Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
Samuel McKenney Claiborne
(Burning the Emperor's New Clothes)
Non-Aligned Political Thought
Political Incorrectness
Rabid assaults on hypocrisy and mediocrity, no matter who it annoys...
Non-Aligned Political Thought
Political Incorrectness
Rabid assaults on hypocrisy and mediocrity, no matter who it annoys...
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Monsanto Is Satan (Part 1 of a 10,000 part series...)
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
03/23/11 • -1 min
High on my special list of pathologically destructive corporations is Monsanto. Though their sins are legion, I’m going to focus on perhaps their most evil activity of all – their attempt to control virtually all farmers and all crop seeds, and to force those same farmers to use their genetically altered crops and toxic agri-chemicals.
Although this is hard to believe, farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when Monsanto’s genetically-modified soybean and canola plants have shown up in their fields, carried there by birds and the wind. One Canadian farmer, who had been selectively breeding his own canola plants with his wife for decades, was sued when some of these Monsanto plants were found growing in a ditch alongside his property.
This is where the entire affair, which is not unique to this one farmer, becomes positively Kafkaesque. Monsanto contended that this man had essentially stolen their seeds. They asked the court to levy a hefty fine, take all of the profits from his current canola crop, and most insidiously, they also asked the court to seize the man’s own proprietary canola breeds, the product of 50 years of careful selective breeding.
Because of a few plants found in a ditch, Monsanto not only wanted to bankrupt this farmer, they wanted to steal his intellectual property as well.
As utterly bizarre as it seems , the court upheld Monsanto’s claims in full. But this was no ordinary farmer. He appealed to Canada’s Saskatchewan appellate court, where the 3 justice panel again upheld Monsanto’s position.
He appealed once more, this time to Canada’s Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Somewhere along the line, Monsanto must have felt the winds of change, because they suddenly agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Not only will this brave farmer keep his seeds, and not pay any fines, but Monsanto will be legally liable for eliminating any of their contaminating GMO canola that finds its way onto his land.
He has won, but thousands like him are daily being bullied, stolen from, and often bankrupted by this giant company that literally seeks control over the world’s seed supply.
Monsanto’s contracts, signed by any farmer who wants to use their seed, say it all:
The farmer cannot use his own seeds at all; he must only buy seeds from Monsanto
The farmer can only use Monsanto chemical fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides.
Monsanto’s private investigative force, mostly composed of highly-coercive ex-law-enforcement officers is permitted to search their land whenever they want, without notice, for 3 years after they stop using Monsanto seed.
Most incredibly: The farmer can never sue Monsanto. He must waive all rights to future lawsuits for any reason.
When Monsanto and the other big GMO companies first started pushing their ‘Frankenfood’ products, they claimed that they would never interbreed with other strains, and would never ‘escape into the wild’. Just the opposite is true: all over Canada and the USA, their GMO canola can be found, spreading like an invasive weed. It’s in ditches everywhere, and it’s crowding out other strains. Indeed, it looks as if it’s now virtually impossible to grow completely non-GMO soy or canola anywhere on this continent.
And just what are their seeds genetically modified to do? In the case of their canola, it’s called ‘Roundup Ready’, which means that the plants have been genetically modified to be highly resistant to Monsanto’s toxic Roundup herbicide. This allows canola farmers to blitz their fields with heretofore unheard of levels of toxic herbicides, a sort of slow-motion agent-oranging of the entire American and Canadian heartland.
The creation of plants that will allow even more poisoning of the land, even more toxic residues in our foodstuffs, even more depletion of bees, butterflies and other natural pollinators is doubly, triply evil.
The Europeans have been way ahead of us on this, banning GMO foods. A small band of Organic farmers is currently suing Monsanto for destroying their plant strains and infecting their fields. Not only do we need to support this David and Goliath struggle, but it’s time we revisit the entire GMO question. It’s time to ban all new GMO crops, and not just from commercial use, but from research plots too. GMO wheat is growing in small plots all over the US and Canada. Wheat is, of course, a relative of grass, and spreads just as readily. The fallacy that GMO plants can be segregated has been proven over and over. It’s time to take action and petition the Obama administration to follow Europe’s lead and ban GMO crops and crop research.
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Although this is hard to believe, farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when Monsanto’s genetically-modified soybean and canola plants have shown up in their fields, carried there by birds and the wind. One Canadian farmer, who had been selectively breeding his own canola plants with his wife for decades, was sued when some of these Monsanto plants were found growing in a ditch alongside his property.
This is where the entire affair, which is not unique to this one farmer, becomes positively Kafkaesque. Monsanto contended that this man had essentially stolen their seeds. They asked the court to levy a hefty fine, take all of the profits from his current canola crop, and most insidiously, they also asked the court to seize the man’s own proprietary canola breeds, the product of 50 years of careful selective breeding.
Because of a few plants found in a ditch, Monsanto not only wanted to bankrupt this farmer, they wanted to steal his intellectual property as well.
As utterly bizarre as it seems , the court upheld Monsanto’s claims in full. But this was no ordinary farmer. He appealed to Canada’s Saskatchewan appellate court, where the 3 justice panel again upheld Monsanto’s position.
He appealed once more, this time to Canada’s Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Somewhere along the line, Monsanto must have felt the winds of change, because they suddenly agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Not only will this brave farmer keep his seeds, and not pay any fines, but Monsanto will be legally liable for eliminating any of their contaminating GMO canola that finds its way onto his land.
He has won, but thousands like him are daily being bullied, stolen from, and often bankrupted by this giant company that literally seeks control over the world’s seed supply.
Monsanto’s contracts, signed by any farmer who wants to use their seed, say it all:
The farmer cannot use his own seeds at all; he must only buy seeds from Monsanto
The farmer can only use Monsanto chemical fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides.
Monsanto’s private investigative force, mostly composed of highly-coercive ex-law-enforcement officers is permitted to search their land whenever they want, without notice, for 3 years after they stop using Monsanto seed.
Most incredibly: The farmer can never sue Monsanto. He must waive all rights to future lawsuits for any reason.
When Monsanto and the other big GMO companies first started pushing their ‘Frankenfood’ products, they claimed that they would never interbreed with other strains, and would never ‘escape into the wild’. Just the opposite is true: all over Canada and the USA, their GMO canola can be found, spreading like an invasive weed. It’s in ditches everywhere, and it’s crowding out other strains. Indeed, it looks as if it’s now virtually impossible to grow completely non-GMO soy or canola anywhere on this continent.
And just what are their seeds genetically modified to do? In the case of their canola, it’s called ‘Roundup Ready’, which means that the plants have been genetically modified to be highly resistant to Monsanto’s toxic Roundup herbicide. This allows canola farmers to blitz their fields with heretofore unheard of levels of toxic herbicides, a sort of slow-motion agent-oranging of the entire American and Canadian heartland.
The creation of plants that will allow even more poisoning of the land, even more toxic residues in our foodstuffs, even more depletion of bees, butterflies and other natural pollinators is doubly, triply evil.
The Europeans have been way ahead of us on this, banning GMO foods. A small band of Organic farmers is currently suing Monsanto for destroying their plant strains and infecting their fields. Not only do we need to support this David and Goliath struggle, but it’s time we revisit the entire GMO question. It’s time to ban all new GMO crops, and not just from commercial use, but from research plots too. GMO wheat is growing in small plots all over the US and Canada. Wheat is, of course, a relative of grass, and spreads just as readily. The fallacy that GMO plants can be segregated has been proven over and over. It’s time to take action and petition the Obama administration to follow Europe’s lead and ban GMO crops and crop research.
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Psycho Pundits
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
09/06/09 • -1 min
In recent months, The psychotic sophistries of right wing pundits have gone gonzo. It’s as if losing the election has blown their minds.
First, there was Sean Hannity’s ‘tree of liberty’. I defy any sane adult to not fall down laughing after viewing it. Mr. Hannity shows us an old-timey illustration of the tree of liberty, complete with roots named Liberty, Freedom, etc, combining into a strong trunk. Above this trunk there are apples, named commerce, security etc. Then Mr. Hannity tells us that since Obama has become president, all of these apples have fallen into, I kid you not, the ‘apple crate of socialism’. This entire cartoon seems to be for two year olds, but it’s not, it’s for the supposedly adult viewers of his program.
Do his viewers never stop to think that by Hannity’s definition, government-run institutions like fire, police, and military forces, and even public schools and hospitals, are equally ‘socialist’.
