Posts
Illustration: Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Democratic Leaders, the party elected to get us out of Iraq.
“Pity the Nation,” after Khalil Gibran.
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars,
whose sages are silenced,and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language
but its own and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their
rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
-- Lawerence Ferlinghetti
The Decider and the Gay Old Party (GOP)
Of course, “Gay” means “Grand,” as in elephant. A grand elephant. A white grand elephant. It is gallomphing along. It is the party of Abraham Lincoln and Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Gordon Liddy. Yes, there is much to be gay about.
Larry Craig resigned, the one who attacked Bill Clinton over a blowjob, left with the words “I am not gay.” Carl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and now Tony Snow have left, but none of them denied being gay. They remain loyal to the last drop.
The Decider showed up in Iraq and shook a lot of hands.
On the same day, Amy Goodman aired an hour long show with Lawence Ferlinghetti of A Coney Island of the Mind. He read a new poem of his and I posted it above. If I’m violating any rights, Larry, let me know and I’ll delete it. I promise.
Another show I heard was on Sacco and Vanzetti – amazing at how deeply Harvard, home of Alan Dershowitz and Henry Kissinger, was involved in that one.
Could that be why Nixon preferred graduates of Indiana?
On the Road was published 50 years ago.
Things look better for me. See, I grew up when we were constantly being warned of a thermonuclear war. It was a good time, knowing that at any time, within 20 minutes, we would all die. I wanted to be there to catch the first bomb as it dropped. I had played centerfield before during times that I beaned too many batters who made a cross as they stepped into the batter’s box (hey, I had enough trouble with the umpires, didn’t need to pitch against God) and that would have been the catch of my life. I once used media reports of the power of the bombs, added them all up together, and calculated that if we set them all off in the same place we could knock the earth off it’s orbit into the sun.
Things sure were depressing when it seemed even the politicians figured it was a bad idea to have such a war and instead played with little ones like Viet Nam, Grenada, and Iraq.
But now, the ecosystem to the rescue! We know that the delicate balance of nature is so fragile that our idiots have not figured it out and any day now they entire things could collapse. I’d rather catch an H-Bomb, but at least I can watch the earth fall apart a little bit at a time, increasing in speed, CNN losing connections once after the other, and then finally total collapse.
Don’t worry, I plan to file an appeal right after that happens.
Some articles that have been waiting:
*ZNet | Israel/Palestine*
*An important marker has been passed*
*by John Pilger; New Statesman
Those calling for a boycott of Israel were once distant voices.
Now the discussion has gone global. It is growing inexorably and
will not be silenced.
From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can
see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the
rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat. He
extended his hand and did not let go. "I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street
entertainer," he said in measured English. "Over there, I played
many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew,
and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum
while the monkey did its tricks. When we lost our country, we
lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of
us. He shouted at my son, "Show me how a Palestinian picks up
his food rations!" So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on
the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The
Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them
up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am
not even a peasant now."
"How do you feel about all that?" I asked him.
"Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian?
I never hated the Jews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I
hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They
can't win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like
the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to
forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after
them . . .".
That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I
recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli
checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks,
with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with
precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by
sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long,
I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At
the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street
entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone
thought he had been "taken away . . . very ill". No one knew
about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside,
another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called "the greatest moral
issue of the age" refuses to be buried in the dust. For every
BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied, thief
with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion
to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state's
commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more
powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion
of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the
historical record has put paid to the fable of heroic David in
the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family were driven
from their home. The alleged threat of Arab leaders to "throw
the Jews into the sea", used to justify the 1967 Israeli
onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly
questionable. In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament
zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building of their
"settlements" has accelerated on the West Bank, along with the
illegal Berli! n-style wall dividing farmers from their crops,
children from their schools, families from each other. We now
know that Israel's destruction of much of Lebanon last year was
pre-planned. As the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has
written, the recent "civil war" in Gaza was actually a coup
against the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by Elliott
Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a convicted
felon from the Iran-Contra era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's crusade
as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an
unprecedented $30bn military "aid package" for Israel, the
world's fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than
Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country
on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without
sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of
lawlessness: not one of the world's tyrannies comes close.
International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is
nothing like it in UN history.
But something is changing. Perhaps last summer's panoramic
horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world's TV screens provided
the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of Bush and Blair and the
incessant use of the inanity, "terror", together with the
day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our
lives, has finally brought the attention of the international
community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to
one of its principal sources, Israel.
I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page
advertisement in the New York Times had the distinct odour of
panic. There have been many "friends of Israel" advertisements
in the Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the
usual outrages. This one was different. "Boycott a cure for
cancer?" was its main headline, followed by "Stop drip
irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between
nations?" Who would want to do such things? "Some British
academics want to boycott Israelis," was the self-serving
answer. It referred to the University and College Union's (UCU)
inaugural conference motion in May, calling for discussion
within its branches for a boycott of Israeli academic
institutions. As John Chalcraft of the London School of
Economics pointed out, "the Israeli academy has long provided
intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and
human support for an occupation in direct violation of
international law [against whic! h] no Israeli academic
institution has ever taken a public stand".
