War Is Making YOU Poor

The more they war, the less there is for you.


The two wars combined have lasted close to 17 years. Because their priorities lie with the military, other things must go by the board...

"There's no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession."
- Joe Biden

Money for War = No Money for Social Security

It's that fucking simple.

Pittsburgh Tribune Review (via Firedoglake):

Ensuring there’s enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country’s entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he’d favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.

Pissed off yet?

The Necessity of Social Security

"It's not altogether an accident that Mr. Bismarck invented social security, that Mr. Ford was in favor of it and that Mr. Beveridge perfected it. These are necessities for the operation of the system itself in the absence of the search for an alternative."
- Pascal Lemy

How I find good blogs...

[source]

There are four ways, basically.

1) If there's a writer I admire, I do a blog search for his or her name. For example, who is talking about Tolstoy?

2) If there's a quotation I like, I search for it.

3) Blog rolls. Who is that blogger I admire touching base with on a regular basis?

4) Finally, topical word combinations sometimes do the trick. For example, a blog search for the terms "capitalism" and "inequality." Who is talking about the stuff I care about?

Throw in a dose of anxiety: what am I missing? The rest is serendipity!

"Call me a grim old fatalist...."

Dennis Perrin, Barry Crimmins, Bad Attitudes, Ian Welsh, James Howard Kunstler, Joe Bageant, Automatic Earth, Rustbelt Radical, thoughtstreaming, Paul Street. My kind of blogs. I gravitate to them. They call bullshit bullshit. They aren't afraid to scrub the varnish off, to reveal the grim reality, our capitalist reality. They teach me a lot. And they are fun to read. Thank you, all.

Joe Bageant:

Call me a grim old fatalist, but I just do not see the human race turning things around. Not because humans are inherently evil (although pimping Gaia to death comes close), but because we are what we are. In any case, we are not going to stop eating, shitting, burning up stuff to stay warm, or following the genetic imperative to breed. How can we solve the problem when we are the problem, other than by self-extinction?

So here it is, top of the ninth round, and Gaia is on the ropes with cuts over both eyes, and no referee on the mat. Homo sapiens are moving in for the killer punch. It's been an ugly fight. But the truth is that there will be no winner. Certainly not man, considering that his triumph results in the specter of human self-extinction, dieback or die-off, or at least by massive die-back.

Big Brother Google Strikes Again

Social networking was designed for the sole purpose of making you do the work of gathering eyeballs to watch more of their corporate advertising. They'll try almost anything to get you to work on their behalf, including violating your privacy.

Raw Story:

As part of an effort to make YouTube more like Facebook and other social networking sites, a re-design of YouTube’s homepage for registered users may reveal some of your deepest, darkest email secrets.

The new layout, rolled out over the course of the spring, while you’re logged in displays all of the individuals you’ve emailed with in a large text box front and center on the homepage, in the hope you will connect with them and expand the matrix of viewers of your (and their) videos.

Dirty Byrd

His legacy will be forever tarnished by his support of the coal industry.

Boston Globe (September 28, 1988):

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who for eight years has been a leading opponent of acid rain legislation, said yesterday that he might accept a compromise clean-air bill. But Byrd acknowledged that his aim is to undercut a tougher acid rain bill that he fears would be enacted in either a Bush or a [Michael S. Dukakis] administration.

Environmental lobbyists immediately criticized Byrd's offer and expressed concern that a hastily passed Byrd-backed compromise might lead legislators to claim victory on acid rain with a bill they say will not significantly deal with the problem for 15 years.

"For a thinking person, a low-grade depression settles in... "

Joe Bageant has a new piece up:

For a thinking person, a low-grade depression settles in, alongside an unspoken fatalism about the future of the human race, particularly the American portion. That's the point I reached a year or so ago. I would probably be ashamed to admit it, if I did not receive hundreds of emails from readers who feel the same way.

If nothing else though, in the process of building our own gilded rat cage, we have proven that old saw about democracy eventually leading to mediocrity to be true. Especially if you keep dumbing down all the rats. After all, Dan Quayle, Donald Trump and George W. Bush hold advanced degrees from top universities in law, finance and business. The head rats, our "leaders," (if it is even possible to lead anybody anywhere inside a cage), have proven to be as mediocre and clueless as anyone else. Which is sort of proof we are a democracy, if we want to look at it that way.

[...]

During my 40 years writing media ass-wipe for the public, I have interviewed many of "The best of my generation", and believe me; most of them were not much.

[...]

Naturally, they believe they are far superior by virtue of having made it to an elevated point in the gilded cage, closer to the feed, water and sex. Because they believe it, and the media echoes their belief, hovering and quoting them, discussing their every brain fart, we tend to believe it too. Nothing shakes our belief, not even staring directly into the face of a congenital liar and nitwit like Sarah Palin, or a careening set of brainless balls like Donald Trump or a retarded jackal like George W. Bush. Americans are unable to explain why such people "rise to the top" in our country. We just accept that they do, and assume that America's process of natural selection -- survival of the wealthiest -- is at work. These people are rich; therefore, they should run the country. God said so. It's a uniquely American principal of governance, which in itself, makes the case for our stupidity.

Obama: What rule of law? Let 'em rot.

[source]

Glenn Greenwald:

The headline from this morning's New York Times article by Charlie Savage says it all...

[...]

Guantanamo -- the closing of which was one of Obama's central campaign promises -- will still be open as of 2013, by which point many of the detainees will have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charges of any kind and without any real prospect for either due process or release, at least four of those years under a President who was elected on a commitment to close that camp and restore the rule of law.

Elect a President who runs from controversy, this is the result.

Paul Rosenberg:

Indeed, Obama is right at home with the neoliberal wing of the party that has long sought-ala the DLC's "Progressive Policy Institute" to redefine "progressive" in a manner that's distinctively non-threatening to the status quo, whereas previously "progressives" self-identified as such to distinguish themselves to the left of the "Cold War liberals" who brought us the Vietnam War....