Later in the week, he tried to stir public ire over the fact that President Obama ordered a hamburger with Dijon mustard on it. Oh dear, how elitist! It’s shocking that the president might want an exotic condiment like grey poupon mustard instead of Heinz ketchup. No, wait a minute, if he’d ordered Heinz, he’d be funding Theresa Heinz Kerry’s evil radical agenda. I’m sure that was on tap as the diligent Hannity production team parsed Mr. Obama’s menu choices.
Rush Limbaugh accused the president of coddling the Somalis who’d taken an American sea captain hostage. He called them ‘black Muslim teenagers’, the implication being: hey, Obama’s black, and maybe he’s Muslim too. Yes, and maybe on weekends President Obama secretly goes swashbuckling in the gulf of Aden with distant dangerous relatives from the Dark Continent. Scary! Of course, once those pirates were dispassionately killed by Navy Seal snipers and the hostage freed, Limbaugh changed his tune – he then criticized the president’s ‘slow response’.
Now Limbaugh has topped it all by suggesting that Governor Mark Sanford’s affair was caused by his extreme distress at having to accept Obama’s stimulus package money. OK, let’s forget for a moment that Sanford’s been having an affair for over a year, i.e. since before Obama was president. Are we really supposed to believe that a prominent Republican, who was until his recent self immolation thought to be a presidential contender, is so weak that he would break his marriage vows under the duress of... performing his executive duties? Is this the supposedly macho Republican Party we’re talking about here, or a bunch of those famously weak wristed liberals?
OK, I know that this president can do no right as far as these folks are concerned. Their job is to throw raw meat to mouth-breathing australopithecines (I wouldn’t insult the intelligence of Neanderthals by calling them that), but surely even these intellectually challenged listeners must at some point find this nitpicking, absurdist bloviating to be too much.
It defies logic that an adult, who knows the rudiments of personal hygiene, can tie their shoes, read and write, and drive a car, can take any of this seriously.
And this is what I find so distressing about these supposed pundits, and many more from Michael Weiner AKA ‘Michael Savage’ to the joyously malevolent Ann Coulter. It’s not that they exist, not even that some media executive might want to put them on the air because their extremist views are consonant with his own. No, it’s that these people have massive, massive audiences.
Who are these millions upon millions of people who follow the pundits, no matter how absurd their rationales, or egregious their hypocrisies. Rush Limbaugh railed against drug addicts for years, yet he was caught with an astounding 30,000 Oxycontin pills. Anyone other than a celebrity of his magnitude would have gone away for a long, long time for possession with intent to distribute. But Rush kept his job. The question is, how did he keep his listeners? How could these people still respect the world’s greatest hypocrite?
And how is America to prosper when so many Americans are this credulous, and this easily manipulated, whether into nonsensical ‘tea party’ protests or murderous attacks on doctors?
...
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All Content Worldwide Copyright - Samuel McKenney Claiborne
First, there was Sean Hannity’s ‘tree of liberty’. I defy any sane adult to not fall down laughing after viewing it. Mr. Hannity shows us an old-timey illustration of the tree of liberty, complete with roots named Liberty, Freedom, etc, combining into a strong trunk. Above this trunk there are apples, named commerce, security etc. Then Mr. Hannity tells us that since Obama has become president, all of these apples have fallen into, I kid you not, the ‘apple crate of socialism’. This entire cartoon seems to be for two year olds, but it’s not, it’s for the supposedly adult viewers of his program.
Do his viewers never stop to think that by Hannity’s definition, government-run institutions like fire, police, and military forces, and even public schools and hospitals, are equally ‘socialist’.
Later in the week, he tried to stir public ire over the fact that President Obama ordered a hamburger with Dijon mustard on it. Oh dear, how elitist! It’s shocking that the president might want an exotic condiment like grey poupon mustard instead of Heinz ketchup. No, wait a minute, if he’d ordered Heinz, he’d be funding Theresa Heinz Kerry’s evil radical agenda. I’m sure that was on tap as the diligent Hannity production team parsed Mr. Obama’s menu choices.
Rush Limbaugh accused the president of coddling the Somalis who’d taken an American sea captain hostage. He called them ‘black Muslim teenagers’, the implication being: hey, Obama’s black, and maybe he’s Muslim too. Yes, and maybe on weekends President Obama secretly goes swashbuckling in the gulf of Aden with distant dangerous relatives from the Dark Continent. Scary! Of course, once those pirates were dispassionately killed by Navy Seal snipers and the hostage freed, Limbaugh changed his tune – he then criticized the president’s ‘slow response’.
Now Limbaugh has topped it all by suggesting that Governor Mark Sanford’s affair was caused by his extreme distress at having to accept Obama’s stimulus package money. OK, let’s forget for a moment that Sanford’s been having an affair for over a year, i.e. since before Obama was president. Are we really supposed to believe that a prominent Republican, who was until his recent self immolation thought to be a presidential contender, is so weak that he would break his marriage vows under the duress of... performing his executive duties? Is this the supposedly macho Republican Party we’re talking about here, or a bunch of those famously weak wristed liberals?
OK, I know that this president can do no right as far as these folks are concerned. Their job is to throw raw meat to mouth-breathing australopithecines (I wouldn’t insult the intelligence of Neanderthals by calling them that), but surely even these intellectually challenged listeners must at some point find this nitpicking, absurdist bloviating to be too much.
It defies logic that an adult, who knows the rudiments of personal hygiene, can tie their shoes, read and write, and drive a car, can take any of this seriously.
And this is what I find so distressing about these supposed pundits, and many more from Michael Weiner AKA ‘Michael Savage’ to the joyously malevolent Ann Coulter. It’s not that they exist, not even that some media executive might want to put them on the air because their extremist views are consonant with his own. No, it’s that these people have massive, massive audiences.
Who are these millions upon millions of people who follow the pundits, no matter how absurd their rationales, or egregious their hypocrisies. Rush Limbaugh railed against drug addicts for years, yet he was caught with an astounding 30,000 Oxycontin pills. Anyone other than a celebrity of his magnitude would have gone away for a long, long time for possession with intent to distribute. But Rush kept his job. The question is, how did he keep his listeners? How could these people still respect the world’s greatest hypocrite?
And how is America to prosper when so many Americans are this credulous, and this easily manipulated, whether into nonsensical ‘tea party’ protests or murderous attacks on doctors?
...
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Band Aids for Machine Gun Wounds
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
01/18/12 • -1 min
Band Aids for Machine Gun Wounds There has been widespread outrage in response to a video showing US Marines urinating on the corpses of their dead Taliban adversaries. I’m not sure how much of the indignation is genuine and how much is pro-forma, but it’s all hypocrisy. Don’t misunderstand: I do not find the desecration of the dead to be a trivial affair. I just feel the irony of the canard that war can be inherently civilized to be nauseating. I could point out that the Taliban, who were among those outraged, have engaged in beheadings, torture, and other appalling acts – but that would mean that I’m justifying this behavior by comparing it to our enemy’s – a moral dead end if there ever was one. I am not justifying this behavior; I am attempting to put it into perspective. The sad, shameful truth is, American military and intelligence personnel have not only practiced torture, but our government has actually taught it to generations of Latin American military men at the infamous ‘School of the Americas’. So, is urinating on a dead body really more reprehensible than institutionalized torture? Another point of perspective: Our men and women in uniform are shot at by snipers and blown up by IEDS. Their dead bodies have been dragged through streets and hung from bridges. They are inculcated into a warrior culture that glorifies violence and dehumanizes the enemy. It is absurd to think that some abstract concept of ‘honor’ will always rule the day in this stewpot of violence and desensitization. These abuses have happened throughout our history. I’ve seen photographs from 1900 of US Marines gleefully waving the severed heads of Filipinos like Al Queda terrorists. Look up a timeline of the United States Military Operations on Wikipedia – this country has been in wars and skirmishes almost non-stop since its inception. Our soldiers have engaged in bloody, murderous campaigns, mostly to subdue freedom fighters, around the globe, from the Philippines to Guatemala to China to Russia. We epitomize a society of violence, not, as pro-lifers like to say, ‘a culture of life’. We are taught that we should recoil in horror at war’s excesses, like the My Lai Massacre and Abu Gharaib torture, but to accept war itself as honorable and gallant. I’m sorry, but it’s all excessive, all morally reprehensible. I recoil at the sight of the severed limbs of dead children scattered in the streets after one of our drone strikes. The mayhem unleashed by these drones, flown from armchairs via joysticks, is once-removed, displayed on a small screen, a silent movie as seen from the air – not down on the ground with the smell of blood, feces, and urine and the screams of the dying and the maimed. The combatant is spared the visceral, first-hand knowledge of what they have done. Their killing becomes partially abstracted, sanitized, and therefore easier to perpetrate. What could be more obscene? There is a wonderfully telling scene in the movie Apocalypse Now when a solder panics and he and his compatriots machinegun an entire family in a sampan. One woman survives, though she is grievously wounded. The main protagonist, who had not fired a shot, remorselessly shoots her, much to the shock of the rest of the solders – who had just massacred her entire family. He laments about the hypocrisy of war, the barbaric cruelty combined with moralistic hand-wringing, saying “We’d cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie.” It is a lie. It’s a lie to think that war can be moral or honorable. Making it cleaner or more antiseptic for some of its participants through technology only makes it easier, not harder for them to partake in the most bestial carnage. And those involved on the ground are desensitized by the things they see and do in a different, more time-honored way. We wonder when some vet kills his family or a park ranger – what made them snap? It’s obvious: a system that turns a human being into a killing machine, that glorifies violence, is inhumane and inherently uncivilized. And participants in that system almost inevitably become less humane, less civilized themselves. You worry about urine on a dead body? What about the child who still lives, though he is burned beyond recognition and limbless? What about the father who has lost his entire family? The wedding party shredded by aircraft fire? The girl gang-raped by our soldiers? You think that war in the 21st century is materially different from what it was in the 12th? The obscenity is not only that this is not so, but that we pretend it is, and we shield ourselves, through media self-censorship and euphemism, from the truth. We do not see the photos of American bloodshed of civilians that the rest of the world sees. And NPR still calls American waterboarding an ‘Enhanced Interrogation Technique’ even though we actually executed Japanese soldiers as war criminals for the very same practice. There is no hesitation when speaking of Iranian or Taliban ...
