michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jul 7, 2006 18:52:44 GMT 4
Swelling Numbers of Racist Extremists in U.S. MilitaryOver the last few years, we've all been stunned by accounts of flagitious treatment, torture of prisoners, and cold blooded murder of innocents carried out by US military personnel. There has always been that type of solider, that human abomination, who seems to enjoy this type of behavior; they get a sick rush from it. This type of personality has been with us throughout military history. For some, Vietnam massacres brought this to our attention for the first time. Older generations of soldiers and civilians noted this during W.W.II. I see this type of human as a fractured soul. This can happen to humans through a variety of ways but it is usually implanted during childhood through some kind of trauma, or it can be passed on through parental upbringing. The point here is that due to recruitment shortages, our Defense Department is looking the other way instead of toughening policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel. Could the Pentagon actually want this type of soldier? "American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country." The website for The Southern Poverty Law Center offers many articles about this. The one I first read is listed below......Michelle A Few Bad Menby David Holthouse SNIP: Ten years after a scandal over neo-Nazis in the armed forces, extremists are once again worming their way into a recruit-starved military. July 7, 2006 Before the U.S. military made Matt Buschbacher a Navy SEAL, he made himself a soldier of the Fourth Reich. Before Forrest Fogarty attended Military Police counter-insurgency training school, he attended Nazi skinhead festivals as lead singer for the hate rock band Attack. And before Army engineer Jon Fain joined the invasion of Iraq to fight the War on Terror, the neo-Nazi National Alliance member fantasized about fighting a war on Jews. "Ever since my youth -- when I watched WWII footage and saw how well-disciplined and sharply dressed the German forces were -- I have wanted to be a soldier," Fain said in a Winter 2004 interview with the National Alliance magazine Resistance. "Joining the American military was as close as I could get." Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way. CONTINUED: www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=66*************************************************** Newswire Release:Investigation by Southern Poverty Law Center Uncovers Swelling Numbers of Racist Extremists in U.S. Military7/7/2006 7:19:00 AM Contact: Mark Potok, 334-956-8303, Booth Gunter, 334-324-6470, both of the Southern Poverty Law Center MONTGOMERY, Ala., July 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -– Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, U.S. military officials have relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists, with the result that large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces, according to an investigative report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The report –- available at www.splcenter.org -– comes a decade after the Oklahoma City bombing and the racially motivated murder of a black couple by neo-Nazis in the 82nd Airborne Division prompted hearings by the House Armed Services Committee and a crackdown on racist extremism by the Department of Defense. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) President Richard Cohen, in a letter delivered today, urged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward racist extremism among members of the military. "Because hate group membership and extremist activity are antithetical to the values and mission of our armed forces, we urge you to adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to white supremacy in the military and to take all necessary steps to ensure that the policy is rigorously enforced," Cohen said. A military investigator is quoted in the report as saying, "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a problem." In addition: -- A Department of Defense gang specialist estimates that thousands of soldiers in the Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity. -- Hundreds of neo-Nazis identify themselves online as active duty soldiers. These include an airman based at Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia who is pictured holding assault rifles in front of a swastika and Iron Eagle neo-Nazi banner. A military investigator there said that although he was aware of the airman's neo-Nazi identity, he interpreted ambiguous military regulations to mean that the airman "has to actually organize or recruit or commit a crime" before action can be taken against him. -- One investigator identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists based at Fort Lewis in Washington, but only two were discharged. Investigators also uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis in the Army and Marines who were spread out across five military installations in five states. -- The SPLC informed military investigators about an active duty Navy SEAL who was heavily involved in neo-Nazi activities, but he was allowed to complete his tour of duty in Iraq and receive an honorable discharge. "Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists are joining the military in large numbers so they can get the best training in the world on weapons, combat tactics and explosives," said Mark Potok, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project. "We should consider this a major security threat, because these people are motivated by an ideology that calls for race war and revolution. Any one of them could turn out to be the next Timothy McVeigh."The report, available today on the SPLC website, will appear in next month's issue of Intelligence Report, the quarterly magazine of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, which has been tracking hate groups since 1981. ------ The SPLC is a nonprofit organization that combats hate, intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation. In addition to the Intelligence Project, its Teaching Tolerance program helps foster respect and understanding in the classroom and in communities across the country. Its litigation team, known for legal victories against white supremacists, handles innovative cases that fight discrimination and protect society's most vulnerable members.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jul 27, 2006 14:48:59 GMT 4
"War is Good for Business": More Contracts for America's Weapons Producers Is Israel running out of Bombs? New Deliveries of WMD "Made in America" The Replenishing of Israeli WMD stockpiles points to escalation both within and beyond the borders of Lebanonby Michel Chossudovsky July 22, 2006 GlobalResearch.ca "War is Good for Business": More Contracts for America's Weapons Producers The aerial attacks on Lebanon have contributed to fuellng the US military industrial complex in what essentially constitutes a "profit driven war". The Israeli air force confirms that it has led 3000 sorties hitting some 1,800 targets since the beginning of the bombing campaign (BBC, 22, July 2006). According to UN sources, close to a million people have been displaced out of a total population of 3.8 million. The country's civilian infrastructure has been destroyed. In contrast to the "shock and awe" March 2003 blitzkrieg over Iraq, the Israelis have aimed systematically and almost exclusively civilian targets. Moreover, Lebanon is defenseless. It does not possess an air defense system and the Israelis know it. The number of declared targets is staggering, even when compared, for instance, to the 300 selected strategic targets identified in the 1991 Gulf war. The civilian infrastructure has been destroyed: water, telecommunications, bridges, airports, gas stations, power plants, dairy factories, etc. Confirmed