I want a president who is a real Democrat and won't use that affiliation to further Republican, neoliberal ends!

How I'll remember Al Gore

The New Austerity = The Old Neoliberal Wet Dream

World Socialist Web Site:

The Obama administration has launched a public relations campaign entitled “summer of recovery,” kicked off by Vice President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday, followed by a presidential appearance Friday at a construction site in Columbus, Ohio.

The purpose of this public relations exercise is to mask the dismal reality of mass unemployment and protracted economic stagnation, and to justify a turn to austerity policies and budget-cutting.

The “recovery” campaign coincides with the decision of the US Senate to block the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of workers, with a faction of Senate Democrats using the claimed “recovery” to justify the termination of extended benefits.

"We make whitewash
We sell whitewash
Consume whitewash
Consumed by whitewash
Whitewash
Buy it"
- Chumbawamba

(h/t I Cite)

Not content with destroying marine and coastal habitat, BP takes aim at crops

Thank you, U.S. government, for allowing this all to happen.

How would you describe your political views?

Me? Ultra-liberal. In 2000, 4% of Americans considered themselves very liberal. By 2009, it was 5%. At this rate, we will be in the majority by 2450 or so.

Conservatism is for authoritarians. Yuck.

[source]

Truth vs. Journalistic Impartiality

Ian Welsh:

The responsibility of reporters is not to be “impartial”, their responsibility is to tell the truth. Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that America was torturing people? Should that not bother them as people? Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?

Is that we want? Sociopaths who have no personal opinions?

[..]

This standard, the “court eunuch” standard, is exactly why you have a press corp that is worthless for holding those in power responsible. People with no strong beliefs, or whose ambition or fear is so great they never express those standards strongly, are the sort of people who know that bucking a President isn’t good for your career, and so who cares of hundreds of thousands of people die because you’re a gutless careerist?

Death by Hamburger

Be careful out there.

AlterNet:

Meat-heavy diets aren't great for adults, either: In 2009, a landmark National Cancer Institute study of 500,000 Americans between the ages of 50 and 71 found that people who eat a quarter-pound of red meat or processed meat every day were 30 percent more likely to die in the 10 years of the study than those who ate 5 ounces of red meat or less per week. Compare that to research about vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists, many of whom live significantly longer than the average American.

If Dodd is proud of it, it must suck

Financial Regulation deal reached.

TPM:

"I am proud of this bill, and I am proud of the open and transparent process that led to such a successful result," said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, who lead negotiations for the Senate.

A N.Y. Times commenter writes:

Our economy is enslaved to financial speculators--and this bill does not reign them in. We will not see genuine economic development (as opposed to "growth" or just another speculation bubble) and certainly not a truly green economy until we are able to harness our wealth as a society and invest it in green infrastructure projects, education, and healthcare. By definition, these types of investments do not yield "high returns," so private capital won't touch them. In fact, private capital will seek to exploit any wealth that remains in these spheres (witness the wholesale tax-farming of public assets), and then quickly drain away anything of value. Read history. It's repeating itself.

Honestly, without a strong social democracy, changes to this system seem unlikely. Without strong unionization, people are easily manipulated by the media, and structural changes in our economy (the destruction of our industrial base, outsourcing, hostile anti-union climates) have decimated labor movements. As an alternative, the movement and energy coming from the World Social Forum now meeting in Detroit is what we must support to build new visions of society.

"The single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species."

AP (via MSNBC):

AGADIR, Morocco - American scientists who spent five years shooting nearly 1,000 sperm whales with tissue-sampling darts discovered stunningly high levels of toxic heavy metals in the animals, according to a report obtained Thursday.

The levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium together are the highest ever found in marine mammals, the scientists say, warning that the health of both ocean life and the people who consume seafood could be at risk.

Analysis of cells from the sperm whales showed pollution is reaching the farthest corners of the oceans, from deep in the polar region to "the middle of nowhere" in the equatorial regions, said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance that conducted the research.

"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.

"These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean," he said.

Ultimately, he said, they could contaminate fish that are a primary source of animal protein for 1 billion people.

"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.

Al Gore, you are pathetic!

[source]

Democracy Now!:

Oregon Police Investigated Gore for Unwanted Sexual Contact in 2006

And Oregon state prosecutors have disclosed former Vice President Al Gore was accused of unwanted sexual contact by a Portland massage therapist in October 2006. The alleged victim initially told police Gore had forcefully tried to have sex with her during an appointment at a Portland hotel. But she later refused to be interviewed and didn’t want the investigation to proceed. The woman later changed her mind and gave a statement in January 2009, but detectives decided there was insufficient evidence to press charges. A spokesperson said Gore has no comment. Gore and his wife Tipper Gore announced their separation earlier this month after forty years of marriage.

Some details of the alleged assault (via TPM):

[H]e turned to me and he immediately flipped me flat on my back and threw his whole body face down over atop me, pinning me down and outweighing me by quite a bit. Get off me, you big lummox! I loudly yelled protested to him and I struggled with my whole body to shove him as hard as I could to roll him off me and get out from underneath him and I using my whole left leg and stuff and that's where I strained all the muscles but I didn't realize it at the time. Um, he just giggled and acted like I was only teasing him and I had to physically struggle and wrench around to throw him off my body so I could · stop being squashed and breathe again.

[...]

He pleaded, grabbed me, engulfed me in embrace, tongue kissed me, massaged me, groped my breasts and painfully squeezed my nipples through my clothing, pressed his pelvis against mine, rubbed my buttocks with his hands and fingers and rubbed himself against my crotch, saying, You know you want to do it. As I kept pulling and struggling and pulling away from him and trying to leave.

"Only endless bloody stalemate ... we repeat the same words, just change the place names ... no victory lies ahead in Afghanistan."

When the Master of the Photo-Op met the Killing Machine...

[Stanley's favorite movie]
There was, like, NO chemistry. Obama didn't seem "engaged." Da Boss was "disappointed."