This is What a Police State Looks Like
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
11/28/11 • -1 min
This is what a police state looks like.
I am mad as hell. The images of police brutalizing peaceful demonstrators with batons, concussion grenades, teargas, and pepper spray has engendered an all-consuming rage within me. I detest bullies. I detest brutality. I detest the complacency that most Americans seem to feel when someone with whom they disagree with politically is deprived of their constitutional rights. For many, it goes beyond complacency – many actually approve of the brutalization and censorship of those of a different political persuasion. They seem to forget, or perhaps never knew, what America is supposed to stand for.
But more than anything, I detest hypocrisy. I see tent cities on street corners for the consumer High Mass that is Black Friday tacitly supported by local authorities while the tents, books, and medical supplies of those who believe that the guilty who crashed the world economy should pay for their crimes, are torn up and thrown into dumpsters. I hear no soaring outrage from our president’s bully pulpit when an Iraq veteran is grievously wounded by highly-militarized police run amok. Or when a grandmother in her 80’s is basically tortured with pepper spray. Or when vindictive, abusive police wantonly assault peaceful women who are penned like cattle while trying to express their rights.
Mr. Obama was quick to arrange a photo-op beer drinking session for a professor and a cop who had an altercation, but has done nothing about rogue cop Anthony Bologna, who indiscriminately pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors, nor about the Egyptian police style assault of protesters in Oakland, nor the similar assault in New York, which took place under cover of darkness with a total air and ground blockade of the media, a shockingly grievous violation of the Constitution.
While the press, our legislators, and our president laud those who occupy places like Tahrir Square, they mostly turn a blind eye, or level an accusatory one, at those who use similar tactics to promote justice and challenge a corrupt system here at home. The president is MIA and the Republicans call the unarmed Occupy Wall Street crowd thugs and rapists while praising the armed to the teeth Tea Partiers, who have been known to spit on congressmen and carry not-so-subtle signs calling for bloodletting and revolution.
Well, I support the Tea party’s right to demonstrate. I support the right of those odious ‘God hates Fags’ miscreants to demonstrate. I support your right to express yourself, and your right to free assembly, even if I hate your message.
You may point out that the occupiers are doing one thing different from all of these other domestic groups: they are occupying public and semi-public spaces. It’s true. So are homeless people, and those Black Friday zealots. And I think it’s also true that this wouldn’t be happening all over the US had the Arab Spring not happened, and had the media not praised occupiers and demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Syria and elsewhere. Occupy is a global flowering of the same consciousness, the same rebellion against a system of neo-serfdom that is built to insure the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.
In some countries, the iron hand is more overt – you have no right to speak, you are jailed and beaten for the most minor dissent, far from the freedom of speech we enjoy here in America. But, the difference is increasingly one of style, not substance, for here in America, we have an even wider income disparity than in China. Our elites (and I’m not talking Susan Sarandon here, but folks like the Koch brothers) already own us – they have sold us a hollow American Dream that has pacified and splintered us, and so do not have to resort to the iron hand that is ubiquitous in places like Egypt, Syria and China.
But when a movement that challenges the relationship of serfs to lords in any meaningful way arises here, believe me, it will be crushed just as heavily, if need be, as anything you’ve seen in Tienamin or Tahrir Squares. If we, the people, ever truly challenge the status quo, we will be assaulted, beaten, tortured, killed. It’s already happening! You see the groundwork laid for it now: the virtual silence of our ostensibly liberal president and his Justice Department, the gradual numbing to brutality amongst the general populace as police violence is slowly ratcheted up in concert with a campaign of disparagement and dehumanization of the occupiers, who’ve even been called traitors, why I cannot fathom, except that those in power will tell any lie, make any threat, and break any person who threatens them. And they will also divide and conquer, artfully setting the tea partiers and the occupiers, who have much more in common than either camp appears to realize, against one another.
The future is here, America, and freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose...
Po...
I am mad as hell. The images of police brutalizing peaceful demonstrators with batons, concussion grenades, teargas, and pepper spray has engendered an all-consuming rage within me. I detest bullies. I detest brutality. I detest the complacency that most Americans seem to feel when someone with whom they disagree with politically is deprived of their constitutional rights. For many, it goes beyond complacency – many actually approve of the brutalization and censorship of those of a different political persuasion. They seem to forget, or perhaps never knew, what America is supposed to stand for.
But more than anything, I detest hypocrisy. I see tent cities on street corners for the consumer High Mass that is Black Friday tacitly supported by local authorities while the tents, books, and medical supplies of those who believe that the guilty who crashed the world economy should pay for their crimes, are torn up and thrown into dumpsters. I hear no soaring outrage from our president’s bully pulpit when an Iraq veteran is grievously wounded by highly-militarized police run amok. Or when a grandmother in her 80’s is basically tortured with pepper spray. Or when vindictive, abusive police wantonly assault peaceful women who are penned like cattle while trying to express their rights.
Mr. Obama was quick to arrange a photo-op beer drinking session for a professor and a cop who had an altercation, but has done nothing about rogue cop Anthony Bologna, who indiscriminately pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors, nor about the Egyptian police style assault of protesters in Oakland, nor the similar assault in New York, which took place under cover of darkness with a total air and ground blockade of the media, a shockingly grievous violation of the Constitution.
While the press, our legislators, and our president laud those who occupy places like Tahrir Square, they mostly turn a blind eye, or level an accusatory one, at those who use similar tactics to promote justice and challenge a corrupt system here at home. The president is MIA and the Republicans call the unarmed Occupy Wall Street crowd thugs and rapists while praising the armed to the teeth Tea Partiers, who have been known to spit on congressmen and carry not-so-subtle signs calling for bloodletting and revolution.
Well, I support the Tea party’s right to demonstrate. I support the right of those odious ‘God hates Fags’ miscreants to demonstrate. I support your right to express yourself, and your right to free assembly, even if I hate your message.
You may point out that the occupiers are doing one thing different from all of these other domestic groups: they are occupying public and semi-public spaces. It’s true. So are homeless people, and those Black Friday zealots. And I think it’s also true that this wouldn’t be happening all over the US had the Arab Spring not happened, and had the media not praised occupiers and demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Syria and elsewhere. Occupy is a global flowering of the same consciousness, the same rebellion against a system of neo-serfdom that is built to insure the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.
In some countries, the iron hand is more overt – you have no right to speak, you are jailed and beaten for the most minor dissent, far from the freedom of speech we enjoy here in America. But, the difference is increasingly one of style, not substance, for here in America, we have an even wider income disparity than in China. Our elites (and I’m not talking Susan Sarandon here, but folks like the Koch brothers) already own us – they have sold us a hollow American Dream that has pacified and splintered us, and so do not have to resort to the iron hand that is ubiquitous in places like Egypt, Syria and China.