by the British press, in towns and villages across Lebanon, schools and hospitals have been targetted with meticulous accuracy. in an utterly twised logic, the Israeli government has casually blamed Hizbollah for using the schools and hospitals as hideouts or launchpads to wage their terrorist activities. (ABC Australia, interview with Israeli Ambassador to Australia, Nati Tamir, 21 July 2006). "This is not a war, this is a crisis"To state that the war was triggered by the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah militants on July 12th is absurd. The history of war and military planning is not an object of analysis by the Western media. The real causes and consequences of what continues to be described by the Western media as the "Lebanon crisis" remain unheralded. Civilian deaths are dismissed as inevitable. The humanitarian crisis is downplayed. The issue of Israeli sponsored war crimes is never mentioned. And the Israelis are now blocking the flow of humanitarian aid into Lebanon. Realities are turned upside town. The level of media disinformation and coverup of what is actually happening in the war theater is staggering.A military operation of this magnitude takes months to prepare. The decision to bomb Lebanon was taken well before July 12. The war on Lebanon is part of a broader Middle East military agenda which has been in the planning stage for more than a year. In very concrete terms, the bombing raids consist in destroying a nation, in "wiping Lebanon off the map", to use a familiar expression, in a righteous act of "self-defense" by Israel, according to the Western media. Is Israel running out of bombs? To meet shortfalls in current stockpiles of WMD, Israel's IDF is to take delivery of an emergency shipment of precision guided bombs, including US made GBU-28 bunker buster bombs produced by Raytheon. "Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But an arms-sale package approved last year provides authority for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as 100 GBU-28’s, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs intended to destroy concrete bunkers. The package also provides for selling satellite-guided munitions. An announcement in 2005 that Israel was eligible to buy the “bunker buster” weapons described the GBU-28 as “a special weapon that was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground.” The document added, “The Israeli Air Force will use these GBU-28’s on their F-15 aircraft.”" (NYT, 21 July 2006) This proposed shipment is described by military observers as somewhat "unusual". Israel already has a large stockpile of precision guided weapons. In addition to its own stockpiles, the IDF took delivery in 2005 of some 5000 US made "smart air launched weapons" including some 500 'bunker-buster bombs. Why would Israel all of sudden need to replenish its stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction, to implement what continues to be described as a punitive operation directed against Hizbollah? While the report suggests that "Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike", the history of these deliveries of bunker buster bombs to Israel, suggests that they are also intended to be used in the broader Middle Eastern region. Escalation: Syria and IranAt this particular juncture, the replenishing of Israeli stockpiles of deadly bunker buster bombs points to an escalation of the war both within and beyond the borders of Lebanon. The air campaign against Lebanon is inextricably related to US-Israeli strategic objectives in the broader Middle East including Syria and Iran. In recent developments, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has stated that the main purpose of her mission to the Middle East is not to push for a ceasefire in Lebanon, but rather to isolate Syria and Iran. (Daily Telegraph, 22 July 2006) A ground war has already started in Southern Lebanon. Aerial targets in Syria are also contemplated. Syria's capital Damascus is less than 50 kilometers from Lebanon's Bekaa valley, which has been the object of an extensive bombing campaign. Moreover, it is worth recalling that the first shipment of US made bunker buster bombs in 2005 was delivered to Israel, in the eventuality of a US-Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. "The Israeli target for the GBU-28 is no secret. For months Israeli intelligence, political and policy operatives in the US have been presenting a case that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons that threaten Tel Aviv and other Israeli population centers" (http://www.irmep.org/GBU.htm) The plan for such an attack on Iran entered "the advanced stage of readiness" in mid 2005. The Iran operation is still on the US-Israeli military agenda, in partnership with Turkey and NATO. Moreover, a new draft resolution concerning Tehran's alleged nuclear weapons program, slated to be submitted to the UN Security Council, suggests that military action against Iran is being considered at the highest levls of the military command structure. Under this plan, the Israeli Air Force would attack Iran's nuclear facility at Bushehr using both US and Israeli produced bunker buster bombs. Bear in mind that the bunker buster bombs can also be used to deliver tactical nuclear bombs. The B61-11 is the "nuclear version" of the "conventional" BLU 113. It can be delivered in much same way as the conventional bunker buster bomb. (See Michel Chossudovsky, www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO112C.html , see also www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofn=jf03norris ) . . . Gbu 28 Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) Replenishing the Stockpiles of Israel's WMD The bombs which are now being rushed to Israel are the large 5000 lb GBU 28 bunker buster bombs, which can in one strike in an urban area kill literally hundreds of people. The US claims that the bunker buster bomb is safe for the surrounding civilian population, because the explosion is underground. Israel has stated that the GBU 28 is to be used against Hizbollah, because Hizbollah has taken refuge in deap underground bunkers: "Designed to penetrate hardened command centers located deep underground, the GBU-28 is a 5,000-pound laser-guided bomb that uses a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead and contains 630 pounds of high explosives." (http://www.irmep.org/GBU.htm) The GBU-28 has already been used in densely populated urban areas inside Lebanon. The gruesome images of charred and mutilated bodies following these aerial bombings, could indeed be the result of the use of the GBU-28, which is among the deadliest weapons in the conventional arsenal (see below. Update 7/24/06: report confirms that these are the result of the use of incendiary white phosphorous bombs and vacuum bombs). "Israel’s need for precision munitions is driven in part by its strategy in Lebanon, which includes destroying hardened underground bunkers where Hezbollah leaders are said to have taken refuge, as well as missile sites and other targets that would be hard to hit without laser and satellite-guided bombs." (NYT, 21 July 2006) SOURCE: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CLO20060722&articleId=2789
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Nov 22, 2006 18:05:45 GMT 4
Canada the "piecemaker" - Very informative slideshow -