Hell, George Fucking Bush would have been engaged! He woulda been slappin' Stanley on the back and makin' fart jokes to loosin' things up! Who wants to be uptight when planning world domination? Reagan would have been licking McCrystal's shoes and making up shit about fictitious exploits in W.W.2.

Obama? Nothin'. Zip. The lesson is as clear as the Afghan mountain air: Ol'bama, you need to practice that wacko all-American macho bloodlust thing some more. Lots more. Remember: killin' ain't no fun without a heapin' helpin' of comedy and camaraderie.

Oh, well, there's more generals where McCrystal came from. Lots more. Keep working on the backslapping and bullshit, Harvard boy.

Rolling Stone:

Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Since no news cycle is complete without input from Sarah Palin, let's hope she weighs in soon. I'm going to feel sort of empty inside until I know how Sarah feels about this dust-up.

Obama: Why go to bat for the people when it's easier to squeeze them to death?

On the heels of the Great Recession comes the Great Austerity.

Ian Welsh:

The spring job recovery is already petered out, and around the world virtually every major economy other than China is turning to austerity, including the US. US cities and States are in a horrible state, gross income is down, and bank lending is still not recovering. The US economy has become more oligopolistic and more sclerotic than ever before, with the major firms who run the economy making their money by squeezing little people who have nowhere to turn. Thanks to Bernanke, Paulson, Geither, Bush and Obama’s bailouts, and refusal to engage in meaningful restructuring of the economy or the financial industry, their profits have recovered. That means, to them, that the crisis is over.

[source]

BP: Why save wildlife when it's cheaper and easier to burn it to death?

Raw Story:

A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP's controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.

Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in a three-week effort to rescue as many sea turtles from unfolding disaster as possible, says BP effectively shut down the operation by preventing boats from coming out to rescue the turtles.

"If we truly want to change the world it is not up to nature, God, fate or experts, but up to us."

"If we realize that human society is not the result of some natural or divine eternal logic but merely the creation of our own labor then that means that we have the power to mold and shape that society as we see fit. In a capitalist society these creative powers take the form of an external world of value and capital that acts back upon society, shaping it against the will of its creators. Yet, in the end the world of capital is nothing but the product of our own creation. If we truly want to change the world it is not up to nature, God, fate or experts, but up to us. This is the radical challenge of the law of value."
- Brendan M. Cooney

I am a country ... filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best

"The USA is like Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener who, when asked to do anything, replied, 'I prefer not to.' His preference led him to a pauper's grave."
- James Howard Kunstler

[source]

"Police ... ought to be video-taped.... There is simply no reasonable compromise on this point."

Len Hart:

I am of the opinion that police --presumably 'public servants' as we have been taught --ought to be video-taped, documented in any and every way possible. There is simply no reasonable compromise on this point. Either we are a free people or we are not! You are either for a free state or you are for a dictatorship that the right wing, the GOP in particular, is intent upon imposing upon us. It really matters little who occupies the White House; the U.S. government is owned!

I cannot recall anyone in government asking for our input on this issue. I believe that many, perhaps most, American politicians are drunk with power and/or pay-offs and just don't care what you think! We should make it clear to them that we are fed up and we are not 'gonna take this anymore'! It won't be easy. The government of the United States is 'jointly' owned by the 'Axis of K-street/wall street', otherwise called the Military/Industrial complex. When Bush said 'who cares what you think?' he was not kidding.

Tweeting state-sanctioned murder

[source]

"Obviously it is impossible to know how persons are deterred from committing murder by the presence of the death penalty on the statute books.... Murder is frequently committed by persons of mental instability, or under such emotional stress that the possibility of capital punishment hardly enters into their thinking."
- A Christian Declaration on Capital Punishment

Is it time to molasses and feather Tony Hayward yet?

"Americans were a strange set of people ... it was in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them; that instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering." [source]

"Questions of whether Obama is fully or only partially 'engaged' are ludicrously ill-framed. Engaged in what...?"

Glen Ford:

Any meaningful discussion of the oceanic version of Chernobyl would challenge a political system in which huge corporations are empowered to seek profits with absolutely no regard for the consequences to Earth or Man. Viewed from that angle – the only sane perspective – questions of whether Obama is fully or only partially “engaged” are ludicrously ill-framed. Engaged in what, in subduing and caging the corporate animals that are defecating in humanity’s only nest? Clearly not: BP is the operative government in the Gulf, with the Coast Guard as its muscle. BP is also the surgeon in charge of mending the Earth’s wound and preventing the spread of septicemia in its life-sustaining fluids – the equivalent of Jack The Ripper tending to his own victims. Under such circumstances, the more Obama assures us he is “engaged,” the greater his confessed complicity in the crime.

"America's caste system is simply re-entrenching itself, more resolute and impenetrable than ever."

From a great Memphis blog, At Home She Feels Like a Tourist:

This country loves its political mythology: the self-made man, the hard-working immigrant, the roads paved with gold, the boundless opportunities, frontier individualism, the family house with a yard and a white picket fence, a nation of Benjamin Franklins and John Winthrops. These were always myths, and they always obscured the darker realities - slavery and segregation, immigrant ghettos, crumbling inner cities. But now, as in the 1930s, the myths have cracked wide open again, and we stand completely paralyzed before the wreckage of the American Dream. The downward spiral of black wealth in this country does not reflect a lack of personal responsibility or a broken work ethic, as we like to imagine in order to console ourselves that the old myths are still just as true (false) as they ever were. Instead it reflects the inevitable result of a highly speculative, predatory capitalism grafted onto a history of racial subjugation which excluded black Americans from amassing hereditable wealth which can cushion us during an economic crisis.

Revolutionary anti-capitalists used to dream that eventually a crisis so acute would come that the working class would rise up in revolution and transform the system. I know a few crusty old dreamers who think perhaps that moment is finally upon us. But for the rest of us, the cynical and the disillusioned, America's caste system is simply re-entrenching itself, more resolute and impenetrable than ever. And Memphis, that mythological but tragic city on the bluff - well, we know what caste we're in.