But when a movement that challenges the relationship of serfs to lords in any meaningful way arises here, believe me, it will be crushed just as heavily, if need be, as anything you’ve seen in Tienamin or Tahrir Squares. If we, the people, ever truly challenge the status quo, we will be assaulted, beaten, tortured, killed. It’s already happening! You see the groundwork laid for it now: the virtual silence of our ostensibly liberal president and his Justice Department, the gradual numbing to brutality amongst the general populace as police violence is slowly ratcheted up in concert with a campaign of disparagement and dehumanization of the occupiers, who’ve even been called traitors, why I cannot fathom, except that those in power will tell any lie, make any threat, and break any person who threatens them. And they will also divide and conquer, artfully setting the tea partiers and the occupiers, who have much more in common than either camp appears to realize, against one another.
The future is here, America, and freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose...
Po...
Our Embedded Media
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
10/24/09 • -1 min
Recently there was an article on natural gas extraction in the NY Times. It was basically a cheerleading essay on how the wonderful new technology of ‘fracking’ was going to exponentially increase the world’s natural gas supply. There was not one single word in the entire article about this technology’s serious environmental repercussions – from its use of large quantities of highly toxic chemicals, to the truly incredible quantities of water it requires.
This led me to think more and more about how our media have changed in my lifetime.
When I was a kid, the horrors of Vietnam were in our living rooms, and our magazines. As a young child, I was traumatized to see pictures of napalmed children in a copy of Newsweek while waiting in a pediatrician’s office. Until that moment, I’d been an innocent 5 year old, never dreaming that people could do that to other people, let alone that my country could be the perpetrator of such unalloyed horrors.
But as traumatic as that experience was, it’s far preferable to the embedded media we have now, which show us gee-whiz video game footage of smart bombs, but barely any pictures of the carnage, the reality of war. People the world over have been flooded with images of the true human cost to innocent civilians of our shock and awe campaign in Iraq and our incessant airstrikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But here in the US, we barely see a trickle of it in the mainstream media. And because of our media bubble, we fail to understand the world’s outrage.
The horrifying truth of the Vietnam War, brought into our living rooms each night, helped end that war. It’s very hard for people, when exposed to the truth of burned babies to feel enthusiastic about war, which is why the corporations behind our new and improved, highly consolidated media, try to shield us from such truths. Of course, the fact that these very same corporations make the weapons systems might have something to do with it as well.
When I was a kid, the NY Times and Washington post braved real threats of federal prosecution when they published the Pentagon Papers, which detailed, among many other things, how we were railroaded into the Vietnam War through a series of bold-faced lies.
Contrast that to the year 2000, when our disputed election was decided by the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore. I had no idea at the time that Justice Scalia had been friends with Dick Cheney for almost 20 years. Two of Scalia’s sons worked for law firms involved with the case, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked for the Heritage Foundation, which was sure to profit greatly from Bush’s election. Yet not only did both of the justices fail to recuse themselves, but the media were largely silent. In fact, it was nearly five years later before I read a major story on the close friendship of Cheney and Scalia, and I was thunderstruck that we’d all been kept uninformed and ignorant of this incredibly salient fact by our major news outlets.
Where were the front-page headlines of every major newspaper demanding recusal while the world awaited a decision? Why wasn’t Scalia’s obvious and profound conflict of interest trumpeted on the morning talk shows, the evening round-ups, the Sunday TV news-fests?
From the courageous reportage on Vietnam, which permeated television, radio and print media, we’ve transitioned in a few scant decades to silence over Scalia’s friendship with Cheney, silence over the theft of Ohio in the 2004 election, and the soft-peddling of our torture policies, which continues today – witness NPR’s continued use of the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Our media have grown more craven, more complicit, more Orwellian than I could ever have imagined in 1974, or1984 for that matter.
Justice Hugo Black said: "Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell." – Yet our press now seems intent on beating the drum for war. I can still remember NPR anchor Bob Edwards stating ‘we know there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’ right after Colin Powell’s laughably tortured and specious presentation to the UN.
In fact, our press even seems to have gone so far as to have colluded in a legal coup de tat underwritten by right wing think tanks and executed by members of our chief judiciary body.
Do we have a free press in this country? Yes and no. Sure, there are programs like Alternative Radio and Democracy Now, and periodicals like Mother Jones and The Nation. There are myriad sites of all political persuasions on the web. There is no hard hand of censorship evident most of the time – except, perhaps, when a newspaper wants to publish photographs of the returning coffins of our honored war dead.
But the average American looks to the mainstream media for their information, and the mainstream media is no...
This led me to think more and more about how our media have changed in my lifetime.
When I was a kid, the horrors of Vietnam were in our living rooms, and our magazines. As a young child, I was traumatized to see pictures of napalmed children in a copy of Newsweek while waiting in a pediatrician’s office. Until that moment, I’d been an innocent 5 year old, never dreaming that people could do that to other people, let alone that my country could be the perpetrator of such unalloyed horrors.
But as traumatic as that experience was, it’s far preferable to the embedded media we have now, which show us gee-whiz video game footage of smart bombs, but barely any pictures of the carnage, the reality of war. People the world over have been flooded with images of the true human cost to innocent civilians of our shock and awe campaign in Iraq and our incessant airstrikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But here in the US, we barely see a trickle of it in the mainstream media. And because of our media bubble, we fail to understand the world’s outrage.
The horrifying truth of the Vietnam War, brought into our living rooms each night, helped end that war. It’s very hard for people, when exposed to the truth of burned babies to feel enthusiastic about war, which is why the corporations behind our new and improved, highly consolidated media, try to shield us from such truths. Of course, the fact that these very same corporations make the weapons systems might have something to do with it as well.
When I was a kid, the NY Times and Washington post braved real threats of federal prosecution when they published the Pentagon Papers, which detailed, among many other things, how we were railroaded into the Vietnam War through a series of bold-faced lies.
Contrast that to the year 2000, when our disputed election was decided by the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore. I had no idea at the time that Justice Scalia had been friends with Dick Cheney for almost 20 years. Two of Scalia’s sons worked for law firms involved with the case, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked for the Heritage Foundation, which was sure to profit greatly from Bush’s election. Yet not only did both of the justices fail to recuse themselves, but the media were largely silent. In fact, it was nearly five years later before I read a major story on the close friendship of Cheney and Scalia, and I was thunderstruck that we’d all been kept uninformed and ignorant of this incredibly salient fact by our major news outlets.
Where were the front-page headlines of every major newspaper demanding recusal while the world awaited a decision? Why wasn’t Scalia’s obvious and profound conflict of interest trumpeted on the morning talk shows, the evening round-ups, the Sunday TV news-fests?
From the courageous reportage on Vietnam, which permeated television, radio and print media, we’ve transitioned in a few scant decades to silence over Scalia’s friendship with Cheney, silence over the theft of Ohio in the 2004 election, and the soft-peddling of our torture policies, which continues today – witness NPR’s continued use of the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Our media have grown more craven, more complicit, more Orwellian than I could ever have imagined in 1974, or1984 for that matter.
Justice Hugo Black said: "Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell." – Yet our press now seems intent on beating the drum for war. I can still remember NPR anchor Bob Edwards stating ‘we know there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’ right after Colin Powell’s laughably tortured and specious presentation to the UN.
In fact, our press even seems to have gone so far as to have colluded in a legal coup de tat underwritten by right wing think tanks and executed by members of our chief judiciary body.
Do we have a free press in this country? Yes and no. Sure, there are programs like Alternative Radio and Democracy Now, and periodicals like Mother Jones and The Nation. There are myriad sites of all political persuasions on the web. There is no hard hand of censorship evident most of the time – except, perhaps, when a newspaper wants to publish photographs of the returning coffins of our honored war dead.
But the average American looks to the mainstream media for their information, and the mainstream media is no...
Chimps and Bonobos
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
10/20/09 • -1 min
Humankind’s two closest genetic relatives are the Chimpanzee and the so-called ‘pygmy chimp’, the Bonobo. We share some 97% of our genetic makeup with both of them.
This is a vast oversimplification, but in general, Chimpanzee society tends to be male-dominated and violent. Chimps engage in brutal fights, gang rape, genocide, even cannibalism. Their society is highly stratified, with dominant males at the top and lesser males at the bottom. Although females also have dominant and lesser representatives, in general their health and safety, and that of their offspring, is still largely a matter of male whim.
The Bonobo are quite different. Although there are fights in Bonobo society, they tend to be brief and non-lethal. There appears to be no rape, no cannibalism, no wiping out of other troops of Bonobo. All in all, the Bonobo society is, for lack of a better word, more humane
In Chimp society, sex occurs only when females are in heat. In the matriarchal Bonobo society, sex occurs all the time, for procreation, for enjoyment, and sometimes merely as a form of social stress relief. It’s kind of like the Greek play Lysistrata, wherein the women refuse the men any sex until the men give up war. The Bonobo have largely given up conflict, replacing it with ready access to sex.
