• 16 Nov 2009 22:28

  How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to Be Afraid By Robert Jensen November 15, 2009 "DV" -- I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday. Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recentessays, I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against Indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States. Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.” In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture. Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline. Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid. Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States. The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others? Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq). Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible. However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations. As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful. Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Citizens of Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, published by Soft Skull Press. He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. ___________________________________________________ A Science Fiction Story By Fidel Castro November 15, 2009 -"Fidel's reflection" - Nov, 11, 2009 -- I very much regret to have to criticize Obama knowing that there are in that country other could-be presidents worse than him. I am aware that that position in the United States is today a major headache. The best example of this is the report in yesterday's edition of Granma that 237 US members of Congress, or 44%, are millionaires. This does not mean that every one of them is an incorrigible reactionary but it is extremely difficult that they feel like the many million Americans who do not have access to medical care, who are unemployed or who need to work very hard to earn their living. Of course, Obama himself is no beggar; he owns millions of dollars. He excelled as a professional and his command of language, his eloquence and intellect are unquestionable. Also, he was elected president despite his being an African American, a first time occurrence in the history of his country's racist society, which is enduring a profound international economic crisis of its own making. This is not about being an anti-American as the system and its huge media intend to label its adversaries. The American people are not the culprits but rather the victims of a system that is not only unsustainable but worse still: it is incompatible with the life of humanity. The smart and rebellious Obama who suffered humiliation and racism in his childhood and youth understands this, but the Obama educated by the system and committed to it and to the methods that took him to the US presidency cannot resist the temptation to pressure, to threaten and even to deceive others. He is a workaholic. Perhaps no other American president would dare to engage in such an intense program as he intends to carry out in the next eight days. According to plan, he will take an extensive tour of Alaska where he intends to address the troops stationed there. He will be visiting Japan, Singapore, the People's Republic of China and South Korea. He will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) and that of the Association of East Asian Nations (ASEAN). He will hold talks with the Prime Minister of Japan and His Majesty Emperor Akihito in the land of the Rising Sun as well as with the prime ministers of Singapore and South Korea and the presidents of Indonesia Susilo Bambang, of Russia Dimitri Medvedev and of the People's Republic of China Hu Jintao. He will be making speeches and giving press conferences. He will be carrying with him his nuclear briefcase, which we hope he will have no need to use during his hasty tour. His Security advisor has said that Obama will discuss with the president of Russia the continuance of the START-1 Treaty set to expire on December 5, 2009. There is no doubt that some reductions of the enormous nuclear arsenal will be agreed upon, albeit this will be of no consequence to world peace and economy. What is our distinguished friend planning to discuss during his intense journey? The White House has made its solemn announcement: climate change and economic recovery; nuclear disarmament and the Afghan war; and, the risks of war in Iran and in the People's Democratic Republic of Korea. There is plenty of material to produce a science fiction book. But, how can Obama unravel the problems of climate change when the position of his representatives during the preparatory meetings of the Copenhagen Summit on the greenhouse effect gas emissions was the worst among those of the industrialized and rich nations, both in Bangkok and Barcelona, because the United States chose not to sign the Kyoto Protocol and the oligarchy of that country is not willing to really cooperate. How can he contribute to the solution of the grave economic problems afflicting a large part of humanity when at the end of 2008 the total debt of the United States --including that of the federal, state and local administrations, the businesses and families—amounted to 57 trillion dollars, that is, over 400% of its GDP, and that country's budget deficit reached almost 13% of its GDP in fiscal year 2009, an information that Obama is certainly aware of. What can he offer Hu Jintao when his openly protectionist policies have been aimed against the Chinese exports and he is demanding at all costs that the Chinese government revaluates the Yuan, an action that would adversely impact on the growing Third World imports from China? The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, who is not a disciple of Karl Marx but an honest catholic among others who are not willing to cooperate with the imperialism in Latin America, has recently said that "....we are risking our destruction and the devastation of life's diversity." "[...] almost half of humanity is living today under the poverty line. The wealthiest 20% are consuming 82.49% of all of the riches on Earth while the poorest 20% are living on a tiny 1.6%." He also quotes the FAO as he warns that "...there will be in the upcoming years from 150 to 200 million climate refugees." And then he adds that "humanity is consuming today a 30% above the regenerating capacity...the planet is giving unmistakable signs that it can stand it no more." What he says is true, but Obama and the US Congress have yet to find out. What is he leaving to us in the hemisphere? The shameful problem in Honduras and the annexation of Colombia where the United States will set up seven military bases. They also established a military base in Cuba more than one-hundred years ago and remain there by force. It was in that base where they installed the horrible torture center widely known around the world; the same that Obama has been unable to close, yet. I hold the view that before Obama completes his term there will be from six to eight right-wing governments in Latin America that will be allies of the empire. Likewise, the US extreme right will try to limit his administration to one term. Once again there will be a Nixon, a Bush or the like of a Cheney in the White House. Then, the meaning will be clear of those absolutely unjustifiable bases threatening today the South American peoples with the pretext of fighting drug-trafficking, a problem created by the tens of billions of dollars that organized crime and the production of drugs in Latin America receive from the United States. Cuba has shown it only takes justice and social development to fight drugs. In our country, the crime rate per 100,000 people is one of the lowest in the world. No other country in the hemisphere can exhibit such low rates of violence. It is known that, despite the blockade, no other country can boast our high education levels. The Latin American peoples will resist the onslaught of the empire! Obama's trip seems a science fiction story. Fidel Castro Ruz

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• 16 Nov 2009 07:11

  Holocaust Holidays in the USA

  June Terpstra, Ph.D.