BP cares about us, the little people!

"I care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don't care, but that is not the case at BP. We care about the small people."

- BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg

I think the general rule is that you call people "small" to put them in their place, to make it clear that you don't give a shit about them, and to show that you are superior to them in every way.

The phrases "we care" and "small people" don't belong together unless you mean to be incredibly offensive and condescending.

Fuck you, Chairman Svanberg. Do you care about the small fish and the small birds, too? Do you care what you've done to our marine environment and coastline in the pursuit of obscene profits? At all?

Jonathan Swift understood this shit.

Obama, You Suck

The Confluence:

In the 18 months since he took the White House, President Obama has managed to reinvigorate this useless and worthless GOP, the opposition party that was on its deathbed, has deflated his own base, has alienated independents, hasn’t made any friends among Republicans although he has embraced many parts of George Bush’s horrendous policies while watering down or staying away from anything remotely Progressive. When he took power, the Democratic Party look as strong as it has ever been. The Party seemed poised to keep power for generations to come. Now, the question about the upcoming election is how bad a beating are the Democrats going to take in November.

He has screwed up, sabotaged or stayed every major policy: Stimulus? Health-care? FinReg? Wars? Middle East? Immigration Reform? Energy? On each one of these issue, he has left everyone dissatisfied, especially his base. (Please spare me the “he’s pissing everyone off, he must be doing something right. I just don’t have the nerves for such horse manure.)

He has shown close to ZERO leadership skills. Don’t tell me how he passed HRA. Everyone was running the show but him. Who ever heard of Stupak before? By the way, what’s happening with the Financial Regulation?

This is a man who’s being called “Socialist” while being a Corporatist, “Radical” while being Mr Status-Quo himself. He has made life miserable for his own fan club for no gain anywhere else.

Worst of all, President Barack Obama has managed to look terrible in every crisis, the “BP oil spill” just being the latest example. The people wailing the loudest now are those who kept telling Obama has some brilliance, some leadership abilities, some genius the rest of us were just not smart enough to see.

Stephen Chu and BP

Missed this piece in the N.Y. Times from May (via Sweetness and Light):

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, the national laboratory then headed by Steven Chu received the bulk of a $500 million grant from the British oil giant BP to develop alternative energy sources through a new Energy Biosciences Institute.

Dr. Chu received the grant from BP’s chief scientist at the time, Steven E. Koonin, a fellow theoretical physicist whom Dr. Chu jocularly described as “my twin brother.” Dr. Koonin had selected the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, over other universities in the United States and Britain in part because of Dr. Chu’s pioneering work in alternative fuels.

Today, Dr. Chu is President Obama’s energy secretary, and he spent Tuesday in Houston working with BP officials to try to find a way to stop the unabated flow of oil from a ruptured well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Dr. Koonin, who followed Dr. Chu to the Energy Department and now serves as under secretary of energy for science, is recused from all matters relating to the disaster because of his past ties to BP, said Stephanie Mueller, an Energy Department spokeswoman.

We "were given advance warning – commonly by Obama himself – of the certain corporatist and military-imperialist trajectory of an Obama White House."

[source]

Paul Street:

“Oh sure,” I can hear defensive liberals and “disappointed progressives” saying: “hindsight is 20-20. We had reasons to hope and dream at the time he was elected.”

I’m sorry, but this doesn’t really wash for me. I did everything I could short of smoke signals and passenger pigeons to raise alarms among “progressives” from the left about the real nature of the Obama phenomenon from the start. And I was not alone. Contrary somewhat to Chomsky’s statement that he is “one of the few people who isn’t disappointed because I had no [progressive] expectations” (of Obama), a considerable number of radical voices tried to caution lefties and serious liberals off “the Obama Kool Aid” from 2005 through the 2008 election. Those voices included John Pilger, Adolph Reed, Jr, Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, Michael Hureaux, Margaret Kimberly, Juan Santos, Greg Guma, Marc Lamont Hill, Pam Martens, Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Kim Peterson, David Peterson, Chris Hedges, Lance Selfa, Joshua Frank, Jeremy Scahill, John MacArthur, David Sirota, Ken Silverstein. and numerous others in such journals as Black Agenda Report, Z Magazine, ZNet, Dissident Voice, Harper’s, The Progressive, Truthdig., AlterNet and SocialistWorker.org. My own voluminous warnings on and against the Obama phenomenon date from late July 2004 – just two days after Obama’s pivotal, career-making keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. My aforementioned book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics was the most ambitious and comprehensive effort before the 2008 election to rigorously demystify the Obama phenomenon – to warn about the Obama re-branding project – from a Left perspective. Along with Lance Selfa’s study The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), Sheldon Wolin’s chilling book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, 2008), and John R. MacArthur’s You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America (New York: Melville, House, 2008), and the essays of a large number of left political writers (just some of whom are mentioned above), it can reasonably be said to have essentially “predicted” the Obama administration’s betrayal of the Obama campaign’s liberal and progressive base. It did so through a simple insistence on rigorously (some might say “ruthlessly”) situating Obama in the world of what the prolific left author and filmmaker John Pilger calls “power as it is, not as many of us wish it to be.” The sixth chapter of my next book – The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power – is titled simply “We Were Warned.” It lists no less than twenty key ways in which reasonably attentive citizens were given advance warning – commonly by Obama himself – of the certain corporatist and military-imperialist trajectory of an Obama White House.

Be sure to check out the excellent footnotes to the article. The last one notes: "The prize for earliest left identification of Obama as a fake-progressive neoliberal centrist goes without question to the black political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr."

Reed has written of Obama:

He's a vacuous opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

BP satisfying government and shareholders?

This lede from the New York Times makes little sense:

As President Obama headed to the Gulf Coast on Monday, BP is searching for a way to satisfy both the United States government and its shareholders.

Is BP in the least bit interested in satisfying the government? Hahaha! No.