What do our two closest relatives have to tell us about human society?
In his landmark work, the Mass Psychology of Fascism, Willhelm Reich posited that the veneration of war and conflict coupled with sexual repression leads to a more violent and easily manipulated, fascistic society.
On its surface, American society is heavily sexualized, not repressed at all. But Reich didn’t mean the repression of all sexual symbols, but rather the displacement of healthy representations of sexuality with unhealthy symbols that debased and dehumanized, coupled with increasing representations of violence.
In light of that distinction, it’s easy to see how American society is sexually repressed when it comes to positive images of sexuality and the human body, while overflowing with negative ones and simply awash in violent imagery. To paraphrase Larry Flynt, in America it’s illegal to commit murder, but not to broadcast movies of it, and legal to make love, but illegal to broadcast movies of lovemaking.
Once, while watching the movie ‘Dead Calm’ on broadcast TV, I saw a naked rear end pixilated on my screen, I suppose to protect me from some terrible prurient urge. This was followed not 5 minutes later by the graphic, unpixelated footage of a man’s head being blown off. What kind of a society finds a naked ass more dangerous than an act of bloody violence?
Obviously, in the human mind, sex and violence seem to be linked in all sorts of complex ways. Look at how the torture at places like Abu Ghraib often devolved into sexual humiliation. The themes of procreation, survival, and death underlie all human activity, and imbue everything with their nascent power, which can be positive or corrosive. It can build a culture up, or debase it. And one man’s view of socio-sexual health can be another’s symptom of metasticized perversion.
For example: when Jonbenet Ramsey was slain, I became aware for the first time of childhood beauty pageants. I was profoundly shocked that these little girls were so sexualized and monetized. The pictures of six year old Jonbenet tarted up like a Vegas showgirl, complete with feathers and heavy makeup, seemed to bespeak some horrific underground subculture of kiddy porn purveyors.
Yet who were the perpetrators of this little girl’s debasement and objectification? Her very own quite conservative, mainstream, Republican, Christian parents, who doubtless saw nothing perverted at all in their actions. In fact, the same segment of society engages in so-called father-daughter purity balls, which ostensibly are about being chaste, but carry many disturbing psycho-sexual undertones, including ones that imply that women are chattel, their bodies and sexuality first owned by their fathers, and then their husbands.
Our culture is so out of whack that a nude adult body part is deemed threatening and perverse while the obvious sexualization of a child, albeit in symbolic terms only, is seen by many as wholesome.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy Chimp world that is America.
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This is a vast oversimplification, but in general, Chimpanzee society tends to be male-dominated and violent. Chimps engage in brutal fights, gang rape, genocide, even cannibalism. Their society is highly stratified, with dominant males at the top and lesser males at the bottom. Although females also have dominant and lesser representatives, in general their health and safety, and that of their offspring, is still largely a matter of male whim.
The Bonobo are quite different. Although there are fights in Bonobo society, they tend to be brief and non-lethal. There appears to be no rape, no cannibalism, no wiping out of other troops of Bonobo. All in all, the Bonobo society is, for lack of a better word, more humane
In Chimp society, sex occurs only when females are in heat. In the matriarchal Bonobo society, sex occurs all the time, for procreation, for enjoyment, and sometimes merely as a form of social stress relief. It’s kind of like the Greek play Lysistrata, wherein the women refuse the men any sex until the men give up war. The Bonobo have largely given up conflict, replacing it with ready access to sex.
What do our two closest relatives have to tell us about human society?
In his landmark work, the Mass Psychology of Fascism, Willhelm Reich posited that the veneration of war and conflict coupled with sexual repression leads to a more violent and easily manipulated, fascistic society.
On its surface, American society is heavily sexualized, not repressed at all. But Reich didn’t mean the repression of all sexual symbols, but rather the displacement of healthy representations of sexuality with unhealthy symbols that debased and dehumanized, coupled with increasing representations of violence.
In light of that distinction, it’s easy to see how American society is sexually repressed when it comes to positive images of sexuality and the human body, while overflowing with negative ones and simply awash in violent imagery. To paraphrase Larry Flynt, in America it’s illegal to commit murder, but not to broadcast movies of it, and legal to make love, but illegal to broadcast movies of lovemaking.
Once, while watching the movie ‘Dead Calm’ on broadcast TV, I saw a naked rear end pixilated on my screen, I suppose to protect me from some terrible prurient urge. This was followed not 5 minutes later by the graphic, unpixelated footage of a man’s head being blown off. What kind of a society finds a naked ass more dangerous than an act of bloody violence?
Obviously, in the human mind, sex and violence seem to be linked in all sorts of complex ways. Look at how the torture at places like Abu Ghraib often devolved into sexual humiliation. The themes of procreation, survival, and death underlie all human activity, and imbue everything with their nascent power, which can be positive or corrosive. It can build a culture up, or debase it. And one man’s view of socio-sexual health can be another’s symptom of metasticized perversion.
For example: when Jonbenet Ramsey was slain, I became aware for the first time of childhood beauty pageants. I was profoundly shocked that these little girls were so sexualized and monetized. The pictures of six year old Jonbenet tarted up like a Vegas showgirl, complete with feathers and heavy makeup, seemed to bespeak some horrific underground subculture of kiddy porn purveyors.
Yet who were the perpetrators of this little girl’s debasement and objectification? Her very own quite conservative, mainstream, Republican, Christian parents, who doubtless saw nothing perverted at all in their actions. In fact, the same segment of society engages in so-called father-daughter purity balls, which ostensibly are about being chaste, but carry many disturbing psycho-sexual undertones, including ones that imply that women are chattel, their bodies and sexuality first owned by their fathers, and then their husbands.
Our culture is so out of whack that a nude adult body part is deemed threatening and perverse while the obvious sexualization of a child, albeit in symbolic terms only, is seen by many as wholesome.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy Chimp world that is America.
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The Welfare State
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
12/05/09 • -1 min
I have a friend. She’s been a self-employed craftsperson involved in home construction and renovation for 25 years down in South Carolina. For all those years she’s paid her taxes and social security, her own health insurance, and reared a son largely as a single mother.
Recently, her business has all but disappeared due to the recession and the housing crisis. She was having trouble paying the mortgage, so she decided to seek help.
She’d had her first workshop in a rundown part of town, and had seen innumerable welfare families provided with not only housing, but TVs and furniture paid for by the state from the local rent-a-center. Given her neighbors experience, Welfare seemed like an obvious candidate. So, she went down to the office to see what help there was, what the system she’d paid into so loyally all these years as a hard working entrepreneur could give back to her in her time of need.
After her meeting, she called me, incredulous. Yes, they offered to help. They would give her 554.00 a month, garnish her monthly 500.00 in child support, and put a lien on her house. Wow – she could sign over control of her house for a net gain of 54.00 a month! She just couldn’t understand it – what about all of those families that had cars, TVs, apartments, food, medical care, and never, ever worked?
This is the great failure of liberalism. The remnant of LBJ’s Great Society is a social support system that rewards sloth and dysfunction, but has nothing substantial to offer someone of means who has hit a rough patch.
If you own nothing in this country and you’re adept at gaming the system - especially through warehousing foster children – you can live well. Perhaps not luxuriantly, but you can have food, shelter, medical care, and even entertainment. But if you have a job, and own a house, a car, and things get rough, that same network of social services is indifferent to your plight at best, hostile at worst..
There is something wrong with a system that completely neglects the working and middle classes in favor of the welfare class. In fact, there’s something wrong with the entire idea of welfare, except for those who are profoundly disabled. I’ve come to believe that Liberalism jumped the shark with welfare. A state that protects people from dire misfortune and shelters the helpless is to be lauded. But one that coddles the lazy and dishonest, in fact creates entire generations of people for whom hard work and responsibility are alien concepts, is bound to rot from within.
Instead of welfare, America should have committed itself, should now commit itself, to full employment for all who want to work. The recent ‘workfare’ programs were an attempt to reverse this dysfunction, but they are deeply flawed, as they’ve often forced people into little more than indentured servitude – dangerous and humiliating work at less than the minimum wage. People need and deserve a living wage, and their dignity.