  November 26, 2008 Did you ever notice how most major USA holidays celebrate genocides and holocausts? The first official Thanksgiving Day celebrated the massacre of native American men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies. "Gathered in this place of meeting, they were attacked by mercenaries and English and Dutch. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth were shot down, The rest were burned alive in the building-----The very next day the governor declared a Thanksgiving Day.....For the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won." (Professor Newell) Then there is Columbus Day. He was a terrorist according to today's definition. Las Casas, a priest traveling with Columbus tells how the Spaniards in the Caribbean "grew more conceited every day" ... They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings." Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys." (Howard Zinn, Peoples History of the USA ) There is the Fourth of July. Those revolutionaries would be tortured at Guantanamo or water-boarded in a CIA prison in Poland or Romania today. The American revolutionaries of the 1700's sponsored a new nation with a constitution built on "Indian removal" and genocide of an estimated 11 million natives and slavery of Africans. The figures from the 18th Century Slave Trade show approximately 5,000,000 people transported and 8,100,000 people died. Then there is Memorial Day celebrating the deaths of all the men that bought the military industrial complex's war propaganda. The United States has sent troops abroad or militarily struck other countries' territory at least 216 times since independence from Britain . Since 1945 the United States has intervened in more than 20 countries throughout the world. Since World War II, the United States actually dropped bombs on 23 countries. These include: China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954,Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Congo1964, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73,Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983,Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998,Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999. Post World War II, the United States has also assisted in over 20 different coups throughout the world, and the CIA was responsible for half a dozen assassinations of political heads of state. My personal favorite holiday is Labor Day. Here are some highlights from Illinois , my state of residence demonstrating how much the USA government values its laborers: 14 July 1877 A general strike halted the movement of U.S. railroads. In the following days, strike riots spread across the United States . The next week, federal troops were called out to force an end to the nationwide strike. At the " Battle of the Viaduct" in Chicago , federal troops (recently returned from an Indian massacre) killed 30 workers and wounded over 100. Haymarket on 11 November 1887, four anarchists were executed. All of the executed advocated armed struggle and violence as revolutionary methods, but their prosecutors found no evidence that any had actually thrown the Haymarket bomb. They died for their words, not their deeds. A quarter of a million people lined Chicago 's street during Parson's funeral procession to express their outrage at this gross mis-carriage of justice. 5 July 1893 During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had drastically reduced wages, the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago 's Jackson Park was set ablaze, and seven buildings were reduced to ashes. The mobs raged on, burning and looting railroad cars and fighting police in the streets, until 10 July, when 14,000 federal and state troops finally succeeded in putting down the strike. 3 February 1930 "Chicagorillas" -- labor racketeers -- shot and killed contractor William Healy, with whom the Chicago Marble Setters Union had been having difficulties. 30 May 1937 Police killed 10 and wounded 30 during the "Memorial Day Massacre" at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago. For over five hundred years whether it's Europeans calling themselves Catholics or Puritans; Europeans calling themselves Zionists; or the democratic crusaders of the USA it's never a good thing for indigenous populations to have invaders "settle" on the stolen land to which they say they have a divine right. . The Puritans embraced a line from Psalms 2:8, "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heather for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." Their mantra of "God told me it's mine" means the shit is hitting the fan for the people of the land.  In June 1637 John Underhill slaughtered a Pequot village in a similar manner to that described above. The Pequot had a festival to welcome in the new harvest. At that point, the pilgrims came over and ambushed and slaughtered them. The next day the pilgrims went to church and gave thanks to God for the food and success. That's how Thanksgiving started.Sundust Teocuauhtli Martinez The descendents of these Europeans have a similar scam going in Iraq , Palestine , Afghanistan , Somalia , and coming soon to a war near you in Syria , Iran and the Sudan . The war hawks are down right rabid when it comes to taking over the Middle East . They also have their sites on Africa and then their plan is to go back to South America to finish the regime changed begun on that "other" September 11, in 1973 when the USA held their CIA sponsored coup against Allende in Chile. The coup in Chile is exactly what President Nixon wanted, he is quoted as saying, "It's that son of a bitch Allende. We're going to smash him." This latest terror wars scam mirrors the game run by popes and kings of the past. Papal bulls declaring all heathen lands to belong to the Catholics and royal decrees advocating the slaughter and enslavement of natives are today called executive orders and international resolutions. As soon as Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq there was an executive order to "claim" the oil. As for the Zionists, their god tells them that they get to have Gaza, Jerusalem, South Lebanon, and it does not matter if it violates any man made law because their god trumps man made laws and their holocaust gets better film distribution. The hate campaigns of past and present are slick and the propaganda program in the military and the media are one and the same: Hate the native, kill the native, and steal the land. The government media wing employs henchmen, like Edward Bernays of the past and torture loving lawyer Alan Dershowitz who manufactures the hate campaigns of today. They engineer pseudo academic programs and obsessive propaganda films intended to scare white Americans who will in turn support nuking commies or Muslims or both to kingdom come. Today's propagnada of Trotskyites turned neo-conservatives are as factual as the Thanksgiving and Columbus myths. President elect Obama says he's all about change. Guess what story he'll be telling on this National Day of Mourning for the indigenous people of the world that the US government calls Thanksgiving Day? I bet it won't be the story about the massacre of natives after they shared some food with the hungry Europeans. It will be the continuing saga of giving thanks for governments sponsored Iraqi and Palestinian holocausts while bailing out bankers for the new world order. Dr. June C. Terpstra is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago and teaches Justice Studies at Northeastern Illinois University .

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• 12 Nov 2009 20:26

  A Nation Of DestroyersWhat You Didn't Know About The War

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• 10 Nov 2009 13:40

  Not Untitled

  By Joe Mandel

  2009

  What's mine...

  Isn't mine

  What's yours... isn't mine

  I'm stuck here defenseless within the walls of Palestine

  And I'm struggling through the day

  And I'm falling through the night

  And there is no place to land so I throw up my arms and fight

  When no one ever listens

  The frustration engraves my name

  On the plot inside the cemetery

  Built on love and shame

  So the world will still ignore us

  Until the world lets out a shout

  Let out all the pain inside you

  Until your heart feels what we've felt

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• 08 Nov 2009 10:31

  The old lie that palestine was dry desert waiting for a people is just that--a lie. This clip for all people to see the Beauty of the Palestinian People before they were ethnically cleansed and murdered and made into refugees by the State of Israel.Music Joaquin Rodrigo, lyrics Helmut Lotti, sung by LottiAll Photos (b&w) from http://fai.cyberia.net.lb/For Husayn, My husband & Best friend 

  ________________________

  Focusing on Ft. Hood Killer's Beliefs Is an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre

  Mark Ames

  Emergency personnel carry the wounded at the U.S. Army post in Fort Hood, Texas, in this video grab taken and released on November 5, 2009November 6, 2009 It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons. For starters, Fort Hood is located in Killeen, Texas -- where one of the deadliest rampage shootings in American history took place in 1991, when an unemployed ex-Navy enlistee, George Hennard Jr., crashed his pickup into a popular cafeteria, pulled out two handguns (Hasan also used two handguns), and murdered 23 people before taking his own life. The day before the massacre, Hennard was eating a hamburger in a local restaurant watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and, according to the manager, "When an interview with Anita Hill came on, he just went off. He started screaming, 'You dumb bitch! You bastards opened the door for all the women!'" So yesterday’s Fort Hood shooting isn’t the worst or most deranged mass-killing in Killeen’s history -- not by a longshot. The mainstream media is enabling the screaming about the Muslim traitors in our midst, but Hasan killed far fewer Americans than the white, racist George Hennard. And they were bested by the federal government in nearby Waco Texas, in 1993, when federal forces slaughtered some 75 men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound. But in what may seem like a strange coincidence, Maj. Hasan and Killeen are connected to another American shooting rampage. Killeen held the record for America’s worst shooting massacre until 2007, when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 33 fellow students. And Malik Nadal Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech in 1997. Both Hasan and Cho were bullied and harassed -- Hasan’s cousin told reporters that after 9/11, his military comrades regularly abused him, calling him "camel jockey." But the cousin insisted that Hasan’s opposition to the war didn’t grow out of the bullying, but rather from the stories he heard while interning as a psychiatric counselor to veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Hasan even hired an attorney to try to come to a settlement with the US government and leave the service, but they wouldn’t settle for a deal and instead forced him to deploy. He apparently fought it up to the day before his deployment -- and instead of going to the war, he brought the war to the US military. As is often the case, the wrong lesson was learned, and the solution was more guns and more militarization of society: after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007: a new pro-gun student group was formed, calling for the arming of as many students as possible. The group is called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, and today it claims over 40,000 members on over 363 campuses. Likewise in 1991 after the Killeen shootings, the state of Texas responded by enacting a law freeing up gun owners to carry concealed weapons. It was President Bush who signed the law as TX governor in 1995 -- and it was also Bush in 2008 who signed the first federal gun control law in 13 years after the Virginia Tech massacre. So Hasan, whose parents came to the US from Palestine, had plenty of personal connections to "Made in the USA" violence and massacres; and yet there’s a frantic attempt to make him out to be a crazy Muslim monster hell-bent on killing Americans. Why would he need to take inspiration just from them, when Americans already provided so many excellent examples of how to mass-murder fellow Americans? Fort Hood, the largest military base in America, has seen its share of violence as well. For one thing, it holds the record for most soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan -- 685 so far -- and though we don’t know the figures, it’s reasonable to assume that Fort Hood is responsible for a sizable percentage of the tens or hundreds of thousands killed in those countries since America invaded them. Over the same period, 75 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood, ten in 2009 alone -- the highest of any base. In just one weekend in 2005, two soldiers who’d returned from Iraq killed themselves in separate incidents. Last year, in something right out of Full Metal Jacket, Specialist Jody Michael Wirawan, 21, of the 1st Cavalry Division, shot and killed his lieutenant, then killed himself when police arrived. And life in Killeen isn’t much nicer: it has one of the nation’s lowest median incomes and highest crime rates. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier was killed by a Killeen cop who claimed he killed the soldier after being dragged underneath his SUV; the dead soldier’s mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the cop was notoriously out-of-control and violent, and that he shot her son while the car was pulled over. All of this violence and despair led Fort Hood’s commander, Lt. General Rick Lynch, to build a post-traumatic stress disorder complex called the Resiliency Campus, featuring a Spiritual Fitness Center for soldiers to meditate, and a Cognitive Enhancement Assistance Center. As though a spiritual fitness workout routine could resolve the underlying cause of why a Resiliency Campus was built in the first place. If the government really were concerned about all the suicides and PTSD cases, they could have prevented Mj. Hasan’s murder-suicide mission before it happened. It would have been easy: Hasan had pleaded with his superiors not to be sent to Iraq, where he was scheduled to be deployed, but his requests were denied. RIght-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin and some mainstream outlets have seized on reports emerging that Hasan supposedly voiced opinions sympathetic to suicide bombers. But if he was an Al Qaeda sleeper-cell suicide bomber himself, it makes no sense why he’d a) argue with fellow soldiers that the wars are wrong and we should withdraw; and b) that he tried to get out of being deployed to Iraq. The 9/11 terrorists did their best to "blend in" and pretend like they were as American as apple pie, because the point is not to draw any attention to yourself if you’re a terrorist planning to suicide bomb a military base. Moreover, the timing of his shooting, the day before he was to be sent off, shows that his desperation had reached the limit. What this suggests is that the massacre could have been avoided if Maj. Hasan’s objections were taken into account. Maj. Hasan’s opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars puts him where the majority of Americans are today. And he’s not the first soldier at Fort Hood to protest the war. Desertion rates have soared since the Iraq invasion, and Fort Hood has had some high-profile objectors making the news this year, such as Spc. Victor Agosto, who was court-martialed in August after he refused to go to Afghanistan, and Sgt. Travis Bishop, who filed for conscientious objector status after serving in Iraq for 14 months. Going back to Vietnam War, Fort Hood was famous as the site of one of the first anti-war protests in 1965, when the so-called "Fort Hood 3" refused to be shipped off on the grounds that the war was wrong and illegal. Three years later, the movement expanded: hundreds of African-American GIs protested plans to deploy them to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and 43 were court-martialed. It was a heroic act: US troops and cops staged one of the bloodiest police-on-citizen episodes in modern history. In 1971, the Fort Hood United Front, made up of soldiers from the base, marched into Killeen, even though the city refused to grant them a permit; hundreds were arrested.  Today, if you read through some of the forums out of Fort Hood, the antiwar mood is clearly strong and clearly a problem for the authorities. So they’ll do their best to paint Maj. Hasan as a Muslim loon. The rightwing has been trying for years now to equate opposition to the wars with pro-terrorist, anti-American sentiment, and by the poll numbers today, that would make most Americans anti-American terrorists.  You can already see the dark, rank heart of the American Soul in anonymous messages posted on underground right-wing sites like Free Republic, a few of which are posted below: Why is anyone surprised? We already have a DIRTY MOSLEM TRAITOR in the Oval Office. What’s one more moslem piece of garbage? *         *         * [Quoting a previous posting] **If you are Islamic, you may not serve in our military. Period.** I'm getting closer to: If you are Islamic, you may not serve in our military live in this country. Period. *         *         * I’m getting closer to: If you are Islamic, you may not live. *         *         * The story is still fresh and there’s a lot we don’t know, and there are still a lot of conflicting reports and confusion. Since Hasan will be tried in a military court, the American public will only learn whatever the military wants us to learn. And to a nation slipping deeper into its own amnesiac fog, the last thing we want to learn are the painful, threatening truths. _______