Obama left the solutions to the spill entirely in BP's hands and BP chose the most profitable course of action. They are not interested in cleaning up after the spill. They are interested in sucking it into tankers and selling it.

The day BP looks for ways to satisfy the government is a day that will never come. Shareholders come first and last.

Oil spill? What oil spill? Obama urges Gulf tourism.

Just as Bush urged us to go shopping after 9/11, Obama has responded to the oil spill by pleading with Americans to spend money at Gulf Coast beaches.

N.Y. Times:

Mr. Obama said that one of the most important things that ordinary Americans could do to help residents of the Gulf was to visit the area’s beaches, many of which appeared virtually deserted on Monday.

[...]

“There’s still a lot of opportunity for visitors to come down here,” Mr. Obama said. “There are a lot of beaches that have not been affected and will not be affected.”

Obamanamistan

How to Deal with a Visit from the FBI

Very informative! Protest is suppressed through violence, intimidation, and harassment. The FBI excels at harassment.


(h/t Louis Proyect)

"Corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money."

Chris Hedges (via Jodi Dean's I Cite):

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship only money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is the same nightmare seen in postindustrial pockets from the old mill towns in New England to the abandoned steel mills in Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, mourning their dead, live each day.

"You are not allowed to interview any workers."

Raw Story:

In a video clip obtained by ThinkProgress, a local news team from WDSU in New Orleans was told by a private security guard that they were not allowed to talk to cleanup workers on a public beach or come within 100 yards of cleanup operations.

"Who’s saying that?" reporter Scott Walker asked the guard. "Because no one can tell me that, unless you’re the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, you’re the Coast Guard, or you’re the military, can you tell me where to go on this public beach."

"I can tell you where to go because I’m employed to keep this beach safe," the guard replied, adding, "You are not allowed to interview any workers."

“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.”
- Bill Moyers

Sierra Club Shocker

Politico:

“President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.”

Obama's environmental record so far is awful. Nuclear power, offshore drilling, endangered species? Moratorium on whaling? He stinks. The Center for Biological Diversity gives him a "C" for his first year in office.

What the Sierra Club is doing is called sucking up and selling out.

If at first you don't succeed... solo circumnavigate again

She certainly has guts!

ABC:

"It's been a little bit crazy these past few days. Everything's happened pretty fast but I was really lucky that there was a boat that could come and get me where I was," she said.

"When stuff is going on out there you can't really get too scared about it - I mean it doesn't really do any good."

[...]

Despite the ordeal, Sunderland still plans to achieve her dream of sailing around the world.

"I'm definitely going to sail around the world again or at least give it another try," she said.

"I don't know when I'll get another chance to do it, but I've wanted to sail around the world for years and I'm definitely going to do it sometime."

A Waters After My Own Heart

“I’m one of the few
who voted for Obama
because he was a friend
of Bill Ayers.”
- John Waters

"I don't know what she's doing in the southern Indian Ocean in the middle of the winter."

Couriermail:

The man who built Wild Eyes said that Abby was not up to the trip.

"The way we built the boat means that it is unsinkable. We had stringent rules to test the positive buoyancy and we tested it again and again," said Queensland boat builder Jon Sayer.

"This boat is bigger and faster than Jessica Watson's boat. In Abby's case she wasn't physically or mentally strong enough to handle a 40-foot boat in those winter storm conditions."

Round-the-world yachtsman Ian Kiernan criticised Abby for failing to respect the sea.

"I don't know what she's doing in the southern Indian Ocean in the middle of the winter. We need adventurers but adventurers who do foolhardy things and put their rescuers at risk, it should not be allowed."

There is still a risk that her yacht will overturn in the heavy seas. If that happened, the Federal Government would order an aerial rescue, which would cost millions of dollars.

May they find Abby alive...

Abby Sunderland's irresponsible born-again parents allowed her to sail off around the world in a boat that behaves "like a surfboard."

Solo sailor David Dicks:

The boat I took is like a pit bull, it's low and it's strong and it gets through everything but Abby's boat is like a greyhound. If it's not handled in exactly the right way in water like that ... you can come to grief a lot more easily.

"If she wasn't experienced in handling a boat like that before she left she would have been by the time she got to the Indian Ocean, but all you have to do is one thing wrong and the thing could break up."

Move over, Sarah Palin, there's a new nut in town

[source]

And she has nutty supporters.

“She is a godly woman. She has all the attributes of Jesus.”
- Frank Bushey

We can thank Harry Reid's dithering if she gets into office.

Support Sanctions Against Apartheid Israel

More Oil Spill Photos

Don't miss this batch of 56 photos at MSNBC. The effort to cut the flow of information [DN! did some excellent reporting on this today] rivals the effort to stem the flow of oil. Another story becomes a journalism story.

"Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials."
- N.Y. Times

Big Brother "Do No Evil" Google in cahoots with BP to drive traffic to BP site.

"BP has bought terms such as 'oil spill' from search engine providers including Google to help direct Internet users to its website as it attempts to control the worst oil spill in U.S. history."
[source]

IP Communicatons:

In a fascinating development that show how Internet search terms truly can influence public perception, news broke that BP bought a number of terms, including “oil spill,” from Google and other Internet search providers.

The move, according to news media, is intended to help direct Internet users to the BP website to control what’s being described as “the worst oil spill in U.S. history.”

More specifically, CNBC reported. A BP spokesman reportedly told news media that it intended to pay fees so its own Website would rank higher on a list of results when Internet users searched terms like “oil spill,” “volunteer” and “claims.”

BP said it wanted to help people who were trying to access information on the BP website to find it more readily, rather than intending to draw away hits from other sites.

Think Google is a benign, enlightened, non-partisan corporation? Think again.

Thanks, Big Brother Google, for all you do to help us find the corporate propaganda we would not be able to live without.

Mr. Greene Goes to Washington?