There must be better solutions out there. Our government subsidizes crops, the oil and gas industry, the elderly and infirm, and yes, the lazy. Could they subsidize a permanent worker training and employment program instead of the latter? Massive 1930’s style public works projects that trained and then employed millions? I don’t know. I only know that the system as it stands is broken - that if you give generations of people something for nothing, you breed dependence, not freedom.
And we also need to help the struggling working class! They’re drowning and no-one’s throwing them a life preserver. My friend doesn’t have any big credit card debts. Her mortgage is modest and at a very low interest rate. Her distress is not due to rampant personal greed or living beyond her means, as Limbaugh and his ilk would have it.
Rather, she’s a victim of the business cycle, the booms and busts that have accompanied capitalism since perhaps the first barter of labor for grain was made in ancient Sumer.
The question is, do we want a society that buffers hardworking members from these implosions, provides a port in the storm for its workers, or one that leaves them to drown while its right flank protects the fatcats and its left, the layabouts?
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Recently, her business has all but disappeared due to the recession and the housing crisis. She was having trouble paying the mortgage, so she decided to seek help.
She’d had her first workshop in a rundown part of town, and had seen innumerable welfare families provided with not only housing, but TVs and furniture paid for by the state from the local rent-a-center. Given her neighbors experience, Welfare seemed like an obvious candidate. So, she went down to the office to see what help there was, what the system she’d paid into so loyally all these years as a hard working entrepreneur could give back to her in her time of need.
After her meeting, she called me, incredulous. Yes, they offered to help. They would give her 554.00 a month, garnish her monthly 500.00 in child support, and put a lien on her house. Wow – she could sign over control of her house for a net gain of 54.00 a month! She just couldn’t understand it – what about all of those families that had cars, TVs, apartments, food, medical care, and never, ever worked?
This is the great failure of liberalism. The remnant of LBJ’s Great Society is a social support system that rewards sloth and dysfunction, but has nothing substantial to offer someone of means who has hit a rough patch.
If you own nothing in this country and you’re adept at gaming the system - especially through warehousing foster children – you can live well. Perhaps not luxuriantly, but you can have food, shelter, medical care, and even entertainment. But if you have a job, and own a house, a car, and things get rough, that same network of social services is indifferent to your plight at best, hostile at worst..
There is something wrong with a system that completely neglects the working and middle classes in favor of the welfare class. In fact, there’s something wrong with the entire idea of welfare, except for those who are profoundly disabled. I’ve come to believe that Liberalism jumped the shark with welfare. A state that protects people from dire misfortune and shelters the helpless is to be lauded. But one that coddles the lazy and dishonest, in fact creates entire generations of people for whom hard work and responsibility are alien concepts, is bound to rot from within.
Instead of welfare, America should have committed itself, should now commit itself, to full employment for all who want to work. The recent ‘workfare’ programs were an attempt to reverse this dysfunction, but they are deeply flawed, as they’ve often forced people into little more than indentured servitude – dangerous and humiliating work at less than the minimum wage. People need and deserve a living wage, and their dignity.
There must be better solutions out there. Our government subsidizes crops, the oil and gas industry, the elderly and infirm, and yes, the lazy. Could they subsidize a permanent worker training and employment program instead of the latter? Massive 1930’s style public works projects that trained and then employed millions? I don’t know. I only know that the system as it stands is broken - that if you give generations of people something for nothing, you breed dependence, not freedom.
And we also need to help the struggling working class! They’re drowning and no-one’s throwing them a life preserver. My friend doesn’t have any big credit card debts. Her mortgage is modest and at a very low interest rate. Her distress is not due to rampant personal greed or living beyond her means, as Limbaugh and his ilk would have it.
Rather, she’s a victim of the business cycle, the booms and busts that have accompanied capitalism since perhaps the first barter of labor for grain was made in ancient Sumer.
The question is, do we want a society that buffers hardworking members from these implosions, provides a port in the storm for its workers, or one that leaves them to drown while its right flank protects the fatcats and its left, the layabouts?
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9-11, ten Years On
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
11/28/11 • -1 min
The tenth anniversary of 9-11 passed, and again I mourned. I mourned the thousands killed in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington that day, but I mourned for much, much more.
I mourned the thousands of American and allied troops who’ve paid with their lives, fighting not to make America more safe, certainly not more free, but to secure Western hegemony.
I mourned the hundreds of thousands innocent men, women and children who’ve been left homeless and destitute, been tortured, terrified, traumatized, bombed, shot and killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq since 9-11.
Rational people recoil in horror when shopkeepers on the West Bank hand out sweets after terrorist bombings. And the joy in the camps of Al Queda after every successful bloodletting is equally abhorrent. Yet there were all night kegger parties when Osama Bin Laden was killed. A loud, vile, xenophobic, and implicitly racist joy was voiced by many Americans, and the final irony came to pass: We were acting just like our enemies; an apparently unarmed man was shot dead in his home without benefit of trial or council, and Americans reacted with unmitigated joy, pumping fists and bellowing ‘USA, #1!’ in that fascistic chant that always gives me the creeps.
As a country, we are less tolerant than ever before in my lifetime. Hate crimes against Muslims now comprise 10% of the total every year, yet Muslims account for only a little over 1% of the population.
We are more paranoid, more frightened, more willing to give up the freedom and tolerance that made this country special than we are willing to face down our fears, and our culpability and find a way out of endless war.
All of the things I hated about America, its provincial xenophobia, it’s propensity to shoot first and ask questions later, its role as world policeman (AKA world bully) have been exacerbated by 9-11. Bin Laden and company have remade us in their image. We have lost something irretrievable, something graceful, if we ever had it – a level of tolerance, a love of liberty, a reverence for privacy and individual rights and expression, and courage. Driven towards each other by terror, an American mob-rule group think has arisen. It considers Christians, especially perhaps white Christians, the ‘true’ Americans, and all others as second-rate citizens. It promotes the idea that the projection of unbridled American military might is a natural right of this country, no matter what immoral mayhem it causes to innocents.
Most simplistically and dangerously, this mindset presupposes that we are the victims. There is simply no room for the idea that maybe 9-11 was even partially fomented by our country’s meddling foreign policy, that it was blowback, and that, although it was unjustified, it was inspired directly by the bombings and destruction wrought by us and by our proxies, using our weapons. ‘They hate us for our values’ George Bush and many others proclaimed. No. They hate us because we give the Israelis and various dictators white phosphorus and cluster bombs, F-16 fighters and A-10 warplanes, Abrams tanks and cruise missiles. They hate us because we maintain military bases in their most holy places. They hate us because we have supported one corrupt brutal regime after another in the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa.
The people who died in the air and on the ground on 9-11 were victims, but we as a country are not. We were attacked due to decades of provocation on our part. Bin Laden himself said he was inspired to make the towers fall by watching Israelis bomb apartment buildings with jets and bombs made in America and essentially given to Israel carte blanche. We were attacked because our policies enslave people, because our proxies bomb and torture people, because we are the largest weapons dealer on earth, because we refuse to sign an international land mine treaty, because we pollute more, take more, demand more, than any other country on earth; Because we are an Empire. And like every other empire before us, we are starting to rot within while we are whittled away from without. Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to vastly accelerate this process; He read the braggadocio insecurity of George Bush perfectly and our Mad Cowboy president followed his script to the letter, transmuting the sympathy of the world into disgust and distrust in record time, and that too, was foreseen and even written about by Bin Laden. All he had to do was wave the red flag, and we proceeded headlong to our own goring.
America self-immolated, her freedoms and values burnt for a sense of false security and for vengeance. I mourn this loss most of all.
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I mourned the thousands of American and allied troops who’ve paid with their lives, fighting not to make America more safe, certainly not more free, but to secure Western hegemony.
I mourned the hundreds of thousands innocent men, women and children who’ve been left homeless and destitute, been tortured, terrified, traumatized, bombed, shot and killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq since 9-11.
Rational people recoil in horror when shopkeepers on the West Bank hand out sweets after terrorist bombings. And the joy in the camps of Al Queda after every successful bloodletting is equally abhorrent. Yet there were all night kegger parties when Osama Bin Laden was killed. A loud, vile, xenophobic, and implicitly racist joy was voiced by many Americans, and the final irony came to pass: We were acting just like our enemies; an apparently unarmed man was shot dead in his home without benefit of trial or council, and Americans reacted with unmitigated joy, pumping fists and bellowing ‘USA, #1!’ in that fascistic chant that always gives me the creeps.
As a country, we are less tolerant than ever before in my lifetime. Hate crimes against Muslims now comprise 10% of the total every year, yet Muslims account for only a little over 1% of the population.
We are more paranoid, more frightened, more willing to give up the freedom and tolerance that made this country special than we are willing to face down our fears, and our culpability and find a way out of endless war.