  :: Article nr. 59808 sent on 07-nov-2009 06:18 ECT

   

  www.uruknet.info?p=59808Link: www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/24805:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website._________________________________________________

  Dark Glass: Hateful Echoes and Hidden Costs

  Chris Floyd

   

  November 6, 2009 I. Seventy-one years ago, almost to the very day, a member of a religious minority fatally shot a government official – an act by a troubled individual that was seized upon by hateful minds to set off an orgy of blood and destruction against his co-religionists. While the Ft. Hood shootings will not spark a rerun of Kristallnacht – the anti-semitic pogrom launched by the Nazis after 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst Vom Rath in Paris on Nov. 7, 1938, in retaliation for Nazi depradations against the Jews – the upswelling of racial, ethnic and religious hatred against Muslims and Arabs we will now see in many quarters will ring with ugly echoes. The entire lexicon of Islamophobia is already filled to bursting with Nazi tropes – "the enemy within," the dark, monolithic mass of "prodigious breeders" threatening to overwhelm Western Civilization, the "maniacal extremists" who will not rest until they destroy the sacred Homeland, the sinister, secret worldwide conspiracy which bribes and suborns Western leaders into doing its bidding, etc. etc. This sinister discourse is accepted, and used, among the highest circles of power – senators, representatives, "serious" commentators, academics, think-tank apparatchiks. And all of this is being constantly regurgitated even while the armed forces and covert operators of the United States are in the midst of an apparently endless campaign of death and violence that has killed, so far, well in excess of a million innocent people – the vast majority of them Muslims, or of Muslim heritage – while planting great, bristling fortresses of domination and excess in the midst of wretchedly poor lands. In this too, our modern Islamophobes mimic their German forbears. It was the Nazis who held – and exercised – violent, overwhelming sway over the Jews within their reach, even as they bleated constantly about the "Jewish threat" to "destroy the German people."  Perhaps many of them, at some level, believed this fantastical projection of their own murderous desires and unquenchable anxieties; certainly, we know that top Nazis like Hitler and Himmler "justified" their extermination programs as "pre-emptive defense" against an existential threat from the "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy. (For in this disordered mindset, every Jew was considered a Bolshevik -- and even rich, capitalist Jews were seen as part of the same overarching conspiracy -- just as our Islamophobes consider every Muslim a terrorist or an extremist.) In a similar manner, all of our Terror Warriors – not just the strident Islamophobes, but the entire bipartisan political establishment, including the "progressive" president – paint the "Long War" as a strictly defensive measure against dark forces who irrationally "hate us for our freedoms" and seek to "destroy our way of life." Comparisons are not equivalencies, and history does not repeat itself -- but it often rings with disturbing assonances. II. At this stage, with so much about the Ft. Hood case still unknown, there is little point in commenting on the substance of the case. But all kinds of rumors and conjectures and second-hand reports about the alleged shooter are richoceting around the media echo chamber. For example, the New York Times, the nation's most "serious" newspaper, filled some of its early reports with pro-terrorist comments culled from the internet, left there by people who have the same or similar names as the accused. (This just days after the media had been burned by numerous "false positives" in the White House guest list.)  The fact that it is unlikely that an Army officer on active duty would post such comments in his own name was obviously no bar to getting the most the most inflammatory factoids into circulation as soon as possible. This might be considered irresponsible, if it didn't come from a paper that has been instrumental in selling the Terror War, with its ever-mounting toll of civilians deaths (three more children, and other civilians working in a field, were killed by a NATO missile on the same day of the Ft. Hood shooting), and all the despair and suffering and hatred it is engendering.  In any case, at this point, I think the only relevant thing one can say about this particular case appeared on the website of the Iraq Veterans Against the War on Thursday: "The shootings that happened today are a tragic reminder of the hidden costs of war."

  :: Article nr. 59802 sent on 06-nov-2009 21:54 ECT

   

  www.uruknet.info?p=59802Link: www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1871-dark-glass-hate
     ful-echoes-and-hidden-costs.html:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.
  