MoJo on South Carolina mystery Senate candidate Alvin Greene:

Greene insists that he's planning to work with state and national officials to ramp up his campaign and raise money "as soon as I can." And he plans on putting his unemployment at the center of his campaign. "I’m currently one of the many unemployed in the state and this country. South Carolina has more unemployed now than at any other time," Greene says. "My campaign slogan: Let's get South Carolina back to work." He adds that he would like to see "one Korea under a democracy."

[...]

...Greene is facing a felony charge for allegedly showing obscene photos to a University of South Carolina student.

Porn or no porn, he'd undoubtedly be better than Jim DeMint.

Vietnamistan

Isn't it fun to watch helplessly as tax dollars that could be spent on social programs go towards an endless, pointless war?

When they come for your social security in the name of deficit reduction, you can thank, in part, our military, the biggest waste of money on the planet.

The angle on Sharron Angle

"Social Security is a broken and bankrupt system ... We must offer a free market alternative..."
- Sharron Angle

"The Department of Education is unconstitutional and should not be involved in education at any level."
- Sharron Angle

"How do we deregulate enough to invite our industries to come back into the United States...?"
- Sharron Angle

"Sharron Angle will strive to maintain the mining laws and provide access to public lands."
- Sharron Angle web site (cached)

"Cap and Trade ... is based on an unscientific hysteria over the man-caused global warming hoax."
- Sharron Angle web site (cached)

"The United State needs to withdraw from the United Nations and work solely with America’s willing allies."
- Sharron Angle web site (cached)

"The United States is only as strong as the military that defends it."
- Sharron Angle web site (cached)

"I affirm that each citizen is a part of the well-armed militia."
- Sharron Angle

"I am the tea party."
- Sharron Angle

She also wants to abolish the EPA. She might be the tea party but she's not my cup of tea. Any one of those statements would disqualify her from ever getting my vote.

Sharron Angle: Drill, Baby, Drill! Climate change a hoax!

Reid's opponent in Nevada in November will be Tea Partier Sharron Angle. She's toxic for the environment. Sarah Palin, step aside!

Angle web site (cached version):

As a long-term policy, America must expand its own domestic energy supplies. Sharron Angle would legislate to repeal regulations that prohibit off shore drilling, drilling in ANWR and development of American owned petroleum resources.

[...]

Cap and Trade, which is based on an unscientific hysteria over the man-caused global warming hoax, steps over the constitutional boundaries of the federal government and is merely another way to tax the people.

"Oil had crept over, under and around the abandoned boom that formed a moat around Queen Bess's castle."

Georgianne Nienaber (OpEd News):

There were rings of deflective and absorbent boom surrounding Queen Bess and neighboring Grand Terre Island, but something was very wrong. The boom was a neglected window dressing--broken, saturated, and coiled in some places like gigantic, filthy, bloated snakes.

[...]

Oil had crept over, under and around the abandoned boom that formed a moat around Queen Bess's castle. Pelicans on the shore that were not oiled were wading through puddles of gloppy red goo, literally trying to shake the stuff off their feet. We observed a pair of birds, which were obviously bonded, and watched helplessly as the non-oiled one of the pair started to fly away while it's mate or companion flopped helplessly in the grass.

[...]

This rocky island of low mangroves and trees is still a breeding ground. There are chicks and fledglings in the nests that need food and need parents to provide food that is not oiled. Nests are found on the ground or in low trees. Pelicans lay an average of three eggs, and statistics say that survival in good times is limited to one egg. The hatchling is blind and completely dependent on its parents, who share nesting duties, shield them from the sun, and feed them regurgitated food from their leathery pouches. They don't develop downy feathers until two weeks after hatching and feeding continues for about nine weeks. Each chick will devour about 150 pounds of fish, and fish are accumulators of toxic chemicals. It was accumulations of DDT that almost eradicated the brown pelican from Louisiana waters. Now the fish are oil-soaked, and if and only if the parent is able to reach the chicks, dinner consists of toxic regurgitations. In a worse case- scenario, oil soaked parents cannot reach the nests, let alone feed themselves.

But federal and state management procedures say the rookery must not be disturbed no matter how many birds are unable to assist their young.

[...]

Generations of pelicans are at risk, victims of policy. Someone needs to think outside of the box of regulations and procedures that were not designed to address the greatest environmental catastrophe of our lifetime.

[...]

We asked who was in charge of boom maintenance.

Answer: "BP."

Was BP's lack of attention to boom maintenance a problem?

"Definitely."

So here is the catch-22. Damned if you intervene and buck the system, and the birds are certainly damned if we don't get BP to maintain the boom. To leave it as is traps the unfortunate pelicans in a toxic environment and the chicks that survive will leave the nests and enter the brew.

End of the Myth of Two States

Palestine is Over
Nombre's top image shows the situation on the ground after the 1967 War. The second image shows the extent of encroachment, expropriation, annexation and ethnic cleansing since then. Obviously, the Israelis have seen to it that they won the peace as well as the war.

It's Manifest Destiny (Déjà vu) all over again, as Yogi would say.  As Nombre 44 says in his previous post.

I don't think there are any readers out there who would buy a veined-up New York cut that looked like what 'Palestine' looks like.

And yet Israel is forcing this abomination down the throats of Arab residents of the West Bank...

Israel has plumbed the depth of their Bad Neighbor Policy to the extent that they are now engaging in state-sponsored piracy.

The Zionist maximalist dream = the American maximalist dream

Israelis aren't the new Nazis. They are the new Americans.

[source]

[source]

Seed Sovereignty vs. Disaster Capitalism

The WIP:

“We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals. In our advocacy, we say that seeds are the patrimony of humanity. No one can control them,” said Doudou Pierre, national coordinating committee member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA), in a recent interview. “We reject Monsanto and their GMOs. GMOs would be the extermination of our people.”

A march is being held in Haiti today for World Environment Day, called by at least four major national peasant organizations and one international one. The march’s purpose is to protest the new arrival of Monsanto seeds. The day’s slogans include, “Long live native seeds” and “Down with Monsanto. Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.”