CANADA'S HYPOCRISY IS SICKENING! THIS IS A MUST SEE AND SHARE FOR ALL CANADIANS! HERE ARE SOME EXCERPTS... (...) Canadians have been fooled, again and again. Such deceptions are easy in Canada because there is a huge myth towering over us, the myth that Canada is a great force for global peace. Most Canadians don’t have a clue that Canada is one of the world’s top military exporters and spenders, or that we even have a military industrial complex. (...) Canada’s multibillion dollar frigates are already deeply integrated into the U.S. war machine. These warships helped enforce the naval blockade that killed a million and a half Iraqis, mostly children under the age of five. And then there was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. (...) Canadian frigates with some 1,300 Canadian troops working onboard, fulfilled a very important role in the invasion and occupation of of Iraq. They did this by protecting U.S. warships from attack on their way through the Persian Gulf. Canada's multibillion dollar frigates put U.S. warships safely in place so that they could launch their so-called “shock-and-awe” bombardment of Iraqi cities, killing untold thousands of innocent civilians and paving the way for the illegal occupation. So much for not being involved, eh? (...) Every year, Canada exports billions of dollars worth of high-tech military hardware to the U.S. These photos are from a Press for Conversion! (#53) which documented the fact that 100 Canadian war industries had supplied important parts and services for these three dozen major, weapons-delivery systems used in the Iraq war. (...) The U.S. has used these Canadian cluster bombs in Iraq. One of Bristol’s warheads is a cluster bomb with nine “High Explosive Multipurpose Submunitions.” On its website, the company brags that these cluster bombs have: “a scored interior body wall [that] optimizes fragment size against personnel.” Translation? These cluster bombs are designed to kill as many people as possible. (...) The A-10 Warthog is the main way that this radioactive waste product is disposed of in Iraq and elsewhere. It fires armour-piercing, heavier-than-lead, DU munitions. With its half life of over 2 billion years, DU is responsible for dramatically-increased cancer rates, not only in Iraq, but also in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. It will cause countless miscarriages, diseases and death in these and downwind countries for thousands of years. Canada is the world's top uranium producer and the top uranium supplier to the U.S. Our government pretends that our uranium exports are for “peaceful” purposes only, but they do nothing to stop its use in these munitions. (...) Canada also provides advisors and financial support to Iraq’s Interior Ministry. What's wrong with that?* This Ministry has been caught running torture centres,* Thousands of its officers have been withdrawn for corruption, and* It works with death squads accused of executing a thousand people per month in Baghdad alone this past summer. The RCMP, which isn't exactly known to worry much about the torture of Canadian citizens abroad (ask Maher Arar), should have nothing to do with this notorious Iraqi institution and its faceless commandos. CLIP - MUCH MORE ON THE REAL ROLE OF CANADA IN AFGHANISTAN, AND ALSO ABOUT THE FULL, AND DECEITFUL - PARTICIPATION OF CANADA TO THE LARGEST WEAPON DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM EVER, THE BALLISTIC MISSILE "DEFENSE" SYSTEM GO TO: coat.ncf.ca/Slides/3in1/001.htm
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jan 17, 2007 14:26:07 GMT 4
Speaking Truth To Power
A Time to Break Silence Part 1 of 2 By Rev. Martin Luther King By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
Audio mp3 of Address, Will play while reading:www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htmBeyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence By Rev. Martin Luther King 4 April 1967Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York CityI come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight. I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. The Importance of VietnamSince I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier: O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be! Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life? Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. Strange LiberatorsAnd as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives. For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace. The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators? Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers. Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence? Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands. Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores. At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor. Text continued.......
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jan 17, 2007 14:29:16 GMT 4
....text continuedSpeaking Truth To Power
A Time to Break Silence Part 2 of 2 By Rev. Martin Luther King This Madness Must CeaseSomehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism." If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement. Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Protesting The WarMeanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible. As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops. The People Are ImportantThese are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain." A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated: Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, Off'ring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light. Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet 'tis truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong: Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above his own. www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 16, 2007 6:08:25 GMT 4
The Sport of King GeorgeConcerning his latest essay, David Michael Green, gives the following introduction:Well, the good news is that the Bush administration is beginning to unravel before our very eyes. The bad news is just how ugly it is underneath that particular pile of rocks (and, believe me, we're just getting started). If there is any one thing that could possibly be more disgusting than the shabby way in which BushCo has consistently treated American troops - not just at Walter Reed Hospital - it is that these same abusive politicians constantly use those soldiers to score political points, including by hurling accusations that critics of their disastrous policies are not supporting the troops. That really outrages me, as you'll see in the latest installment of the Regressive Antidote:The Sport of King GeorgeBy: David Michael Green From 1980 through 1988, hundreds of thousands of Iranian adolescents were massacred as literal cannon fodder during last century’s longest conflict, and one of its bloodiest – the Iraq-Iran War. It would be easy to feel bad about the slaughter of these children, but you don’t when you realize that they’d been told they’d be going to Paradise as martyrs to Islam following their gruesome deaths. No, you don’t feel bad. You feel worse. And you don’t feel bad when you learn that their government actually gave these kids little plastic keys which they were told would allow them to open the gates of heaven once they got there. No, you don’t feel bad. You feel like being sick. All of that is shameful and ugly in the extreme. But it takes the additional knowledge that these keys were manufactured on an Israeli kibbutz to truly drive home the criminal insanity of modern war. No clearer case is imaginable to demonstrate the way in which powerful people and powerful interests prey upon the innocent and turn them into political tools to realize the former’s ambitions for wealth and power. Because these innocents are naive, or frightened – or, most harrowing of all, genuinely patriotic – such predators are cynically able to turn their very bodies into industrial war machine resources, no different than steel or silicon. Attach Part A (weapon) to Part B (weapon operating tool, a.k.a. human being). Deploy on battlefield. Sadly, ‘twas ever thus. Not for nothing did Europeans come to call war, “the sport of kings”. Of course, that could never happen here. Not now. Surely our young (and, in this war, not so young) soldiers