  
  

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• 04 Nov 2009 18:49

  GoodnessAfter all the Gods and Idols have come and away have passedGoodness will subside forever and forever will last.So long as there is a Wrong, there will be a RightAnd the Fighters for Good will Fight the Good Fight.All Lying Liars will see an end to their LiesAnd Answers will be given to all the WhysAll through eternity we may glimpse the PrizeOf the Goodness which will never die.The empires crumble, the tyrants tumble,Malcontents grumble, the Proud are humbled,Bloodthirsty crowds mumble as fighters get ready to rumble,But Goodness will not end, or falter, or fumble.All the Gods and the Idols will forever Rise and Fall;Goodness for Goodness's sake outlasts them, One and All.---al-Ustadh Husayn Farajullah Zaki Al-Kurdi.November 3, 2009. Dhu al-Qa'dah 15, 1430.

  ____________

  Obama Turns His Back on Urban Youth

  By R.L. Donovan / November 4th, 2009

  On DC's green-line train headed to Branch Avenue sits a young girl gone weary by the teenage blues and the 3:15 pm school dismissal. She sits on the last of an eight-car train, slouched and coiled - her legs in a pretzel.

  By the circumference of her hooped ear-rings, the length of her braids, and the style of her school uniform, I can tell that she is no older than 14 - a DC Public Schools student who spends her school day playing an eighth-grade lab rat under the sterile watch of Chancellor Michelle Rhee for the costly scientific experiment of "education-reform." If only someone were to ask her what she learns.

  Her book-bag is stuffed with materials; a pink ruler veers out of the open zipper. And while a number of large textbooks make their rectangular imprints, she has too much on her mind to take one out for reading.

  She munches on a handful of sun-flower seeds, and I can just about predict which of the pending train stations will be her stop. She wears the empty gaze of a girl from Anacostia, with the skin-color of Congress Heights, and the sense of oblivion one can only earn from Southern Avenue.

  Surely, one of these stations must be her stop. As if in a forbidden despair, she dissolves her attention into the window, where nothing more than a reflection and the routine of a dark subway-tunnel entertains the moment. She sits motionless, clearly absent of the hope one would expect a young person to have, living in the same city as President Obama.

  The train slithers into the Anacostia station; her peers crowd the door with an after-school ruckus. It is their stop. The doors open and they all rush out while she remains entranced. One of her peers yells, "Tanika cmon'!" She lethargically returns from a self-induced hypnosis, and nearly misses her chance at the platform, as the train's doors chime of closure. The train is now empty of young students, and everyone breathes a united sigh of relief.

  For one evening it seems that no one would have to bare the onus of having to press the train's emergency button for a teenage dispute gone tragically wrong. But today, one year after the election of President Obama, no one on this train is thanking their Commander-in-Chief for this rare evening where young people train-goers will not become an evening news segment for Channel 8.

  We sit in our seats pretending that we understand why the president chooses to pre-occupy himself with a war in Afghanistan, instead of the war happening in the very streets of DC, east of the Anacostia River and south of Pennsylvania Ave-the one between young angry black bodies and 9mm bullets.

  And as we keep the casual look of "voting citizen" on our faces, we ponder why political pollsters are too chicken to ask Tanika if she thinks National Security has something to do with a place outside of the boundaries of her neighborhood or the classrooms of her school.

  One year later, we pretend not to notice a disenchanted Tanika sitting in a voluntary loneliness on a rush-hour train, in the middle of a city where there is too much diabetes, HIV, and shrapnel in the blood. We also pretend not to notice that our president has a discourse about health care that neglects this fact.

  A year ago today, like Alice in Wonderland, Tanika had been willing, like all of us, to follow Obama curiously down his rabbit hole as he hopped away feverishly, lamenting running late (she thought "for change").

  And just like Alice, Tanika now finds herself in a long hallway of locked doors, where the very door promising opportunity is too small for her to fit through. But unlike Alice, this place of opportunity behind locked doors is all but déjà vu-a familiar mirage of life growing up in DC's inner-city.

  Surely, it's nothing to cry about. But, Tanika never imagined that one year later, her new president would have led her to this wretched place, and that all she would ever see from him was his backside getting farther and farther away.

  As my stop approaches, I can't help but notice that the train grows emptier as it gets closer to the end of the line - each passenger having put his or her faith in the ride for as long as they could, until they felt that the train could no longer get them any closer to where they hoped to be.

  This emptying train is not all that different from the Obama presidency - a fast moving apparatus on rails once crowded with committed riders believing the destination - now a speeding vessel with too much standing room, with promises of emptiness by the time it reaches the end of the line.

  When my stop arrives, another rambunctious group of young students linger eagerly at the edge of the platform. As I head toward the escalator, they board the train; the doors chime and gently close. As I hear the train departing, I begin to worry, for I know that the train will lead them down its rabbit hole - a tunnel of expectations, speeding along as if it were running late, getting farther and farther away from where the young students first started.

  No telling how many Tanikas are among them.

