press and airwaves about the financial crisis and then health care crisis and then the crisis in the "intelligence community"and then the defense departments over the prosecution of the wars and that "Obama should do this" and "Obama needs to be more/less--(fill in the blank.) Now this latest--the nattering nabobs have something to gloat about. Forcing the resignation of Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Seems that Jones, widely admired as a leader in the field on developing green jobs and new technologies, said something that Republicans didn't like about...Republicans. Forget his competence, accomplishments and abilities...he was another one of those damn activists.
The Washington Post reporting that, "Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) called on Jones to resign Friday, saying in a statement, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged Congress to investigate Jones's "fitness" for the position, writing in an open letter, "Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?" On Saturday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote on his Twitter account, "Van Jones has to go.""
These Republicans??? These self-same Republicans that have called the sitting President of the United States a fraud for taking office even though he was foreign-born? These very Republicans that have lied openly and often about the President's health-care initiatives--"pulling the plug on Grandma" and "Democratic death panels?" These very charlatans who covered the Bush White House while they lied, stole, committed horrible atrocities, committed open acts of treason and usuary, all in the name of "democracy and freedom." Acts of distortion and disreputation that we paid for with blood and treasure and continue to pay for. Last week I watched a clip of a room full of people shouting down a disabled woman at a town hall meeting while she attempted to get her views out about a health care system that was victimizing her. She was in a wheelchair and they screamed at her to, "shut up and ask her question." Well I have one, "where is this democracy and American idealism that you are trying so desperately to shove down the throats of the world at the point of a gun?" Forget that Americans need these new jobs, forget that the planet is melting and the air is on fire. Forget that millions and millions of people are suffering and that all the misery coming from ignoring these various crises for decades is going to be exponentially difficult the longer we delay dealing with them.
Where is the simple, common sense and humanity required to understand that people are hurting and that unless we agree to make some changes we are doomed? Why is it that the people who have everything are fighting so desperately to keep others from having just a little? Don't they realize we pay for that cynical selfishness every day in both taxes and moral disintegration? That the insurance company we allow to game the system, the abuses we allow to be done under cover, the lies and chicanery we ignore, are all coming back to bite us in the ass one day...and that day right soon?
No, President Obama does not make every step with precision. But at the very least I can say we see the Administration move with some degree of grace and intelligence. I dare say that I have never seen that in American politics. The way to any fundamental change is fraught with rough spots and obstacles. We do want him to continue to fight for the change we need, and while I support and salute his desire to want to win consensus, doing do requires honest communication from both sides--and most of us are realizing that the right-wing of the Republican party see too much lost privledge for them to agree to do that. So, they lie, distort and like the good citizen of Lilliput...do everything in their considerable but waning power to tie President Obama down. We have lost a smart and capable leader with Van Johnson's resignation. But I can almost guarantee he is not leaving the fight, just that particular address. Even though the opponents of change are vocal, they don't outnumber the rest of us...and I for one, didn't and still don't expect the privledged to give up easily. They have been enjoying the cheese too long.
I want my President to be smart, do well and I am sure he understands that this is a marathon and not a easy sprint to the finish-line. I don't want him to fear taking the fight to them when the time comes --there does come a moment when you exhaust diplomacy and have to prepare for war. But I applaud the effort to resist fighting and to use that as a last resort. In this battle with the forces of obstruction and distortion, I am reminded of Langston's Hughes' poem, "Mother to Son"...
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
--Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now --
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
What Is Happening?
Not sure how many of you are tracking the breaking story of the Eric Prince, the founder of the company formerly known as Blackwater, but it struck me as a expose' of the rotting core of what had been official US foreign policy. As I watch the white supremacists foaming at the mouth in apoplexy at the thought of having to share dwindling resources with the rest of us and the Obama Administration struggles to find some equitable solutions to the mess they inherited, this case seems to be the smoking gun as to what has been wrong with us all along. The mobs trying to shut down debate on health-care, the nutbags trying to foment calls for the "illegitimacy" of the Obama Presidency because he's foreign born, the virulently aggressive attacks on anyone that challenges what Dr. Cornel West calls, "the pigmentocracy" -- all this occurs to be as manifestation of the struggle to finally make America accountable for the ideals it claims to be founded on...and yes, most of those founders and framers of our Constitution were slavers. This day of reckoning is long overdue.