The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important
marker has been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to
sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Both Mandela and
Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South African
cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish
members of the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often
Jewish-led academic campaign against Israel's "methodical
destruction of [the Palestinian] education system" can be
translated by those of us who have reported from the occupied
territories into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian
universities, the harassment and humiliation of students at
checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children
on their way to school.
British initiatives
These initiatives have been backed by a British group,
Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include Stephen
Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm. The country's
biggest union, Unison, has called for an "economic, cultural,
academic and sporting boycott" and the right of return for
Palestinian families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons'
international development committee has made a similar stand. In
April, the membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ)
voted for a boycott only to see it hastily overturned by the
national executive council. In the Republic of Ireland, the
Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from
Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which
accounts for two-thirds of Israel's exports under an EU-Israel
Association Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to
Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights conditions in the
agreement should be invoked and Israel's trading ! preferences
suspended.
This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that
such grave discussion of a boycott has "gone global" was
unforeseen in official Israel, long comforted by its seemingly
untouchable myths and great power sponsorship, and confident
that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure silence. When
the British lecturers' decision was announced, the US Congress
passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as
"anti-Semitic". (Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to
Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of
American academics has denied them promotion, even tenure. The
late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New York
apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at
Columbia University were once burned down. Following my 2002
film, Palestine is Still the Issue, I received death threats and
slanderous abuse, most of it coming from the US where the film
was never shown. When the BBC's Independent Panel recently
examined the corporation's coverage of the Middle East, it was
inundated with emails, "many from abroad, mostly from North
America", said its report. Some individuals "sent multiple
missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence of
pressure group mobilisation". The panel's conclusion was that
BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not "full and
fair" and "in important respects, presents an incomplete and in
that sense misleading picture". This was neutralised in BBC
press r! eleases.
The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single
democratic state, to which the Palestinian refugees are given
the right of return, is the only feasible and just solution, and
that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical in achieving
this. Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide
boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa's
whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A
boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says Pappé,
"will not change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will
send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist
and unacceptable in the 21st century . . . They would have to
choose."
And so would the rest of us.
*ZNet | Labor*
*Labor Day Hypocrisy*
*by Stephen Lendman; September 01, 2007*
Labor Day is commemorated on the first Monday in September each
year since the first one was celebrated in New York in 1882.
Around the world outside the US, socialist and labor movements
are observed on May 1 to recognize organized labor's social and
economic achievements and the workers in them. This day gets
scant attention in the US, but where it's prominent it's
commonly to remember the Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 in
Chicago. It followed the city's May 1 general strike for an
eight hour day that led to violence breaking out on the 4th.
Labor Day became a national federal holiday when Congress passed
legislation for it in June, 1894 at a time working people had
few rights, management had the upper hand, only wanted to
exploit them for profit, and got away with it. It took many
painful years of organizing, taking to the streets, going on
strike, holding boycotts, battling police and National Guard
forces, and paying with their blood and lives before real gains
were won. They got an eight hour day, a living wage, on-the-job
benefits and the pinnacle of labor's triumph in the 1930s with
the passage of the landmark Wagner Act establishing the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It guaranteed labor the right to
bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the
first time ever.
All of it was won from the grassroots. Management gave nothing
until forced to and neither did government. It always sides with
business never yields a thing unless threatened with disruptive
work stoppages or possible insurrection. All this is in a
democracy that claims to be a government of the people, by the
people and for the people, most of whom are ordinary working
class ones.
Since a worried Congress passed the 1935 Wagner Act during The
Great Depression, the state of organized labor declined,
especially post-WW II. It accelerated precipitously during the
Reagan years under an administration openly hostile to worker
rights in its one-side support for management. It continued
unabated, under Republican and Democrat administrations, and
today stands at a multi-generational low.
Under George Bush conditions got much worse. Since coming into
office in 2001, he sided with management openly on policies to
strip workers of their right to organize and be able to bargain
for a living wage and essential benefits. He hired anti-union
officials, denied millions overtime pay, cut pay raises for 1.8
million federal workers claiming a "national emergency," and
schemed to end Social Security as we know it by plotting
(unsuccessfully so far) to let Wall Street sharks take it over.
Since labor's ascendency decades earlier, corporate America, in
league with government, shamelessly denigrated unions and the
rights of working people in them. In 1958, 34.7% of the work
force was unionized, but now the figure is around 12% overall,
and only 7.4% in the private sector - the lowest it's been in
seven decades.