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• 03 Nov 2009 06:32

  Taliban Decline US Offer Of 6 Provinces for 8 Bases By Aamir Latif "US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast," http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23861.htm === McChrystal Doesn't Get It-Does Obama? By Scott Ritter There is a curious phenomenon taking place in the American media at the moment: the lionization of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23868.htm === House to Vote on Resolution to Reject Goldstone Report By Jeremy R. Hammond The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on a resolution calling on President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' in multilateral fora."http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23864.htm === Rack 'em and Screw 'em, Boys! By Sheila Samples Is there anything scarier than the New York Times' Halloween treat entitled, "Documents Detail Conditions Found at Secret C.I.A. Jails"? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23865.htm === Bonaparte Blair & Co By Gilad Atzmon Blair was sure that he had the presidency 'in his pocket'. He was wrong, it is now rather clear that European leaders have woken up.  The horrifying dream may be over. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23870.htm === Welcome To The Masquerade By Jim Kirwan The government and the constitution has been dead and buried since the 1968 obscenity of the 'Democratic" convention in Chicago-and nothing that has been done since has been able to push back this theft of our FREEDOM to speak or to demand redress for our grievances with the continuing fascist police-state that has existed since those police riots shut down that convention. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23871.htm === Be Prepared for the Worst The large-scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly. By Ron Paul, A false recovery is under way. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23867.htm === Death of 'Soul of Capitalism': Bogle, Faber, Moore 20 reasons America has lost its soul and collapse is inevitable By Paul B. Farrell Jack Bogle published "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" four years ago. The battle's over. The sequel should be titled: "Capitalism Died a Lost Soul." Worse, we've lost "America's Soul." And, worldwide, the consequences will be catastrophic. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23866.htm === Kucinich: Health Reform Legislation 'a Bailout for Insurance Companies' By Stephen C. Webster According to Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), the Democrats' health reform legislation is basically a sham. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23863.htm === Osama bin Laden Responsible for 9/11 Attacks? Is This Belief Based on Evidence? By David Ray Griffin There is not even any good evidence for the claim that bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Accordingly, insofar as the justification for the continuation of the AfPak war is based on the fact that bin Laden in the region both before and after the 9/11 attacks, that justification would seem to be doubly baseless. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23862.htm === "Assassination of Russia" False flag Government sponsored terrorism Russian style? Video French Documentary Alleges Kremlin Involvement in Russia's 1999 Apartment Bombings. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23869.htm === Life & Debt Video Documentary If you have ever wondered what the IMF and the New world Order can do to a third world country, this one is for you. Click to viewhttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23860.htm === 36 dead in Somalia violence: Scores have been wounded in three days of fighting in central and southern Somalia, and police and soldiers clash in the north's autonomous Puntland region.http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-somalia2-2009nov02,0,5758154.story === Blast kills senior commander in northwest Somalia: A roadside bomb killed a senior military commander and wounded four others on Sunday in the northwestern Somalia region of Somaliland, local media reports said.http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/02/content_12372463.htm === Terrorizing Aid to Somalia: The United States is willfully letting millions of Somalis go hungry in its drive to hunt down terrorists.http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/28/terrorizing_aid_to_somalia === Pakistan: 34 killed in blast near Army General HQ in Rawalpindi: The motorcycle-borne bomber detonated his explosives outside a state-run bank, causing considerable damage to the facade of Shalimar Hotel on Mall Road, less than a kilometre from the army's fortified General Headquarters that was besieged by a group of terrorists nearly a month ago.http://www.deccanherald.com/content/33762/34-killed-blast-near-army.html === Twelve "militants" killed in South Waziristan: Twelve "militants" were killed during the past 24 hours in the South Waziristan operation, Director-General Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Athar Abbas said.http://snipurl.com/t0z1x === British explosives expert killed on final day in Afghanistan: A SENIOR British explosives expert was killed while trying to defuse a bomb on the last day of his tour in Afghanistan, it was revealed today.http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/British-explosives-expert-killed-on.5786895.jp === Karzai claims victory as Afghan runoff cancelled: The cancellation of Saturday's vote came one day after former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah announced he was pulling out of the Nov. 7 vote. "We congratulate President Karzai on his victory in this historic election and look forward to working with him" to support reform and improve security, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement. Britain and the United Nations also issued statements of congratulations.http://snipurl.com/t0z2s === Reform needed after Afghan leader's flawed win: "Karzai has lost his legitimacy, he is a very weak president and he cannot govern without reaching out to Dr Abdullah," said Kabul-based political analyst Haroun Mir. "So the ball is in Dr Abdullah's court right now."http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/VVOS-7XEL84?OpenDocument === Will the war in Afghanistan bring down NATO?: Afghanistan has shown that the alliance has become "a corpse, decomposing," Hillier concludes. "Unless the alliance can snatch victory out of feeble efforts, it's not going to be long in existence in its present form."http://snipurl.com/t0z35 === Bicycle bomb kills five in southern Iraq: A bomb attached to a bicycle killed five people and wounded dozens in southern Iraq on Sunday, and at least five others were killed in violence across the country, police said.http://snipurl.com/t0z3l === Three Iraqi civilians killed in seperate attacks: An Iraqi police source told KUNA that a communication company employee was fired at by armed men in Al-Islah Agricultural town in Mosul. He added that the armed men stormed into a lawyers office and killed a lawyer.http://snipurl.com/t0z43 === Over 400 killed in Iraq during October: The figures were markedly higher than September, which saw a total of 203 people die as a result of violencehttp://www.albawaba.com/en/news/256358 === Iraq restricts movement by TV journalists: The government has banned movement by press vehicles with equipment to broadcast live.http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news\2009-10-30\kurd.htm === Iran seeks review of nuclear deal: Iran has said it wants the UN's nuclear watchdog to establish a committee to review a deal aimed at easing Western fears over its nuclear programme.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8337192.stm === Manufacturing Consent For Attack On Iran : France warns Iran over stalling tactics: "We are waiting for Iran to formally accept the proposition made by the (UN atomic agency) IAEA. If the Iranian response is to stall, as it seems to be, we will not accept this," he told reporters.http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091102/wl_mideast_afp/irannuclearpoliticsiaeafrance === The shadow behind US-Israeli war games: "We're here for some very specific reasons, some specific threats that the Israelis are interested in, that we're interested in. And that's as far as I want to go down that road."http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8338155.stm === US forces set up radar in Iraq to spy on Iran: According to the sources, the radar is a preparatory measure aimed at providing the United States and its allies advanced control capabilities in event of a US military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110243§ionid=351020104 === Netanyahu savours victory after US drops settlement demand: Israel's premier savoured a victory on Sunday after Washington hailed his "unprecedented" stand on settlements and backed his call for peace talks to resume without the construction freeze sought by the Palestinians.http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091101/wl_mideast_afp/mideastdiplomacyus === Palestinians accuse US of killing peace hopes: Pointing an accusing finger at the US, the Palestinians yesterday said Washington's backing for Israeli refusal to halt Jewish settlement expansion had killed any hope of reviving peace negotiations soon.http://snipurl.com/t0z5y === 'There are Jewish terrorists still at large in Israel': The official's comments follow the announcement on Sunday that settler Yaakov Teitel was arrested last month for allegedly killing two Palestinians and carrying out a string of bomb attacks.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125288.html === How Israel caught the suspected Jewish terrorist: A sweeping gag order; an armed break-in at the suspect's home; the denial of legal representation to the suspect; and the interrogation of his wife - these are just a few of the measures the Shin Bet took against suspected Jewish terrorist Yaakov Teitel and his family.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125289.html === "Settlements" are fertile ground for Jewish terror: The parade of the self-righteous got underway Sunday night: Yaakov Teitel was described as a "foreign element," "wild thorn" and "rotten apple." Even if he acted alone, spoke and hallucinated in English, even if he was mentally disturbed, as his attorney claimed, it does not change the fact that Jack the Ripper from the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel - contrary to his predecessor in London - acted on ground that was fertile like no other.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125294.html === Palestinians foil attack on Al-Aqsa worshippers: Palestinian security guards have foiled a Jewish gunman's attempt to infiltrate the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a Palestinian official reports.http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110224§ionid=351020202 === 'Russian who spied on Israel shot near his Moscow home': Shabtai Kalmanovitch, an Israeli immigrant from the former Soviet Union who served time in prison for spying for the KGB, was shot outside his Moscow home, the Russian Interfax news agency reported on Monday. There is no word on the extent of his wounds.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125329.html === AP admits: Cheney equivocated to the FBI: On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy.http://rawstory.com/2009/11/ap-admits-cheney-equivocated-fbi/ === How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash: In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/v-print/story/77791.html === Goldman takes on new role: taking away people's homes: Unable to identify a lender, the couple could neither capitalize on a mortgage hardship provision that would allow them to defer some payments, nor on a state law enabling them to offset their debt against separate, investment-related claims against Goldman http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77841.html === How States Can Finance Their Own Recovery: Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in. http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/cut-wallstreet.php === Let Us Work Towards Peace And Joy Tom Feeley >

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• 29 Oct 2009 00:07

  

  The Shrinking American Empire

  Posted Tue, 07/07/2009 - 18:41

  A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

  "Imperialists believe that everything can be made into a weapon with which to bludgeon the rest of humanity into submission."The day before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, back in March of 2003, I wrote a piece called "They Have Reached Too Far" - "they" being U.S. imperialists. I was on that day, as U.S. tanks revved their engines in the sands of Kuwait, preparing to cross into what Washington thought would be a glorious future of global domination, that a crack opened up in time, and it was clear as a desert day that the U.S. empire would be swallowed up in that widening crack - maybe in my lifetime. George Bush and his gang had rolled the dice, betting everything on a land and resource grab designed to save a parasitical system through world-defying theft and awesome - Shock and Awesome - intimidation. But there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would fail catastrophically, although no one could predict precisely how the disaster would unfold. It was also clear that the U.S. aggression against Iraq should not be narrowly interpreted as all about Israel or about oil or about further expansion of U.S. spheres of geopolitical dominance or about beating back the challenge of the euro. It was simultaneously about all of those things, and more. Empires seek to dominate the very planet, to set the terms for every human transaction. Nothing is beyond the ambitions of empire. Imperialists believe that everything can be made into a weapon with which to bludgeon the rest of humanity into submission. So I wrote, back in 2003, that the impending Iraq war was "an oil currency war, a preemptive strike against the euro's potential to challenge the U.S. dollar as the sole denominator of petroleum purchases. By seizing the Iraqi oil fields and positioning itself to do the same in Saudi Arabia, Iran and throughout the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea and South Asia, the U.S. can stop the euro cold and rule as its own OPEC, awesomely armed and dreadfully dangerous." The dollar would "remain supreme, backed by the oil reserves of the globe." "The American threat to humanity was so general, and so generally perceived and felt, it achieved the opposite of what Washington had wished." And that was part of the overall Plan: to set the terms of trade in oil and everything else on the planet, extracting wealth from all the world's people while creating nothing but terror and, hopefully, submission. But the American threat to humanity was so general, and so generally perceived and felt, it achieved the opposite of what Washington had wished. Rather than the world acclimating itself to the rule of the "New Rome," as the imperialists were openly calling themselves, much of the planetary community conspired to find ways to break the unequal ties that bound them to the empire. The Iraq invasion greatly accelerated the process of U.S. imperialism's decline, so much so, that only a few years later the American Lords of Capital found themselves turning to a Black man to put a dramatically different face on their imperial enterprise. But Barack Obama cannot save them. The U.S. dollar's days as the world's reserve currency are numbered, and when the dollar is finally dethroned, only the military aspect of the imperial husk will remain. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to http://www.blackagendareport.com/. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.    