Blackwater's security contra tors are accused of murdering Iraqi civilians without any real provocation. Now comes the accusation that it was official Blackwater policy to kill Muslims, in fact, to target them as a part of a twisted Christian Crusade against Islam. Although the US State Department canceled Blackwater’s contract in Iraq following findings that company security guards opened fire in Baghdad in September, 2007, and killed seventeen Iraqi civilians, Blackwater had free reign under the Bush Administration, and, according to one employee, Prince, "...encouraged his staff to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis." He added... "It appears that Mr Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who had provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct. Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades." Although the company, now operating under the name Xe, lost its US government contract in Iraq, it is still the largest of the State Department's private security contractors.
So, if I understand these charges correctly, the US government knowingly hired a right-wing mercenary hit-squad, masquerading as security whose real mission it was do an ethnic cleansing of the Muslim world?!" All in our name. By the way, the accusations also include prostitution, drug smuggling, child prostitution, tax evasion and coercion of witnesses including death threats against the employees testifying against them now. Notwithstanding the total inanity of that plan, was it enough to just wreak havoc and incite the population enough for Cheney and his boys at the Pentagon and Halliburton to profit from the mayhem? Did they really think that a handful of extremely well-paid hit men (while our own soldiers and their families struggled on salaries considered barely modest) would be able to turn the tide and wipe out Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan with machine guns and grenades?
If this case does not speak to the absolute moral corruption at the heart of US policy under Bush and his gang of pirates, I don't know what does. It is hard to believe that this is not tied to Cheney's secret, black-ops fund that was exposed earlier this year by the NY Times and other publications. But what occurs to be is that all this 'white mischief' engaged in by US leadership in our name is that it so completely corrupts any moral standing we have in the world and says to those receiving their daily dose of American policy at the end of a bullet or a bomb, that the ideals behind our democracy are only hypocrisy. A cover for what we are really up to and what we've been up to all along--American hegemony. That what we really want is to take the resources of the planet by force and continue the subjugation of anyone that gets in the way--an ideology that has been in place since before recorded time.
If we are going to be able to address the people around the world who seem intent on killing us, don't we have to address whether their complaints against us have any merits? Osama bin Laden and his minions have accused America of engaging in a holy war against Islam--a new 'Crusade". George Bush used exactly those words and this time, I don't think he was mangling the language. Bush/Cheny et al have done something I did not think possible-make Osama seem like his jihadist campaign is justified.
Eric Prince and Blackwater expose the horribly reality of so many people's experience of America. While I am no fan of Islamic fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism of any stripe also seems to drive people insane eventually. Blackwater's vicious, corrupt and reprehensible actions, officially sanctioned for years by the Bush Administration, have done such great damage to our reputation and fostered nearly inextinguishable rage against us, that I am not sure if even President Obama's new programs and overtures can calm the waters. And as I watch and listen to the racist mobs at town hall meetings and on Limbaugh, Coulter and Beck's supremacists' airwaves fan the flames of hate and suspicion, I struggle with choosing the available legal and civic systems to address these misinformed and twisted actors as they try to desperately cling to privileges they have not earned--the affirmative action "for whites only" that has been an institution in America since we first arrived and snatched it from under the natives. This is more than just "bad behavior." These people too claim superiority because of their Christian ideology...a sense of righteousness that allows them to murder and maim in the name of...quite frankly, I am not sure what book they are reading. I will admit to being a lapsed Catholic but I spent years in catechism class. I just don't remember this Jesus they speak of that provides them cover to unleash such pain, hatred and suffering all over the world and yet sleep so soundly at night.