All of the things I hated about America, its provincial xenophobia, it’s propensity to shoot first and ask questions later, its role as world policeman (AKA world bully) have been exacerbated by 9-11. Bin Laden and company have remade us in their image. We have lost something irretrievable, something graceful, if we ever had it – a level of tolerance, a love of liberty, a reverence for privacy and individual rights and expression, and courage. Driven towards each other by terror, an American mob-rule group think has arisen. It considers Christians, especially perhaps white Christians, the ‘true’ Americans, and all others as second-rate citizens. It promotes the idea that the projection of unbridled American military might is a natural right of this country, no matter what immoral mayhem it causes to innocents.
Most simplistically and dangerously, this mindset presupposes that we are the victims. There is simply no room for the idea that maybe 9-11 was even partially fomented by our country’s meddling foreign policy, that it was blowback, and that, although it was unjustified, it was inspired directly by the bombings and destruction wrought by us and by our proxies, using our weapons. ‘They hate us for our values’ George Bush and many others proclaimed. No. They hate us because we give the Israelis and various dictators white phosphorus and cluster bombs, F-16 fighters and A-10 warplanes, Abrams tanks and cruise missiles. They hate us because we maintain military bases in their most holy places. They hate us because we have supported one corrupt brutal regime after another in the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa.
The people who died in the air and on the ground on 9-11 were victims, but we as a country are not. We were attacked due to decades of provocation on our part. Bin Laden himself said he was inspired to make the towers fall by watching Israelis bomb apartment buildings with jets and bombs made in America and essentially given to Israel carte blanche. We were attacked because our policies enslave people, because our proxies bomb and torture people, because we are the largest weapons dealer on earth, because we refuse to sign an international land mine treaty, because we pollute more, take more, demand more, than any other country on earth; Because we are an Empire. And like every other empire before us, we are starting to rot within while we are whittled away from without. Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to vastly accelerate this process; He read the braggadocio insecurity of George Bush perfectly and our Mad Cowboy president followed his script to the letter, transmuting the sympathy of the world into disgust and distrust in record time, and that too, was foreseen and even written about by Bin Laden. All he had to do was wave the red flag, and we proceeded headlong to our own goring.
America self-immolated, her freedoms and values burnt for a sense of false security and for vengeance. I mourn this loss most of all.
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Imagine
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
12/24/10 • -1 min
Writing commentaries has turned me into a sort of semi-professional curmudgeon. It's pretty easy too, since the world does indeed appear to be going to hell in a handbasket. Nonetheless, it's getting to be a drag. So, I'm going to try something new today. I'm going to try imagining a better future for America, and, by extension, the world.
True, in imagining what could be, I will once more be underscoring how far we are from such lovely dreams. Envisioning a better future can't help but evoke a certain amount of dismay about the present. But I'm going to try anyway, because you cannot get a better future without dreaming of it. The dream, the visualization, is what engenders change. We've seen this over and over again, from Gandhi to Mandela.
So:
Imagine if the two billion dollars a week America is spending on the war in Afghanistan were being spent to build hospitals here at home. Or schools. Or high speed rail, light rail, bridges, tunnels.
Imagine if 10 percent of what America spends on the military was spent on the arts, and another 10 percent on the sciences - what kind of cultural renaissance would we be experiencing right now?
Imagine if no one went to sleep hungry in America, or the world. We have enough wealth on this planet right now to give everyone clean food and water.
Imagine if there were hundreds of thousands of newly employed workers installing federally subsidized solar panels, wind turbines, insulation, and efficient heating and lighting in your house and mine.
Imagine if all American military bases outside the US were shut down; How much fuel we'd be saving; How much money.
Imagine if America categorically refused to provide any material aid whatsoever to any brutal regime, regardless of ideology.
Imagine if children were taught empathy, comparative religion and literature, critical thinking and non-violent conflict resolution, and real science not creationist claptrap, the world over. No more madrassas of mindless rote memorization, no more ideologically-driven curricula - whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu, or Jewish. No one ever to be taught again that their way of life, their skin color, their tribe, country, ethnic group or religion was superior to any other.
Imagine if nothing was ever allowed to become 'too big to fail', again, and every single Wall Street gambler and corporate banking hotshot paid their fair share of their losses.
Imagine if corporate CEOs still made on average only 10 times what their workers made in salary. Compared to today's lopsided ratios, that would almost feel egalitarian.
Imagine if people thought that paying taxes was patriotic because instead of funding endless wars that bloated the coffers of mega-corporations and politicians, our tax dollars were spent on the best educational and health systems in the world, and on an Apollo-style full-bore attack on the intertwined challenges of energy independence and carbon neutrality.
Imagine if carping bullies like Rush Limbaugh, histrionic febrile charlatans like Glenn Beck, sub-intelligent corporate mouthpieces like Sean Hannity and vituperative racist homophobes like Anne Coulter were laughed at whenever they spouted their slanders, absurdities and lies.
Imagine if we could all be part of a civil dialogue, one big reality-based conversation among grown ups, with the congenital liars, bullies, and misanthropes all dropped by the wayside, dead ends on our evolutionary tree.
Imagine if all racism - black, white, yellow and brown, had withered away and you and I were always judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
Imagine if America had some of the lowest teen pregnancy and infant mortality rates in the developed world, and some of the highest literacy rates, instead of the other way around.
Imagine if sexuality was seen as a gift from god, instead of something dirty and shameful.
Imagine if there were no welfare, because if you were fit to work, society had a job waiting for you, and if you were disabled, your needs were taken care of so you could live comfortably and with dignity.
Imagine if America didn't incarcerate almost 25% of all of the prisoners on earth.
Imagine that instead of one woman in four on our planet being subjected to sexual or domestic violence, that number was none in 4 billion.
Imagine if parents never struck their children, but met their needs and tolerated their inevitable misdeeds with patient, unconditional love.
Imagine if it was OK that you believed in one god and I in another, or none at all, that I were straight and you gay.
Just Imagine!
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All Content Worldwide Copyright - Samuel McKenney Claiborne
True, in imagining what could be, I will once more be underscoring how far we are from such lovely dreams. Envisioning a better future can't help but evoke a certain amount of dismay about the present. But I'm going to try anyway, because you cannot get a better future without dreaming of it. The dream, the visualization, is what engenders change. We've seen this over and over again, from Gandhi to Mandela.
So:
Imagine if the two billion dollars a week America is spending on the war in Afghanistan were being spent to build hospitals here at home. Or schools. Or high speed rail, light rail, bridges, tunnels.
Imagine if 10 percent of what America spends on the military was spent on the arts, and another 10 percent on the sciences - what kind of cultural renaissance would we be experiencing right now?
Imagine if no one went to sleep hungry in America, or the world. We have enough wealth on this planet right now to give everyone clean food and water.
Imagine if there were hundreds of thousands of newly employed workers installing federally subsidized solar panels, wind turbines, insulation, and efficient heating and lighting in your house and mine.
Imagine if all American military bases outside the US were shut down; How much fuel we'd be saving; How much money.
Imagine if America categorically refused to provide any material aid whatsoever to any brutal regime, regardless of ideology.
Imagine if children were taught empathy, comparative religion and literature, critical thinking and non-violent conflict resolution, and real science not creationist claptrap, the world over. No more madrassas of mindless rote memorization, no more ideologically-driven curricula - whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu, or Jewish. No one ever to be taught again that their way of life, their skin color, their tribe, country, ethnic group or religion was superior to any other.
Imagine if nothing was ever allowed to become 'too big to fail', again, and every single Wall Street gambler and corporate banking hotshot paid their fair share of their losses.
Imagine if corporate CEOs still made on average only 10 times what their workers made in salary. Compared to today's lopsided ratios, that would almost feel egalitarian.
Imagine if people thought that paying taxes was patriotic because instead of funding endless wars that bloated the coffers of mega-corporations and politicians, our tax dollars were spent on the best educational and health systems in the world, and on an Apollo-style full-bore attack on the intertwined challenges of energy independence and carbon neutrality.
Imagine if carping bullies like Rush Limbaugh, histrionic febrile charlatans like Glenn Beck, sub-intelligent corporate mouthpieces like Sean Hannity and vituperative racist homophobes like Anne Coulter were laughed at whenever they spouted their slanders, absurdities and lies.
Imagine if we could all be part of a civil dialogue, one big reality-based conversation among grown ups, with the congenital liars, bullies, and misanthropes all dropped by the wayside, dead ends on our evolutionary tree.