are never called upon to fight in the interests of elites, interests so nefarious that they would have to be hidden under stacks of lies concerning national security threats, and behind a barrage of patriotic platitudes. Surely America’s bravest are never treated as expendable cannon fodder by leaders who could care less about their welfare. Surely they’re not trotted off the war like so many Iranian children, clutching a plastic key to heaven in one hand, and a fairytale of how much they’re truly valued in the other. More surely, that was a lot more believable even a week ago than it is today. For even if you had miraculously somehow managed to hang on to the myth of the Iraq war as a just and necessary invasion for purposes of American national security, that fantasy must surely have been burst with the revelations of the Walter Reed scandal. Has there ever been an American administration which wrapped itself so tightly in the flag? Have we ever had a government which hid its policies so carefully behind their supposed interest in the welfare of the troops? If you didn’t know any better (which was precisely the idea) you’d have thought these people were tough American war veterans themselves, tempered in the crucible of battle, and now just empathetically looking out for the welfare of today’s kids in situations similar to those in which they had once found themselves. Never mind that none of them bothered to make their way over to Nam and pitch-in during their day. Except, of course, the only one who opposed the war (privately, that is, while he was selling it publicly at the United Nations). The same one they dumped right after the next election. But Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice – somehow none of these hyperpatriots ever managed to translate their jingoistic enthusiasm into actually putting themselves into harm’s way. And yet any American – even (or is it especially?) a real combat veteran – who dares doubt the wisdom of the president’s breathtakingly transparent folly in Iraq has his or her patriotism publicly called into suspicion, always in the name of supporting the troops. To speak the truth is to risk accusations of treason. Somehow, to call for our soldiers to be removed from a chaotic civil war which was sold on lies from the beginning, and cannot be won but only prolonged until this gang is safely out of office, is failing to support the troops. But sacrificing these soldiers – over three thousand now, with tens of thousands if not as many as a hundred thousand of them gravely injured – for these lies, and to protect this president’s pride, is supporting the troops. Somehow, calling for these troops to come home safely is undermining them. But sending them on a mission invading an ancient civilization, when the fool who sent them there had only learned of the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims months after he had decided to go to war, is supporting the troops. Somehow, criticizing the war is an unpatriotic act that disrespects the troops, but sending them to Iraq in insufficient numbers to possibly succeed in order to test the pet theory of a now-fired Secretary of Defense is supporting them. Somehow, criticizing a commander-in-chief who can’t be bothered to attend a single military funeral is undermining our war effort. But his failing to equip our soldiers with proper armor – to this day, four years into the war – such that their home communities have literally held bake sales to properly outfit them with life-saving protection, that is supporting the troops. Somehow, it is unpatriotic blasphemy to complain that Americans are being kept, for the first time ever, from seeing the caskets of their fallen soldiers returning to American soil at Dover Air Force Base. But leaving the injured ones to rot in squalid conditions at Walter Reed and elsewhere (haven’t they given enough yet, Mr. Bush?) is supporting the troops. Somehow, it’s okay for the president to run around the world talking about the importance of freedom, as if he had the faintest clue. While at home his administration has been intimidating and silencing these very same injured soldiers, threatening them if they talk to the press. All in the name of supporting them, of course. Somehow, the administration can question the patriotism of Congress when it contemplates conditioning war appropriations with requirements that the troops be adequately trained, equipped and rested. But the same administration ‘supports’ those troops by denying and delaying disability benefits to injured veterans in order to help maintain the public lie about the fiscal costs of the war. Somehow, believing that the burdens of national security – not to mention the momentous policy of invading and occupying another country – ought to be shared by all Americans through a military draft is some kind of socialist plot. But sending Guard and Reserve troops who were never intended for this sort of deployment into three, four and five rotations, not relieving them with regular military draftees, and sticking them alongside highly paid no-bid contractor mercenaries who comprise nearly half the forces on site, that is supporting the troops. Somehow, criticizing the administration for torturing, humiliating and murdering POWS in hell-holes like Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, while trashing the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete” and “quaint”, is being soft on terrorism. But the president was supporting the troops when he said of five Americans captured early in the war, “We expect them to be treated humanely, just like we'll treat any prisoners of theirs that we capture humanely”. God help American soldiers if they are treated the way we’ve treated theirs. Somehow, caring for the wounded returning from Iraq represents some sort of vaguely liberal anti-American project that ‘compassionate conservatives’ (the oxymoron of the century) find all too suspect. But returning them to the battlefield, as this administration is now doing, even before they’ve recovered from their wounds is a fine case of supporting the troops. And somehow, arguing that the Iraq war was a ridiculous and tragic diversion from the campaign against al Qaeda only betrays the naiveté of the fools – including former high officials in the Reagan, Bush and even Bush Junior administrations – dumb enough to make such comments. (We either fight them over there or we fight them here, you know.) But creating international chaos, global antipathy toward the United States and legions of angry new terrorists today, whom our soldiers can expect to have to face in battle tomorrow, is supporting the troops. In what insane world, in what Kafka novel, in what twisted Dali painting, does this litany of Bush administration shame represent supporting the troops? How much Coulter Kool-Aid do you have to drink to believe that sending American forces off to die for a lie is defined as supporting them, while trying to save them from dying for that lie is undermining them? How many Limbaugh Lies do you have to hear before you think that trashing Geneva, overtaxing vulnerable Guard and Reserve forces to avoid a draft, sending injured soldiers back into battle, delaying and denying the meager benefits due to the wounded, and housing them with cockroaches represents support for the troops? With all due respect to American troops (whose commander-in-chief has shown them none of the respect they’re due, whatsoever), you’d have to be either insane or desperate to join the military today. Which precisely explains why people aren’t doing so anymore. And which also precisely explains why standards have been lowered in recent years in order to meet recruitment targets for the Army and Marines. Low IQ? Never been to high school? Serious criminal record? No problem. There’s a home for you in George W. Bush’s military. They’ll start you off at the