  Freedom! Lakota Sioux Indians Declare Sovereign Nation StatusMore info: Lakota Freedom DelegationSource: Lakota Freedom Delegation media pageMEDIA ADVISORYImmediate Release: 19 December 2007Washington D.C. – Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government. The withdrawal, hand delivered to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the State Department, immediately and irrevocably ends all agreements between the Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties at Fort Laramie Wyoming.“This is an historic day for our Lakota people,” declared Russell Means, Itacan of Lakota. “United States colonial rule is at its end!”“Today is a historic day and our forefathers speak through us. Our Forefathers made the treaties in good faith with the sacred Canupa and with the knowledge of the Great Spirit,” shared Garry Rowland from Wounded Knee. “They never honored the treaties, that’s the reason we are here today.”The four member Lakota delegation traveled to Washington D.C. culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities. Delegation members included well known activist and actor Russell Means, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin Sr. were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.“In order to stop the continuous taking of our resources – people, land, water and children- we have no choice but to claim our own destiny,” said Phyllis Young, a former Indigenous representative to the United Nations and representative from Standing Rock.Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.
  
  Young added, “The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people”.
  
  Following Monday’s withdrawal at the State Department, the four Lakota Itacan representatives have been meeting with foreign embassy officials in order to hasten their official return to the Family of Nations.
  
  Lakota’s efforts are gaining traction as Bolivia, home to Indigenous President Evo Morales, shared they are “very, very interested in the Lakota case” while Venezuela received the Lakota delegation with “respect and solidarity.”
  
  “Our meetings have been fruitful and we hope to work with these countries for better relations,” explained Garry Rowland. “As a nation, we have equal status within the national community.”
  
  Education, energy and justice now take top priority in emerging Lakota. “Cultural immersion education is crucial as a next step to protect our language, culture and sovereignty,” said Means. “Energy independence using solar, wind, geothermal, and sugar beets enables Lakota to protect our freedom and provide electricity and heating to our people.”
  
  The Lakota reservations are among the most impoverished areas in North America, a shameful legacy of broken treaties and apartheid policies. Lakota has the highest death rate in the United States and Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any nation on earth, excluding AIDS, at approximately 44 years. Lakota infant mortality rate is five times the United States average and teen suicide rates 150% more than national average . 97% of Lakota people live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers near 85%.
  
  “After 150 years of colonial enforcement, when you back people into a corner there is only one alternative,” emphasized Duane Martin Sr. “The only alternative is to bring freedom into its existence by taking it back to the love of freedom, to our lifeway.”
  
  We are the freedom loving Lakota from the Sioux Indian reservations of Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana who have suffered from cultural and physical genocide in the colonial apartheid system we have been forced to live under. We are in Washington DC to withdraw from the constitutionally mandated treaties to become a free and independent country. We are alerting the Family of Nations we have now reassumed our freedom and independence with the backing of Natural, International, and United States law. For more information, please visit our new website at www.lakotafreedom.com. ##