Even worse, most jobs are low-pay service sector ones because
the nation's manufacturing base and many higher-paying positions
in finance and technology have been offshored to low-wage
developing nations. Workers there can be hired for a fraction of
the pay scales here or as virtual serfs at below poverty wages
as low as $2 a day or less and no benefits. They fill legions of
sweatshop factory jobs in countries prohibiting unions and fair
worker practice standards for Wal-Mart's "Always low prices" on
the backs of ruthlessly exploited working people.
Nonetheless, on the first Monday each September, this nation
"remembers" working Americans with a federally-mandated holiday
in their "honor." Who's celebrating when it's disingenuously
commemorated at a time worker rights are threatened, ignored,
forgotten, and uncared about by heartless governments beholden
to capital. They scorn working people who are no longer as
deceived with meaningless bread and circus droppings at the
expense of what they need most: good jobs at good pay, essential
benefits, job security, and a government on their side doing
what counts most - supporting their rights with worker-friendly
legislation.
Workers are reminded every day that backing like that is off the
table by governments shamelessly mocking their day. It's
commemorated in name only by a nation beholden to capital, the
corporate giants controlling it, and the best democracy their
money can buy for them alone.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to
The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on
TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
*ZNet | Labor*
*Labor Day Hypocrisy*
*by Stephen Lendman; September 01, 2007*
Labor Day is commemorated on the first Monday in September each
year since the first one was celebrated in New York in 1882.
Around the world outside the US, socialist and labor movements
are observed on May 1 to recognize organized labor's social and
economic achievements and the workers in them. This day gets
scant attention in the US, but where it's prominent it's
commonly to remember the Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 in
Chicago. It followed the city's May 1 general strike for an
eight hour day that led to violence breaking out on the 4th.
Labor Day became a national federal holiday when Congress passed
legislation for it in June, 1894 at a time working people had
few rights, management had the upper hand, only wanted to
exploit them for profit, and got away with it. It took many
painful years of organizing, taking to the streets, going on
strike, holding boycotts, battling police and National Guard
forces, and paying with their blood and lives before real gains
were won. They got an eight hour day, a living wage, on-the-job
benefits and the pinnacle of labor's triumph in the 1930s with
the passage of the landmark Wagner Act establishing the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It guaranteed labor the right to
bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the
first time ever.
All of it was won from the grassroots. Management gave nothing
until forced to and neither did government. It always sides with
business never yields a thing unless threatened with disruptive
work stoppages or possible insurrection. All this is in a
democracy that claims to be a government of the people, by the
people and for the people, most of whom are ordinary working
class ones.
Since a worried Congress passed the 1935 Wagner Act during The
Great Depression, the state of organized labor declined,
especially post-WW II. It accelerated precipitously during the
Reagan years under an administration openly hostile to worker
rights in its one-side support for management. It continued
unabated, under Republican and Democrat administrations, and
today stands at a multi-generational low.
Under George Bush conditions got much worse. Since coming into
office in 2001, he sided with management openly on policies to
strip workers of their right to organize and be able to bargain
for a living wage and essential benefits. He hired anti-union
officials, denied millions overtime pay, cut pay raises for 1.8
million federal workers claiming a "national emergency," and
schemed to end Social Security as we know it by plotting
(unsuccessfully so far) to let Wall Street sharks take it over.
Since labor's ascendency decades earlier, corporate America, in
league with government, shamelessly denigrated unions and the
rights of working people in them. In 1958, 34.7% of the work
force was unionized, but now the figure is around 12% overall,
and only 7.4% in the private sector - the lowest it's been in
seven decades.
Even worse, most jobs are low-pay service sector ones because
the nation's manufacturing base and many higher-paying positions
in finance and technology have been offshored to low-wage
developing nations. Workers there can be hired for a fraction of
the pay scales here or as virtual serfs at below poverty wages
as low as $2 a day or less and no benefits. They fill legions of
sweatshop factory jobs in countries prohibiting unions and fair
worker practice standards for Wal-Mart's "Always low prices" on
the backs of ruthlessly exploited working people.
Nonetheless, on the first Monday each September, this nation
"remembers" working Americans with a federally-mandated holiday
in their "honor." Who's celebrating when it's disingenuously
commemorated at a time worker rights are threatened, ignored,
forgotten, and uncared about by heartless governments beholden
to capital. They scorn working people who are no longer as
deceived with meaningless bread and circus droppings at the
expense of what they need most: good jobs at good pay, essential
benefits, job security, and a government on their side doing
what counts most - supporting their rights with worker-friendly
legislation.
Workers are reminded every day that backing like that is off the
table by governments shamelessly mocking their day. It's
commemorated in name only by a nation beholden to capital, the
corporate giants controlling it, and the best democracy their
money can buy for them alone.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to
The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on
TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