rank of Cannon Fodder, First Class, and you’ll see exciting action right away on a romantic desert battlefield. And even though you’ve never spent a day in high school, the military will send you to college when you return. If you return. And if you can survive the compassionate care Mr. Bush has lined up for you at Walter Reed. From the lies surrounding the Spanish-American War to those behind the Vietnam War to those of the absurd manly Republican adventures in Grenada and Panama, America has too often squandered the lives of its youth for the sport of presidents. And from the Bonus Army to Agent Orange to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the Gulf War Syndrome, America has far too frequently abused them a second time, despite their willingness to answer the call. Major General Smedley Butler (who knew firsthand whereof he spoke, having served, by his own assessment, as a high-ranked military lackey doing the dirty work for corporate robber-barons in Latin America) nailed it when he said, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” I like to think that not every war which Americans fought was a scam, though for sure far too many were, and that makes the personal tragedies involved so much more tragic. But other than the fact that (so far) a lot less people have died in Iraq than did in Vietnam, it is unimaginable how this war could be any more tragically wasteful of American (and, far more, Iraqi) lives than it is. And it is unimaginable how an administration could be more contemptuous of those individuals, many of whom choose to serve out of a sheer dedication and patriotism that is completely foreign to cowardly avoiders like Bush and Cheney. Pat Tillman is the paradigmatic case. By all accounts he was motivated by pure patriotism to sacrifice a career of fame and wealth in order to defend his country after 9/11, and by going to war he knowingly risked sacrificing infinitely more. It was bad enough that he did so only to be killed by friendly fire, though that happens in all wars, and is no doubt usually the result of the best of intentions, if not always the greatest competence. What cannot be condoned, however, was that he died in Afghanistan fighting a war which his commander-in-chief seems, at best, to have been only vaguely interested in prosecuting, and a lot less than even that once it became possible to instead pursue his pet project in the desert sands of Mesopotamia. What cannot be condoned is that his president and those around him called upon people like Pat Tillman to fight wars that they wouldn’t fight when it was their turn. What cannot be condoned is that people like Pat Tillman were turned into props for Karl Rove’s marketing machine, the most cynically bloody political project this side of the 1930s. What cannot be condoned is that his family was lied to about his fate, even while Rove was turning him into a commercial to help move more product. And what cannot be condoned is that those who were “luckier” than Pat Tillman were cast aside when no longer useful to this gaggle of dark hearts, left to rot with enforced silence in cockroach-infested holding pens, there to begin the looming decades of unalterable suffering, deprivation and frustration which will forever haunt their broken lives. The sad truth is that this president, this vice-president, and this administration have never given a damn for the soldiers they’ve condemned to lives filled with agony, when they aren’t lives simply cut short in the flower of their youth. (And let’s not even get started on their lack of concern for the infinitely greater number of Iraqi lives shattered by their sporting adventure.) These soldiers are tools to be used for a purpose. They might as well be wrenches or rifles. Their purpose is to win glory and the spoils of war for Bush and Cheney and ExxonMobil. They have another purpose, as well. These soldiers – these presidential tools – serve as props for Bush administration photo-op propaganda efforts. But only if they’re new and shiny and whole, of course. Rove and his minions regularly make sure that the wounded ones – the amputees, the burned, scarred and mangled, the ones with caved-in crania and permanently melted faces – that these are kept to the side, out of the photo with the smiling, caring, commander-in-chief. And you can bet there won’t be any cockroach-infested rooms or three-day old soiled hospital sheets in the pictures either. You have to wonder what happened in somebody’s childhood to make them so heartless that they could launch a war like this, based on utter and complete lies, leave the wrecked bodies who come back from it in dumping stations like Walter Reed, stall on providing them even the minimal benefits to which they’re entitled, and then have the audacity to pull the wounded out of presidential photo sessions. I’m sorry George, Dick, Karl, if your mother was cold or your father distant. I truly am. But this has to stop. As you are so fond of reminding us, it’s all about personal responsibility. Isn’t it still? Regardless of personal circumstances, right? Doesn’t that apply equally to sanctimonious keepers of the public morality as well as to the poor SOBs whom you love to strap onto death chamber gurneys? (And they are, in fact, always poor, and always the product of far more damaging childhoods than you could imagine.) Doesn’t it apply to you Deciders whose decisions have terminated nearly a million lives in Iraq, and brought untold misery to millions more? So when will you guys take responsibility for what you’ve done? When will you attend a military funeral? When will you simply knock some freakin’ heads together inside the administration which you fully control to fix the medical system for wounded vets, rather than appointing yet another jive Washington commission, with all the same crowd of jive Washington commissioners, to “look into it” and report back a year later with some anemic recommendations that you’ll ignore anyhow? When will you add money to the budget to provide adequate care for these folks you call heros, rather than stealing it from them in order to stuff the pockets of another crony contractor? When will you risk instituting a draft in order to put enough soldiers on the ground such that you don’t drive into the ground the few soldiers that you keep sending back and back and back? When will you, in short, live up to your own revoltingly cynical rhetoric and start truly supporting the troops, rather than hiding behind them? When, indeed. On the eve of his illegal and completely unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state, the honor midget known as George Bush had this to say: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services: If war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” Sadly, those words are far more relevant today for the soldiers of a different dying regime, led by a different thug, attacking a different country. But one thing remains the same. Master Bush may not hand you a plastic key to heaven manufactured in Islamabad before he feeds your body to his insatiable war machine, but so deep and so wide are the lies that he might as well be doing so. Regardless, it is definitely not worth your own life. Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/The_Sport_of_King_George.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 16, 2007 9:29:37 GMT 4
Senator Feinstein's Iraq Conflict Part 1 of 2
Frustrated at the lack of attention pointed toward members of Congress who directly benefit from defense industries through contributions, ownership of defense industry stock, and other motivation such as constituent interests [jobs]. I took it on myself to begin to post articles concerning this abuse of power at: Re: Militarism/Nationalism/Patriotism « Reply #14 on Feb 19, 2006, 9:38am » Government officials are quite willing to wage permanent war in pursuit of capital gains.