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• 27 Oct 2009 21:59

  Cyber Resistance

  Dahr Jamail

  t r u t h o u t , October 24, 2009 If technology has transformed warfare into a spectacle of shock and awe, its contribution to the cause of dissent has been no less remarkable. It has enabled solidarities across borders and facilitated networks and forums dedicated to impartial communication of ground realities beyond the sanitized projection of mainstream news. True, technological advances have not brought an end to either occupation, but it has certainly helped alternative voices and views to be heard.     During the Vietnam War, over 100 underground newspapers, run by soldiers themselves, sprouted across the United States. The modern version of this has taken root within the Internet, largely in the form of blogs.     Many American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been confounded by the wall of censorship they confront, jointly constructed by the military and the corporate media. The Internet offered them a convenient and powerful channel through which to get their stories out to the public. Constrained by slow military mail service from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention overt attempts by superiors to curtail their interaction with journalists, soldiers have long since taken to blogging, posting photographs and uploading videos online, all related to their experience of the occupations.     "Fight to Survive," one of the first soldier blogs from Iraq, had its origin before the bloggers were deployed to the country. The site's mission statement declares, "The E-4 Mafia was a group of soldiers deployed in Iraq between January of 2004 and March of 2005. The posts from this period are an expression of our raw emotions and thoughts while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom II. Since being honorably discharged in the summer of 2005, we've continued to post additional journal entries, poetry, and reflections from our time served and our current lives as veterans as we continue our fight to survive."     Garett Reppenhagen, Jeff Englehart, Ben Schrader and Joe Hatcher were stationed in Germany, where they happened to attend a concert by a band called Bouncing Souls and befriended its members. Post-deployment they were desperate to process the grief, violence and frustration that they were experiencing in Iraq, so they started pouring their emotions into e-mails to the band members. The Bouncing Souls, impressed with the e-mails - which included powerful poetry - began posting them on their own website. In 2004, Hatcher created "Fight to Survive."     Englehart later told a reporter, "We were opposed to the war before we went. And we got together and said, 'You know what we should do? We should write about this shit.'"     Reppenhagen, the first active-duty soldier to have joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, was pulling a shift at Tower Guard in Fort Collins, Colorado, when Truthout phoned him. Tower Guard is an action designed to spread awareness about the occupation of Iraq. Veterans pull together scaffolding, cover it with camouflage and, donning their desert gear, take shifts atop the tower - this one twelve feet high - to maintain a presence where people can ask them questions, and in response they can provide information.     For him, the motivation for the blog had come from having to participate in an occupation he didn't believe in. "We were already against the war before going, and didn't know why we were going, and it didn't look good. There was no resistance to speak of within the military. But I found a purpose with the writing. I didn't want to let my friends down there by not serving, and nobody knew what would happen if you refused to go out, because nobody had done it yet. So the blogging began. As a high-school dropout I wasn't a strong writer," he explains, but I had all these ideas I just couldn't stop, and writing them down was a huge release.... Having people read them was therapeutic. This then became my mission, to have people read about what we were doing. After a while, Joe Hatcher, whom we met in basic training, created the blog website. This was summer of 2004, and I'd never heard of a blog earlier. The idea caught on and sparked something, and as far as I know, ours was the only antiwar blog from soldiers in Iraq at the time. We used aliases; mine was "heretic" or "soldier X," Jeff Englehart was "hEkLe," Joe was "Joe Public." We used these because we were unsure of the consequences of revealing our identities."     Postings from Iraq on "Fight to Survive" ranged in content from asking people to sign petitions against stop-loss, to expressing disbelief at how persistent the military was in trying to get soldiers to renew their contracts, to posting graffiti and commenting on it. An entry posted in September 2004 by heretic titled "My Struggle For Reason" reads: "Souls, Friends, and Conspirators, "The temperature dropped to sixty degrees last night while I huddled in a ditch near Diyala Bridge. The breeze off the river crawled into my heart and the sudden chill reflects my current mood. I found out earlier that night that I had been extended an additional two months on top of my previous stretch. It now appears that I will be in the service until July, while my original date of release is supposed to be next month. All this, and my recent two-week taste of the civilian world on leave, is leaving me empty and detached. It is so much easier to live in slavery if you had willingly accepted your fate. I am not sure if my mental fortitude is prepared for a whole extra year in oppression. And, I still don't have a certain time when I will be finished with this war. "Three soldiers in our unit have been hurt in the last four days and the true number of Army-wide casualties leaving Iraq is unknown. The figures are much higher than what is reported. We get awards and medals that are supposed to make us feel proud about our wicked assignment. We feel privileged when we are given the smallest perk. Like a dog that is beaten everyday and then thankfully adores it's owner when he skips a day of punishment. I have more trust with some of the Iraqi locals than my own command sometimes. I know that my higher chain of command hates me for my political opinions and my moral views. "I am called a "faggot pink-o" or a "bleeding heart traitor." It doesn't take a liberal to realize the moral wrongs involved with this or any war. Why should I feel ashamed of caring about all of humanity, even the people that ignorantly hate me? Is wanting a better standard of living for all the world so negative? In a way, deeper than sexuality, I love my friends and brothers and for that I am labeled a deviant of some kind. Does everyone buy into this Arnold ideal of fear that they are not strong enough, so they have to over-compensate and become an asshole? I believe that all weapons should be laid down [by] choice of the individual. It is the same fear I have of my bigot neighbor that causes Americans to support a war against a possible US threat. If we are all responsible enough to handle firearms, is it not sensible to allow countries like Iran and N. Korea nuclear weapons? If we think these countries are less responsible than the drunk-driving redneck or the crack-dealing gangster, I think we need to take a longer look at American society. Sure, a nuke can destroy the world, but an automatic weapon can kill my daughter and she is the world to me. I don't believe that taking away people's rights is the proper step to world peace. However, we overspend on national defense and cut education when we need to be more concerned about raising a generation of problem solvers, instead of mindless warriors. "So I finally find the drive to get out and try to make a difference in the world, and I am stuck freezing in a Middle Eastern desert. What state will the earth be in if I ever escape this combat zone? What little changes I can make, I do through the networks I have built up with my close friends. The Bouncing Souls have given us soldiers a voice and forum to express the hardships and our feelings on the Iraq occupation. All my friends, some new and some old, listen and support our efforts and they have my deepest respect and thanks. I could not survive this in any sane manner without the backing of all of you. I cannot promise that I will have a positive effect on current issues that plague our planet, but I can promise I will never give up, if you never give up on me."     Another moving entry from August 22, 2005, titled "Finding Closure," posted by Jeff Englehardt (hEkLe) after exiting Iraq, reads in part: "There is nothing that I feel can alleviate the guilt for being directly involved with our illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq. I ask myself from time to time, "Why was I so afraid to resist the order to go to war? Why didn't I object to the whole damned thing?" I have been told many times not to be ashamed for my service to this country, but I can't help a genuine intuition that this war is not designed to promote freedom and our beautiful American way of life, but instead only carried out to proliferate Western imperialism and corporate profits every time a bullet is fired. My guilt is synonymous with the sentiment that I was indeed on the wrong side of the wire." * * *     As the blogging continued, the audience expanded. Radio personality Randi Rhodes, who at the time brought Air America Radio its largest audience to date, began reading their dispatches on air.     As was to be expected, the military began to crack down on the writers. "It was not difficult for them to track what base and unit the writing was coming from and they were able to narrow it down to me," says Reppenhagen. "My sniper section leader walked into my room and asked if I was writing something stupid on the Internet. I admitted I was posting writings, but whether it was stupid depended on the readers' views, and he told me to report to the colonel who wanted to ask me questions about this shit I was writing."     All along, Reppenhagen felt he was leading a dual existence: "I was living two lives, going outside the wire, but still writing on the blog, all the time looking over my shoulder. I was afraid of our e-mails being monitored, and there was a lot of isolation." He rarely crossed paths with the other members of the E-4 Mafia, and knew that he would have to deal with the colonel alone. From his perch on the tower, he recounted, "I did the whole thing, saluting him, doing the full pivot, and coming to at-ease, and he has a stack of everything we had written, and copies of personal e-mails I had written. He asked me if I had written it and I said yes. He told me I should stop writing, that I was going to be investigated by Military Intelligence and if found to have violated operational security, I would be tried for treason. I was scared."     Undeterred, he kept blogging and was soon summoned by the colonel once again. "I told him I had a right to continue. They pulled my computers, tried to limit my access, took me off sniper duty, and put me on guard duty of Iraqis on base. The last two months were lonely and difficult for me. I was afraid I would be court-martialed. In the end, it was determined that nothing I wrote had violated operational security and that I had committed no treason and, since there were no rules prohibiting blogging, I had broken no rules either. But I was continually hazed by my superiors as long as I was there.... They were constantly looking for ways to trap me. I was made to fill sandbags and do other menial jobs. However, I was finally awarded an honorable discharge in May 2005, and gained a lot of respect from most of my fellow soldiers. Many would give me the peace sign as they passed me by."     Reppenhagen dove headlong into activism after being discharged. He took a job with Veterans for America, in Washington, DC, and volunteered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Coming full circle, Reppenhagen had one of his poems set to music by the Bouncing Souls. They called it "Letter from Iraq."     In 2007, he moved to Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, and enrolled in a community college to study to become a history teacher.     He shares his plans: "I continue now to work at helping veterans get the mental and physical health care they deserve. And I want to teach history in high school.... One of my dreams is to teach on a Native American reservation. After coming back from Iraq, I traveled around a lot, and saw many reservations, and saw this grinding poverty there similar to what I saw in Iraq, and decided that that is where I can help the most."     On being discharged, the other E-4 Mafia members also moved to Colorado: Schrader to Fort Collins, Hatcher to Cascade and Englehart to Denver. They continue blogging, alongside antiwar activism. * * *     Casey J. Porter, a specialist from Austin, Texas, served one year in Iraq and in fall 2008 was on his second deployment after having been stop-lossed. His contract ended January 21, 2008, but he was redeployed on March 9, although diagnosed with PTSD by a civilian doctor. As he says on a YouTube video, "I am making the best of it by making short films about what really goes on over here."     A post from him on a blog called "Soldier Voices" reads: "Some of you might already know me through my films. I am a Stop-Lossed Soldier currently in Iraq." There is a website for his work: http://www.youtube.com/caseyjporter."     Porter's films feature raw footage coupled with a compelling background score. Scenes include mortar attacks against bases, military personnel running for cover during mortar attacks as explosions echo in the background, gun battles, destroyed Humvees and soldiers talking about their low morale. One film, "Area of Operations," reveals a new weapon of the Iraqi resistance, Lob-Bombs, which are created by cutting open an oxygen tank and packing it with ball bearings, screws and bolts as shrapnel before welding it back together and pressurizing. The film also shows a Lob-Bomb attack that killed two soldiers, which the Associated Press reported as having been caused by small-arms fire. Truthout spoke with Porter by telephone when he was at Forward Operating Base Rustamiyah. He said there were two versions in the military and corporate media reportage of the deaths: "One reported it as small-arms fire and the other as indirect fire. Indirect fire is obviously a very general term, so the Army can say, 'Oh, it is indirect fire, it's not an accurate weapon.' But when the public hears of indirect fire, they think some guy is shooting at you with a machine gun."     There is a clip in the film that has audio recordings from military radios after the attack. It presents a soldier saying, "The K.I.A. [killed in action], I can't tell you who they are, they're in pieces, break ..."     Later in the film, a soldier in Iraq says to the camera, "Would this country be the way it is right now had we done anything close to what we promised before we came over? The Humvees we drive, they are not doing the drive over here as protection ... not even the slightest. The MRAP [mine resistant, ambush protected] still won't stop an EFP [explosively formed penetrator]. But it's a big vehicle and makes a lot of noise and that's what the American people want, apparently." The camera goes on to show Humvees destroyed by roadside bombs, then returns to the soldier who says, "I won't be surprised if they turn this place into a duty station. I mean look at all the nations that we've liberated. Look at Germany, Korea. I'm pretty sure at one time somebody thought, 'Hey, we're only going to be here for a couple of months.'"     Another of Porter's films, "What War Looks Like," shows scenes of destroyed military hardware. Pictures of blown-up tanks and Humvees crushed by roadside bombs are seen flashing across the screen. Other scenes show burnt-out Bradley fighting vehicles atop transport trucks, decomposed bodies of fighters, and then the names and photos of "friends we lost," US soldiers killed in Iraq. After photos of a body being loaded for shipment back to the United States, the screen goes black as the text reads, "It's not politics, it is saving soldiers' lives, bring us home now."     Truthout asked Porter what had made him decide to make the films.     He said, "After coming back from my first tour, I was so against the war that I started speaking out and showing videos I'd made from footage I'd shot during my first deployment. Then when I got stop-lossed, I decided I'm not going to be another American who complains about the situation and then does nothing. Going AWOL wasn't a realistic option for me, so instead of being complacent about something I feel is wrong, I decided to make films to show people what they're not seeing on television, and to show people that I'm not the only soldier that feels this way. Along with very realistic combat footage, I showed real threats facing soldiers, some of the financial traps, and other issues they must deal with during deployment."     Porter talks of the morale in Iraq being poor and more soldiers than ever beginning to question the mission. However, he added, "One thing that disappoints me about American soldiers is the apathy, the 'what can you do?' mentality. But they are more or less speaking their minds by not reenlisting though they are afraid of the consequences of actively speaking up. More of them are doing it, but still not as many as should. The Army seems like such a big giant, and the threat of, well, if you do this we're going to punish you, and we own you, and all this and that. Then this gets into soldiers' heads." * * *     Iraq war veteran and former Marine Adam Kokesh also maintains a blog, "Revolutionary Patriot" where he has written about being assaulted by undercover FBI agents in Washington, DC, about his thoughts on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 2008, and about dealing with PTSD.     Not a shy man, Kokesh did not hesitate to upload onto his blog a video of his speech during a march in DC, where he is seen exhorting a boisterous crowd, "The time is now. The threat is clear. The bands of tyranny are tightening around America. It is our duty to resist!"     Kokesh was part of a team of vets who met with Representative John Conyers in July 2008 to push Conyers to file Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush. In a video of the meeting posted on his blog, Kokesh used his time at the microphone to tell Conyers, who was undecided about filing the articles:     "And I get the feeling that what you're doing and what the Democratic Party is doing is telling this country, as we are being bled dry by tyrants, that we're just going to be OK. That the only promises we get from Democrats are Band-Aids over these far deeper wounds that anyone is willing to admit to publicly. I hear one of the arguments against impeachment, that it would harm the Democrats in the upcoming elections. And I hope that you realize, because you didn't communicate this when I asked you the question, that there are real consequences to not impeaching that are far, far worse than not having Democrats in the Congress or Senate, or a Democrat in the White House. You said you've made thousands of decisions, many of them very respectable, many of them very courageous. But by your own admission, it seems that what is holding you back from this one is your own indecision. You said that I might be surprised by your plans. You haven't put forth any. And frankly, I'm not surprised."     Aside from blogging, testifying to representatives, leading marches and getting arrested, Kokesh has participated in Operation First Casualty (OFC), a tactic of street theater in which vets don their camouflage and take to the streets of US cities to carry out public patrols, realistic mock arrests, home raids and tower watches to raise awareness of the occupation. After an OFC action on March 19, 2007, the fourth anniversary of the invasion, he received an e-mail from the Marine Corps Mobilization Command that oversees the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) to which Kokesh reported.     The e-mail accused him of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) by wearing his uniform during a political event. "I was like, wait a second, I'm in the IRR, the UCMJ doesn't apply. This is bullshit." The scathing response that Kokesh sent back is posted on his blog. It concludes:     "I fail to see how reminding me of my 'obligations and responsibilities' helps you achieve either of these. It seems that while accomplishing our mission in Iraq, every corner we turn sends us further down the spiral, but there is still much that you can do to bring our fellow Marines home alive.     "So no, I am not replying to your email in order to acknowledge my understanding of my obligations and responsibilities, but rather to ask you to please, kindly, go fuck yourself."     In the chain of events that followed, the military threatened to give him a less than honorable discharge, which would affect his education benefits, but so far the military has not followed through. His case was helped by appearing on several major media programs, including "Good Morning America."     Kokesh thinks the future of GI resistance holds great possibility for social change. He told Truthout, "It's kind of a battle for the hearts and minds of the troops between resistance and obedience. And if the military power structure keeps fucking up and putting people off, then resistance is going to start winning a lot more hearts and minds, you know, and we're doing what we can to further that." Yet he is realistic.     "The forces at play here are far greater than any organization, bigger even than the military itself. It's social, it's cultural ... and I think it is great in terms of what we can do to foster a broader civilian resistance, and develop a culture of questioning authority.... Whether the GI resistance movement is actually going to be enough to end the war, I don't think you can consider it in those absolute terms. We're building pressure. And there are a lot of forces maintaining pressure to keep the war going. If nothing else, we need to be a countervailing force to those and, who knows, maybe that's going to stop the next war."