Imagine if all racism - black, white, yellow and brown, had withered away and you and I were always judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
Imagine if America had some of the lowest teen pregnancy and infant mortality rates in the developed world, and some of the highest literacy rates, instead of the other way around.
Imagine if sexuality was seen as a gift from god, instead of something dirty and shameful.
Imagine if there were no welfare, because if you were fit to work, society had a job waiting for you, and if you were disabled, your needs were taken care of so you could live comfortably and with dignity.
Imagine if America didn't incarcerate almost 25% of all of the prisoners on earth.
Imagine that instead of one woman in four on our planet being subjected to sexual or domestic violence, that number was none in 4 billion.
Imagine if parents never struck their children, but met their needs and tolerated their inevitable misdeeds with patient, unconditional love.
Imagine if it was OK that you believed in one god and I in another, or none at all, that I were straight and you gay.
Just Imagine!
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All Content Worldwide Copyright - Samuel McKenney Claiborne
Monsanto Is Satan (Part *2* of a 10,000 part series...)
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining
04/04/11 • -1 min
Apsartame, better known as Nutrasweet, or AminoSweet, and its new cousin, Neotame, a much larger, much sweeter, and potentially even more toxic update of the Aspartame molecule, are all over the place. Virtually everything you put in your mouth labeled ‘sugarless’ or ‘diet’ contains these pernicious, toxic substances.
Nutrasweet’s original manufacturer was Searle corp. They tried to get Nutrasweet declared safe for consumption, but the body of evidence against it was too strong. In the lab, it caused the following forms of cancer tumors in cellular cultures: brain, pancreatic, breast and uterine. In more recent tests, leukemia, lymphoma and kidney cancers were discovered.
If one examines the structure of the Aspartame molecule itself, it’s easy to see why it could be so deadly. The molecule mates what is essentially a precursor to wood alcohol, the type of alcohol that causes blindness and seizures, to two amino acids, so that your body readily recognizes it as a nutrient. During digestion, this deadly methanol and also formaldehyde form from these precursor chemicals.
I happen to know a researcher who worked in Cornell’s neurochemistry program when Searle came calling with their new product. They asked the chairman of the department what percentage of people would be adversely affected by ingesting their new sweetener. When he replied that he thought that 15% could suffer ‘irreversible neurological damage’, the Searle people actually smiled. 15% was a reasonable number to these people, given that the Cyclamate artificial sweeteners had just been pulled from the market, and there was pressure to do the same with saccharine. There was just too much money to be made to let the health of a few million people get in the way.
Since those early studies were not encouraging, (and in fact the FDA was set to rule against them), Searle started paying for their own studies, and to increase their chances of getting to market even more, they hired consummate Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld as CEO. The day after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the FDA (with the hasty addition of a 6th voting member) abruptly reversed course, and legalized Nutrasweet.
Nutrasweet, Neotame and the venerable Monosodium Glutamate are all classified as Excitotoxins, toxic compounds mated to amino acids in such a way that the body sees them as nutrients and absorbs them readily. It’s like some kind of diabolical Trojan Horse, ushering in the most potent poisons masquerading as nutrients.
Many people know of the MSG headache, or the fuzziness that can accompany a Nutrasweet binge, but are unaware what these warning signs really attest too. They portend potential cellular changes, neurological destruction, endocrine imbalances, and immune system chaos.
There is striking evidence that Nutrasweet can also cause or help cause Macular Degeneration, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease (it’s been shown to produce pinholes in the brains of rats), Graves Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and several other neurological and autoimmune conditions, as well as the numerous, aforementioned cancers.
Both Searle, and their later parent purchaser, Monsanto, vociferously fought any attempts to get this highly-toxic substance off the market. Their only concern is shareholder equity; Profits, growth and dividends trump any moral qualms.
If the FDA really cared about you and I, every cow would be tested for mad Cow disease, factory farms would be forced to deal with their huge waste lagoons, cruelty to animals, and antibiotic and steroid use. Nutrasweet, Neotame, and a host of other dangerous chemicals including trans fats, Olestra, and genetically-modified crops would be illegal. Instead, we have all become unwitting lab rats, with a stew of biochemical experiments and genetically modified substances combining and recombining in completely un-knowable ways in our guts, our bloodstreams, our nerves, and in our brains.
There was a hoax on the Internet that Neotame would be allowed, unlabeled, in Organic foods. I’m very relieved to know that this is not true. But beware: Monsanto, and all of the big agribusiness companies are constantly working to weaken the USDA Organic standard to the point that it’s as utterly meaningless as the word ‘natural’ has become on food labels.
Rid yourself of these toxins. Grow your own food and get involved with your local organic food growers and purveyors, and petition the federal government to maintain and enhance the integrity of the USDA organic standard, and to return the FDA to its mandate: serving and protecting the people, instead of furthering corporate interests at the people’s expense.
Nutrasweet’s original manufacturer was Searle corp. They tried to get Nutrasweet declared safe for consumption, but the body of evidence against it was too strong. In the lab, it caused the following forms of cancer tumors in cellular cultures: brain, pancreatic, breast and uterine. In more recent tests, leukemia, lymphoma and kidney cancers were discovered.
If one examines the structure of the Aspartame molecule itself, it’s easy to see why it could be so deadly. The molecule mates what is essentially a precursor to wood alcohol, the type of alcohol that causes blindness and seizures, to two amino acids, so that your body readily recognizes it as a nutrient. During digestion, this deadly methanol and also formaldehyde form from these precursor chemicals.
I happen to know a researcher who worked in Cornell’s neurochemistry program when Searle came calling with their new product. They asked the chairman of the department what percentage of people would be adversely affected by ingesting their new sweetener. When he replied that he thought that 15% could suffer ‘irreversible neurological damage’, the Searle people actually smiled. 15% was a reasonable number to these people, given that the Cyclamate artificial sweeteners had just been pulled from the market, and there was pressure to do the same with saccharine. There was just too much money to be made to let the health of a few million people get in the way.
Since those early studies were not encouraging, (and in fact the FDA was set to rule against them), Searle started paying for their own studies, and to increase their chances of getting to market even more, they hired consummate Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld as CEO. The day after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the FDA (with the hasty addition of a 6th voting member) abruptly reversed course, and legalized Nutrasweet.
Nutrasweet, Neotame and the venerable Monosodium Glutamate are all classified as Excitotoxins, toxic compounds mated to amino acids in such a way that the body sees them as nutrients and absorbs them readily. It’s like some kind of diabolical Trojan Horse, ushering in the most potent poisons masquerading as nutrients.
Many people know of the MSG headache, or the fuzziness that can accompany a Nutrasweet binge, but are unaware what these warning signs really attest too. They portend potential cellular changes, neurological destruction, endocrine imbalances, and immune system chaos.
There is striking evidence that Nutrasweet can also cause or help cause Macular Degeneration, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease (it’s been shown to produce pinholes in the brains of rats), Graves Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and several other neurological and autoimmune conditions, as well as the numerous, aforementioned cancers.
Both Searle, and their later parent purchaser, Monsanto, vociferously fought any attempts to get this highly-toxic substance off the market. Their only concern is shareholder equity; Profits, growth and dividends trump any moral qualms.
If the FDA really cared about you and I, every cow would be tested for mad Cow disease, factory farms would be forced to deal with their huge waste lagoons, cruelty to animals, and antibiotic and steroid use. Nutrasweet, Neotame, and a host of other dangerous chemicals including trans fats, Olestra, and genetically-modified crops would be illegal. Instead, we have all become unwitting lab rats, with a stew of biochemical experiments and genetically modified substances combining and recombining in completely un-knowable ways in our guts, our bloodstreams, our nerves, and in our brains.
There was a hoax on the Internet that Neotame would be allowed, unlabeled, in Organic foods. I’m very relieved to know that this is not true. But beware: Monsanto, and all of the big agribusiness companies are constantly working to weaken the USDA Organic standard to the point that it’s as utterly meaningless as the word ‘natural’ has become on food labels.
Rid yourself of these toxins. Grow your own food and get involved with your local organic food growers and purveyors, and petition the federal government to maintain and enhance the integrity of the USDA organic standard, and to return the FDA to its mandate: serving and protecting the people, instead of furthering corporate interests at the people’s expense.
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How many episodes does Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining have?
Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining currently has 24 episodes available.
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The podcast is about News, Left, Political, Environment, Budget, Obama, Podcasts, War and Politics.
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The episode title 'Band Aids for Machine Gun Wounds' is the most popular.
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Episodes of Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining are typically released every 14 days.
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The first episode of Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining was released on Jun 22, 2009.
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