From there much info was added, including this one on Senator Feinstein's War-Profiteering: Re: Militarism/Nationalism/Patriotism « Reply #18 on Mar 2, 2006, 5:59pm » Senator Feinstein's War-Profiteering Enabling Bush
As I read current articles, I see there is a push from writers encouraging citizens to take matters into their own hands. I often think that the average person in my country feels powerless to stop the advancement of never-ending war. Well folks, knowledge is power so here's some more information to arm yourself with and distribute to as many as possible. We have got to stop voting for people like Diane Feinstein who profit greatly from war. Feinstein uses hot button topics like abortion rights and gun control laws to get overwhelmingly reelected
She has currently called for President Bush to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but she strongly supported the invasions, occupations and "reconstructions" of both Iraq and Afghanistan. She sits on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, and she is a consistent hawk on matters military.
As I said, we must end our voter approval of such candidates. If we do not have acceptable alternative candidates, I'm begining to think that it would be better to not vote at all....choosing the lesser of two evils has done nothing to stop our representatives from illegal profiteering and horrendously abusing the power of their postion. What if they hosted an election and nobody showed up?...Michelle
Senator Feinstein's Iraq Conflict January 24-30, 2007 As a member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions to her husband's firms
By Peter Byrne
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.
Each year, MILCON's members decide which military construction projects will be funded from a roster proposed by the Department of Defense. Contracts to build these specific projects are subsequently awarded to such major defense contractors as Halliburton, Fluor, Parsons, Louis Berger, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation. From 1997 through the end of 2005, with Feinstein's knowledge, Blum was a majority owner of both URS Corp. and Perini Corp.
While setting MILCON agendas for many years, Feinstein, 73, supervised her own staff of military construction experts as they carefully examined the details of each proposal. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were or subsequently became URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such MILCON projects.
In her annual Public Financial Disclosure Reports, Feinstein records a sizeable family income from large investments in Perini, which is based in Framingham, Mass., and in URS, headquartered in San Francisco. But she has not publicly acknowledged the conflict of interest between her job as a congressional appropriator and her husband's longtime control of Perini and URS—and that omission has called her ethical standards into question, say the experts.
Insider Information The tale thickens with the appearance of Michael R. Klein, a top legal adviser to Feinstein and a long-time business partner of Blum's. The vice-chairman of Perini's board of directors, Klein was a partner in Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a powerful law firm with close ties to the Democratic Party, for nearly 30 years. Klein and Blum co-own ASTAR Air Cargo, which has military contracts in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Klein also sits on the board of SRA International, a large defense contractor.
In an interview with this reporter in September, Klein stated that, beginning in 1997, he routinely informed Feinstein about specific federal projects coming before her in which Perini had a stake. The insider information, Klein said, was intended to help the senator avoid conflicts of interest. Although Klein's startling admission was intended to defuse the issue of Feinstein's conflict of interest, it had the effect of exacerbating it.
Klein said that he regularly gave Feinstein's chief of staff, Mark Kadesh, lists of Perini's current and upcoming contractual interests in federal legislation, so that the senator would not discuss, debate, vote on or participate in matters that could affect projects in which Perini was concerned.
"Earmarks, you know, set asides, you name it, there was a system in place which on a regular basis I got notified, I notified her office and her office notified her," Klein said.
"We basically identified any bid that Perini was going for and checked to see whether it was the subject of already appropriated funds or funds yet to be appropriated, and if it was anything that the senator could not act on, her office was alerted and she did not act on it."
This is an extraordinary thing for Klein and the senator to do, since the detailed project proposals that the Pentagon sent to Feinstein's subcommittee for review do not usually name the firms already contracted to perform specific projects. Nor do defense officials typically identify, in MILCON hearings, which military construction contractors were eligible to bid on upcoming work.
In theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military construction budget—until Klein told her.
Klein explained, "They would get from me a notice that Perini was bidding on a contract that would be affected as we understood it by potential legislation that would come before either the full Congress or any committee that she was a member of. And she would as a result of that not act, abstain from dealing with those pieces of legislation."
However, the public record shows that contrary to Klein's belief, Feinstein did act on legislation that affected Perini and URS.
According to Klein, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics ruled, in secret, that Feinstein did not have a conflict of interest with Perini because, due to the existence of the bid and project lists provided by Klein, she knew when to recuse herself. Klein says that after URS declined to participate in his conflict of interest prevention plan, the ethics committee ruled that Feinstein could act on matters that affected URS, because she did not have a list of URS' needs. That these confidential rulings are contradictory is obvious and calls for explanation.
Klein declined to produce copies of the Perini project lists that he transmitted to Feinstein. And neither he nor Feinstein would furnish copies of the ethics committee rulings, nor examples of the senator recusing herself from acting on legislation that affected Perini or URS. But the Congressional Record shows that as chairwoman and a ranking member of MILCON, Feinstein was often involved in supervising the legislative details of military construction projects that directly affected Blum's defense contracting firms.