Several U.S. organizations are planning simultaneous events to protest the entry of the controversial multinational in Haiti.

Last month, Haitian citizens learned the news that the giant agribusiness Monsanto will be “donating” 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds. While the seeds are free this year, peasant organizations see a Trojan horse, with Monsanto seeking to gain a foothold in the Haitian market. Hybrid seeds typically do not regenerate, so that farmers would have to buy them again each year, and they generally require large quantities of fertilizer and pesticides (two products that also fill Monsanto’s annual coffers). And while the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto’s offer of genetically modified [GMO] seeds this year because Haiti does not have a law regulating their use, there may follow a push to get GMOs approved, in which case Monsanto would be well-positioned. Moreover, the Calypso tomato seeds contain the pesticide Thiram, whose chemical ingredient is so toxic that the Environmental Protection Agency has banned it for home use in the U.S.

They must die to what has killed them

"Those born to privilege and wealth may miss life by having been installed at the center of a universe revolving around their own desires. Others, born to merciless poverty and the contempt of the ruling class, may miss life by never feeling really human at all. If the advantaged must die to their egocentricity, the underprivileged must die to their hopelessness, fatalism, and acquiescence in their own despoiling."
- Walter Wink

"For students, as for black people, the hardest battle isn't with Mr. Charlie, It's with what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind."

[source]

Something from a more enlightened era...

Jerry Farber (1968):

Students, like black people, have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on the IBM cards. They could make coloring books out of the catalogs and they could put the grading system in a museum. They could raze one set of walls and let life come blowing into the classroom. They could raze another set of walls and let education flow out and flood the streets. They could turn the classroom into where it's at -- a "field of action" as Peter Marin describes it. And believe it or not, they could study eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons -- their own reasons.

They could. Theoretically. They have the power. But only in a very few places, like Berkeley, have they even begun to think about using it. For students, as for black people, the hardest battle isn't with Mr. Charlie, It's with what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind.

"Whoa, Mr. Charlie..."

Frank Rich: "The credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the administration."

Frank Rich:

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector. His default assumption seems to be that his peers are always as well-intentioned as he is. The single biggest mistake he has made in managing the gulf disaster was his failure to challenge BP’s version of events from the start. The company consistently understated the spill’s severity, overestimated the progress of the repair operation and low-balled the environmental damage. Yet the White House’s designated point man in the crisis, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, was still publicly reaffirming his trust in the BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, as recently as two weeks ago, more than a month after the rig exploded.

This is baffling, and then some, given BP’s atrocious record prior to this catastrophe. In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

No high-powered White House meetings or risk analyses were needed to discern how treacherous it was to trust BP this time. An intern could have figured it out. But the credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the administration. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was praised by the president as a “savvy” businessman two months before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman. Well before then, there had been a flood of journalistic indicators that Goldman under Blankfein may have gamed the crash and the bailout.

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

"We are brothers: but..."

Tolstoy, From The Kingdom of God is Within You:

We are brothers: but every morning my brother or my sister performs for me the most menial offices.

We are brothers: but I must have my morning cigar, my sugar, my mirror, or what not, — objects whose manufacture has often cost my brothers and sisters their health, yet I do not for that reason forbear to use these things; on the contrary, I even demand them.

We are brothers: and yet I support myself by working in some bank, commercial house, or shop, and am always trying to raise the price of the necessities of life for my brothers and sisters.

We are brothers: I receive a salary for judging, convicting, and punishing the thief or the prostitute, whose existence is the natural outcome of my own system of life, and I fully realize that I should neither condemn nor punish.

We are all brothers: yet I make my living by collecting taxes from the poor, that the rich may live in luxury and idleness.

We are brothers: and yet I receive a salary for preaching a pseudo-Christian doctrine, in which I do not myself believe, thus hindering men from discovering the true one; I receive a salary as priest or bishop for deceiving people in a matter which is of vital importance to them.

We are brothers: but I make my brother pay for all my services, whether I write books for him, educate him, or prescribe for him as a physician.

We are all brothers: but I receive a salary for fitting myself to be a murderer, for learning the art of war, or for manufacturing arms and ammunition and building fortresses.

The whole existence of our upper classes is utterly contradictory, and the more sensitive a man's nature the more painful is the incongruity.

Rachel Corrie: "I’m here because I care." And gone because others refused to care.

By Rachel Corrie, aged 10 — 1990

I’m here for other children.

I’m here because I care.

I’m here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.

I’m here because those people are mostly children.

We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.

We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.

We have got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.

We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs.

We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.

My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.

My dream is to give the poor a chance.

My dream is to save the 40,000 people who die each day.

My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.

If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.

If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.

"We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities."

Steve Best:

We need to focus like a laser beam on a grim truth: whatever the gains of a worldwide environmental and animal rights movements throughout the last four decades, they have nonetheless continued to lose ground in the battle to save biodiversity, to stop or even slow down the destruction of the rainforests, topsoil, coral reefs; to prevent ever-worsening resource wars; to end the blatant and open war and Holocaust against nonhuman animals; and to come to grips with the immanent catastrophe of climate change in our minds let alone our policies and actions.

The sense of urgency is rising in proportion to the severity of the crisis. Increasingly, calls for legislative change, moderation, compromise, and taking the slow march through the institutions can be seen as grotesquely inadequate, as growing numbers of people gravitate toward more radical tactics of change. “Reasonableness” and “moderation” in the current situation seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as “extreme” and “radical” actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate.

From Athens to Paris to Brazil, there is growing realization that politics as usual just won’t cut it anymore. We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities. The defense of the earth requires immediate and decisive action: logging roads need to be blocked, driftnets need to be cut, and cages need to be emptied. But these are piecemeal and reactive measures, and in addition to these tactics, radical movements and alliances must be built that unites struggles on behalf of humanity, nonhuman animals, and the earth in a politics of total liberation.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009.
[source: N.Y. Times]

Last Blog Posts [narrowly averted!] #2

Why do people stop blogging? Blame Facebook! A blog I keep tabs on went dark for a while but here they are, at it again. Yay!

facebook killed the liberty blog
Posted by Friday on May 23rd 2010 to Journals

Whoa, it’s been five months since I blogged anything. I blame Facebook. I used to keep a background part of my mind subconsciously focused on noting things to blog about, but now that part is redirected towards noting things to Facebook about, in a neverending quest to amuse my friends (both of them) and serve as a lesson to others, usually on what *not* to do with your life.