So do we fight fire with fire, or do we write and debate and pray and hope for a better day? To paraphrase James Farmer, Jr. in The Great Debaters, "...you better hope I choose the latter." But that's what I'm going to say. What do you think?
a/r
Blackwater's security contra tors are accused of murdering Iraqi civilians without any real provocation. Now comes the accusation that it was official Blackwater policy to kill Muslims, in fact, to target them as a part of a twisted Christian Crusade against Islam. Although the US State Department canceled Blackwater’s contract in Iraq following findings that company security guards opened fire in Baghdad in September, 2007, and killed seventeen Iraqi civilians, Blackwater had free reign under the Bush Administration, and, according to one employee, Prince, "...encouraged his staff to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis." He added... "It appears that Mr Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who had provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct. Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades." Although the company, now operating under the name Xe, lost its US government contract in Iraq, it is still the largest of the State Department's private security contractors.
So, if I understand these charges correctly, the US government knowingly hired a right-wing mercenary hit-squad, masquerading as security whose real mission it was do an ethnic cleansing of the Muslim world?!" All in our name. By the way, the accusations also include prostitution, drug smuggling, child prostitution, tax evasion and coercion of witnesses including death threats against the employees testifying against them now. Notwithstanding the total inanity of that plan, was it enough to just wreak havoc and incite the population enough for Cheney and his boys at the Pentagon and Halliburton to profit from the mayhem? Did they really think that a handful of extremely well-paid hit men (while our own soldiers and their families struggled on salaries considered barely modest) would be able to turn the tide and wipe out Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan with machine guns and grenades?
If this case does not speak to the absolute moral corruption at the heart of US policy under Bush and his gang of pirates, I don't know what does. It is hard to believe that this is not tied to Cheney's secret, black-ops fund that was exposed earlier this year by the NY Times and other publications. But what occurs to be is that all this 'white mischief' engaged in by US leadership in our name is that it so completely corrupts any moral standing we have in the world and says to those receiving their daily dose of American policy at the end of a bullet or a bomb, that the ideals behind our democracy are only hypocrisy. A cover for what we are really up to and what we've been up to all along--American hegemony. That what we really want is to take the resources of the planet by force and continue the subjugation of anyone that gets in the way--an ideology that has been in place since before recorded time.
If we are going to be able to address the people around the world who seem intent on killing us, don't we have to address whether their complaints against us have any merits? Osama bin Laden and his minions have accused America of engaging in a holy war against Islam--a new 'Crusade". George Bush used exactly those words and this time, I don't think he was mangling the language. Bush/Cheny et al have done something I did not think possible-make Osama seem like his jihadist campaign is justified.
Eric Prince and Blackwater expose the horribly reality of so many people's experience of America. While I am no fan of Islamic fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism of any stripe also seems to drive people insane eventually. Blackwater's vicious, corrupt and reprehensible actions, officially sanctioned for years by the Bush Administration, have done such great damage to our reputation and fostered nearly inextinguishable rage against us, that I am not sure if even President Obama's new programs and overtures can calm the waters. And as I watch and listen to the racist mobs at town hall meetings and on Limbaugh, Coulter and Beck's supremacists' airwaves fan the flames of hate and suspicion, I struggle with choosing the available legal and civic systems to address these misinformed and twisted actors as they try to desperately cling to privileges they have not earned--the affirmative action "for whites only" that has been an institution in America since we first arrived and snatched it from under the natives. This is more than just "bad behavior." These people too claim superiority because of their Christian ideology...a sense of righteousness that allows them to murder and maim in the name of...quite frankly, I am not sure what book they are reading. I will admit to being a lapsed Catholic but I spent years in catechism class. I just don't remember this Jesus they speak of that provides them cover to unleash such pain, hatred and suffering all over the world and yet sleep so soundly at night.
So do we fight fire with fire, or do we write and debate and pray and hope for a better day? To paraphrase James Farmer, Jr. in The Great Debaters, "...you better hope I choose the latter." But that's what I'm going to say. What do you think?
a/r
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