  
  :: Article nr. 59325 sent on 25-oct-2009 02:26 ECThttp://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=59325:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.
  
  

   

   

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• 23 Oct 2009 16:07

  The Movement Against the Banks By Ruth Conniff October 22, 2009 "The Progressive" -- A massive rally in Chicago next week aims to express public displeasure with the massive bank bailout outside the American Bank Association annual meeting. Protesters will converge at 11:30 on Monday, October 26, at 301 North Water Street, where the meeting is taking place. "The same financial institutions that caused the economic crisis and took billions in taxpayer bailouts are back to earning incredible profits," rally organizers-including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Change to Win-declare. "Meanwhile, Americans face shrinking pensions, rising foreclosures and unemployment, state budget cuts, predatory lending, outrageous overdraft fees, and sky-high credit card interest rates." Protesters will demand oversight and accountability and reforms that would rein in the banks. It is an important moment, since Congress takes up regulatory legislation, including the idea of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, this month. The Obama Administration is backing the idea of a consumer protection agency, but shying away from other reforms, including breaking up the "too-big-to-fail" banks and separating commercial banking activities from the investment activities that led to the current financial crisis. Today's New York Times includes a profile of Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman from 1979 to 1987, describing how he has been marginalized by Obama's pro-Wall Street economic advisors for suggesting a return to the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which, before deregulation, mandated that commercial banking and investment activities be separate. "His disagreement with the Obama people on whether to restore some version of Glass-Steagall appears to have contributed to published reports that his influence in the administration is fading and that he is rarely if ever in the small Washington office assigned to him," the Times reports. Meanwhile, Bankster, "your go-to site for updates on the financial services re-regulation fight in Congress and for progressive net-roots campaigning against the big boys on Wall Street"-is up and running. The site, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, aims to be the most comprehensive resource on the web for lay people who want to understand the battle for control over the financial services industry. The site calls for criminal penalties for the bankers: "On the one-year anniversary of the Banksters blowing a hole in the global economy, no employee of a major American bank or financial institution is behind bars," Bankster points out. "Compare this to what happened after the Savings and Loan heist almost 20 years ago. No less than 1,852 S&L officials were prosecuted and 1,072 were jailed. Over 500 CEOs and top officers were indicted. What is going on here? Don't we believe in holding people accountable anymore? Tell the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to get cracking!" Among the other citizens' groups featured on the site are the "10 percent is enough" campaign that brings together leaders from all the major world religions to oppose usurious interest rates on moral grounds. And just in time for Halloween, the anti-death-bonds campaign focuses on an issue Michael Moore brought to light in his new movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story": employers and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs taking out life insurance policies on working people and naming themselves the beneficiaries, so they can benefit from your death. All of these issues should galvanize public opposition to the banks' control of their own regulators in Washington. As Bankster puts it, "If you want to rein in the Banksters and if you think America deserves better than a ‘boom and bail' economy, you need to muscle up and weigh in." Only engaged citizens can stop the banks. Copyright 2009, The Progressive Magazine

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