At this time five years ago, I was driving across the country, en route to New Hampshire. Seems like a good time to reflect and review on where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Random thoughts on the past five years (I also blame Facebook for damaging my ability to put together a cohesive narrative; everything comes out in 400-characters-or-less bullet points now. :-\ ):

– New Hampshire is a beautiful place. I am very fortunate to live here.

– No regrets about leaving California. That said, I have observed that some wounds don’t heal with time. Or perhaps I just haven’t found the proper emotional or intellectual salves to apply to them. Also, as Jon Kabat-Zinn has noted, “Wherever you go… there you are.”

– I love my funky little log cabin in the woods. I’m utterly failing to keep it up to Middle-Class Suburban White Guy standards of decency, but then, I don’t really care about such standards.

[...]

– Two years ago, I wrote this: “I’ve been meaning to reread “1984?; it’s been many years. But IIRC, it seems like the current reality of the U.S. may actually be worse than Orwell envisioned. This is actually worse than all sorts of sci fi dystopian books/movies I’ve read/seen over the years.” Since then, I *did* reread 1984. I wouldn’t say the U.S. is worse than what Orwell envisioned, but the similarities are mind-blowingly shocking and depressing… and at the same time, difficult to focus your eyes on, seeing as how it’s the reality in which we live all day, every day, and it gets increasingly hard to remember or envision a different/better way of living, like a fish trying to imagine what it would be like to not live in cold water.

[...]

"The whole student body voted overwhelmingly in favor of divestment from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation."

Axis of Logic (yesterday):

Just minutes ago, the students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the alma mater of Rachel Corrie, announced that the whole student body voted overwhelmingly in favor of divestment from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation and in favor of making their campus Caterpillar-free.

What's more remarkable is that the decision was not made by a student council and thus vulnerable to veto by just one person, as we saw in Berkeley. No, it was decided through a campus-wide vote. No one, not the promoters of the divestment policy, not its detractors, knew how the students would vote in complete privacy.

The results? The divestment vote won by a landslide 79.5%! The Caterpillar vote by an equally impressive 71.8%!

The Evergreen College Board of Trustees and Board of Governors actually hold the purse strings of the Evergreen College and the Evergreen Foundation respectively. You can imagine the pressure that will be brought upon them to ignore the student votes.

Why boycott Caterpillar? Specially-designed Caterpillar bulldozers are used to destroy Palestinian homes.

"This is probably the most gratuitous, sustained, sadistic animal abuse I have ever seen."

Mercy for Animals:

Chilling undercover footage recorded during a new Mercy For Animals investigation exposes dairy farm workers sadistically abusing cows and young calves.

Captured on hidden camera, the shocking scenes of abuse reveal a culture of cruelty at Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City, Ohio.

During a four-week investigation between April and May, MFA's investigator documented farm workers:

* Violently punching young calves in the face, body slamming them to the ground, and pulling and throwing them by their ears
* Routinely using pitchforks to stab cows in the face, legs and stomach
* Kicking "downed" cows (those too injured to stand) in the face and neck – abuse carried out and encouraged by the farm's owner
* Maliciously beating restrained cows in the face with crowbars – some attacks involving over 40 blows to the head
* Twisting cows' tails until the bones snapped
* Punching cows' udders
* Bragging about stabbing, dragging, shooting, breaking bones, and beating cows and calves to death

After viewing the footage, Dr. Bernard Rollin, distinguished professor of animal science at Colorado State University, stated: "This is probably the most gratuitous, sustained, sadistic animal abuse I have ever seen. The video depicts calculated, deliberate cruelty, based not on momentary rage but on taking pleasure through causing pain to cows and calves who are defenseless."

The deplorable conditions uncovered at Conklin Dairy Farms highlight the reality that animal agriculture is incapable of self-regulation and that meaningful federal and state laws must be implemented and strengthened to prevent egregious cruelty to farmed animals.

Compassionate consumers can end their direct financial support of farmed animal abuse by rejecting dairy, and other animal products, and adopting a vegan diet.

Police brutality? What police brutality?

Another horrendous, democracy-destroying trend.

Via Ian Welsh:

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

David said...

[Emily Henochowicz]

David said...

You're nothing but a pathetic left-wing Kapo.

People like you are the worst society has to offer.

Stop attacking the IDF, stop producing your Nazi-themed propaganda artwork, and get the hell out of my country.

You deserve to lose a hell of a lot more than just an eye.
June 4, 2010 4:56 PM

David has lost his humanity. I hope he finds it again.

Out the frying pan into the frying pan...

AFP:

"Unlike survivors from the coastal marshlands, which can be released into humid inland areas after being cleaned and rehabilitated, pelicans and other coastal birds must be returned to the sea, where the risk of oil contamination remains."

Heartbreaking...

Oil and Government Don't Mix

Stir them together and the oil companies will float to the top.

Paul Duffy:

The oil companies are so big and so rich and so arrogant that they can pretty much do whatever they want and nobody, it seems, including the United States Senate and the President himself can do much about it, even if they wanted to. The terrible oil spill in the gulf began to look like it might be Obama’s first major setback. After chalking up one success after another, he appeared to be faltering. Why doesn’t he get mad? people said. Why doesn’t he go down to the Gulf Coast and personally get the problem under control?

Jimmy Carter had hostages. Unable to do much to bring Americans home, his presidency was weakened. Obama is now a hostage to an oil company, as powerless to control events as Carter was when confronted with the embassy takeover in 1979.

It's going to be a long, oily summer.