After reviewing the results of this investigation, Wendell Rawls, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., observes that by giving Feinstein notice of Perini's business objectives, Klein achieved the opposite of preventing a conflict of interest.
Rawls comments, "Sen. Feinstein has had a serious conflict of interest, a serious insensitivity to ethical considerations. The very least she should have done is to recuse herself from having conversations, debates, voting or any other kind of legislative activity that involved either Perini Corporation or URS Corporation or any other business activity where her husband's financial interests were involved.
"I cannot understand how someone who complains so vigorously as she has about conflicts of interest in the government and Congress can have turned such a deaf ear and a blind eye to her own. Because of her level of influence, the conflict of interest is just as serious as the Halliburton-Cheney connection."
continued.....
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 16, 2007 9:33:49 GMT 4
....continued from previous post:Senator Feinstein's Iraq Conflict Part 2 of 2Called Into Question Here are a few examples from the Congressional Record of questionable intersections between Feinstein's legislative duties and her financial interests: At a MILCON hearing in 2001, Feinstein interrogated defense officials about the details of constructing specific missile defense systems, which included upgrading the early warning radar system at Cobra Dane radar on Shemya Island, Alaska. In 2003, Perini reported that it had completed a contract to upgrade the Cobra Dane radar system. It has done similar work at Beale Air Force Base in California and in the United Kingdom. URS also bids on missile defense work. In the 2002 MILCON hearings, Feinstein questioned an official about details of the U.S. Army's chemical demilitarization program. URS is extensively involved in performing chemical demilitarization work at key disposal sites in the United States. At that same hearing, Feinstein asked about the possibility of increasing funding for anti-terrorism-force protection at Army bases. The following year, on March 4, 2003, Feinstein asked why the anti-terrorism-force protection funds she had advocated for the year before had not yet been spent. On April 21, 2003, URS announced the award of a $600 million contract to provide, among other services, anti-terrorism-force protection for U.S. Army installations. Beginning in 2003, both Perini and URS were awarded a series of open-ended contracts for military construction work around the world, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Feinstein's leadership, MILCON regularly approved specific project "task orders" that were issued to Perini and URS under these contracts. At a March 30, 2004, MILCON hearing, Feinstein grilled Maj. Gen. Dean Fox about whether or not the Pentagon intended to prioritize funding the construction of "beddown" maintenance facilities for its new airlifter, the C-17 Globemaster. After being reassured by Fox that these funds would soon be flowing, Feinstein said, "Good, that's what I really wanted to hear. Thank you very much. Appreciate it very much, General." Two years later, URS announced a $42 million award to build a beddown maintenance facility for the C-17 at Hickam Air Base in Hawaii as part of a multibillion dollar contract with the Air Force. Under Feinstein's leadership, MILCON approved the Hickam project. In mid-2005, MILCON approved a Pentagon proposal to fund "overhead coverage force protection" in Iraq that would reinforce the roofs of U.S. Army barracks to better withstand mortar rounds. On Oct. 13, 2005, Perini announced the award of a $185 million contract to provide overhead coverage force protection to the Army in Iraq. In the 2005 MILCON hearings, Feinstein earmarked MILCON legislation with $25 million to increase environmental remediation at closed military bases. Year after year, Feinstein has closely overseen the environmental cleanup and redevelopment of McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, frequently requesting that officials add tens of millions of dollars to that project. URS and its joint ventures have earned tens of millions of dollars cleaning up McClellan. And CB Richard Ellis, a real estate company headed by Feinstein's husband Richard Blum, is involved in redeveloping McClellan for the private sector. This investigation examined thousands of pages of documents, including transcripts of congressional hearings, U.S. Security and Exchange Commission filings, government audits and reports, federal procurement data and corporate press releases. The findings were shared with contracting and ethics experts at several nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based government oversight groups. Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit organization that analyzes defense contracts and who examined our evidence says, "The paper trail showing Sen. Feinstein's conflict of interest is irrefutable." On the face of it, there is nothing objectionable about a senator closely examining proposed appropriations or advocating for missile defense or advancing the cleanup of a toxic military base. Blum profitably divested himself of ownership of both URS and Perini in 2005, ameliorating the conflict of interest. But Feinstein's ethical dilemma arose from the fact that, for five years, the interests of Perini and URS and CB Richard Ellis were inextricably entwined with her leadership of MILCON, which last year approved $16.2 billion for military construction projects. Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, remarks, "There are a number of members of Congress with conflicts of interest. [California Republican Congressman John T.] Doolittle, for example, hired his wife as a fundraiser, and she skimmed 15 percent off of all campaign contributions. Others, like [former] Speaker [Dennis] Hastert and Cong. [Ken] Calvert, were earmarking federal money for roads to enhance the value of property held by their families. "But because of the amount of money involved," Sloan continues, "Feinstein's conflict of interest is an order of magnitude greater than those conflicts." Family Matters Californians elected San Francisco's former Mayor Dianne Feinstein to the Senate in 1992. She was overwhelmingly re-elected in November 2006. She is well liked by both liberals and conservatives. She supports abortion rights and gun control laws. She politicked this year for renewal of the Patriot Act and sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban American flag burning. She is currently calling for President Bush to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but she strongly supported the invasions, occupations and "reconstructions" of both Iraq and Afghanistan. She sits on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, and she is a consistent hawk on matters military. And she is wealthy. In 2005, Roll Call calculated Feinstein's wealth, including Blum's assets, at $40 million, up 25 percent from the year before. That made her the ninth wealthiest member of Congress. Feinstein's latest Public Financial Disclosure Report shows that in 2005 her family earned income of between $500,000 and $5 million from capital gains on URS and Perini stock combined. From CB Richard Ellis, Blum earned between $1.3 million to $4 million. (The report allows for disclosure of dollar amounts within ranges, which accounts for the wide variance.) A talented financier and deal-broker, Blum, 70, presides over a global investment empire through a labyrinth of private equity partnerships. His flagship entity is a merchant banking firm, Blum Capital Partners, L.P., of which he is the chairman and general partner. Through this bank, Blum bought a controlling share of Perini in 1997, when it was nearly broke. He named his close associate, the attorney Michael R. Klein, to represent his interest on the board of directors. Blum declined to comment for this story. Perini CEO Robert Band deferred to Klein for comment. In 2000, according to public records, Perini—which partly specializes in erecting casinos—earned a mere $7 million from federal contracts. Post-9/11, Perini transformed into a major defense contractor. In 2004, the company earned $444 million for military construction work in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for improving airfields for the U.S. Air Force in Europe and building base infrastructures for the U.S. Navy around the globe. In a remarkable financial recovery, Perini shot from near penury in 1997 to logging gross revenues of $1.7 billion in 2005. In December 2005, Perini publicly identified one of its main business competitors as Halliburton. The company attributed its growing profitability, in large part, to its Halliburton-like military construction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the company warned investors that if Congress slammed the brakes on war and occupation in the Middle East, Perini's stock could plummet. According to Klein and to public records, Blum's firm originally paid $4 a share for a controlling interest in Perini's common stock. After a series of complicated stock transactions, Blum ended up owning 13 percent of the company, a majority interest. In mid- and late 2005, Blum and his firm took their profits by selling about 3 million Perini shares for $23.75 per share, according to Klein and reports filed with the SEC. Klein says Blum personally owned 100,000 of the vastly appreciated shares when they were sold. Shortly thereafter, Feinstein began calling for winding down the Iraq war while urging that the "global war on terror" continue indefinitely. Perini's Payday It is estimated that Perini now holds at least $2.5 billion worth of contracts tied to the worldwide expansion of American militarism. Its largest Department of Defense contracts are "indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity" or "bundled" contracts carrying guaranteed profit margins. As is all too common, competitive bidding was minimal or nonexistent for many of these contracts. In June, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, released a report by the House Committee on Government Reform criticizing the Pentagon's growing use of bundled contracts. Waxman complained that these contracts give companies an incentive to increase costs. One of the "problem contracts" identified by Waxman was a no-bid, $500 million contract held by Perini to reconstruct southern Iraq's electrical grid. In fact, bundled military construction contracts fueled Perini's transformation from casino builder to major war contractor. As of May 2006, Perini held a series of bundled contracts awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers for work in the Middle East worth $1.725 billion. Perini has also been awarded an open-ended contract by the U.S. Air Force for military construction and cleaning the environment at closed military bases. Perini shares that $15 billion award with several other firms, including URS. Perini regularly performs military construction jobs from Afghanistan to Alaska. It built a biological warfare laboratory for the Navy in Virginia. It built fuel tanks and pipelines for the Navy in North Africa. Details of these projects are typically examined and approved or disapproved by MILCON. At a 2001 MILCON hearing, Feinstein, attending to a small item, told Maj. Gen. Earnest O. Robbins that she would appreciate receiving an engineering assessment on plans to build a missile transport bridge at Vandenberg Air Force Base. He said he would give it to her. She also asked for and received a list of unfunded construction projects, which prioritize military construction wish lists down to the level of thousand-dollar light fixtures. While there is no evidence to point to nefarious intent behind Feinstein's request for these details, it is worth noting that Perini and URS have open-ended contracts to perform military construction for the Air Force. The senator could have chosen to serve on a subcommittee where she had no potential conflict of interests at all. In 2003 hearings, MILCON approved various construction projects at sites where Perini and/or URS are contracted to perform engineering and military construction work. The sites included: Camp Lejeune; the Underwater Systems Lab in Newport, R.I.; Hill Air Force Base, Utah; the Naval facilities at Dahlgren, Va.; projects at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Ind., and Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico; and military bases in Guam, Diego Garcia and Crete. There are some serious problems with Perini's work in Iraq. In June 2004, the Government Accountability Office reported that Perini's electrical reconstruction contract in southern Iraq suffered from mismanagement and lack of competition. In 2006, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that Perini was paid to construct multimillion-dollar electrical substations in the desert that could not be connected to the electrical grid. And the company was billing the government for purchasing and subcontracting costs that were not justified, according to the Defense Contract Audit Agency. An October 2005 audit by the Defense Department's Inspector General criticized the execution of Perini's cost-plus military construction work in Afghanistan, saying, "The contractor had an incentive to increase costs, because higher costs resulted in higher profit." URS and McClellan URS dwarfs Perini. With more than 100 subsidiaries, it employs nearly 30,000 engineers and workers worldwide. The firm's largest customer is the U.S. Army, from which it booked $791 million in work in 2005 out of a total revenue of $3.9 billion. URS is not just a construction company; it also develops and maintains advanced weapons systems. In 2002, URS purchased weaponry firm EG&G Technical Services from the Carlyle Group, in which former President George H.W. Bush was a principal. But as profitable as its arms dealing division is, URS reports that its growth sectors are military construction, homeland security and environmental services for military sites under existing Defense Department contracts. According to a database of federal procurement records made available for this investigation by Eagle Eye Publishers of Fairfax, Va., URS's military construction work in 2000 earned it a mere $24 million. The next year, when Feinstein took over as MILCON chair, military construction earned URS $185 million. On top of that, the company's architectural and engineering revenue from military construction projects grew from $108,726 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, more than a thousandfold increase in a single year. As Congress gave the Bush administration the green light on military spending after 9/11, the value of Blum's investment in URS skyrocketed. Between 2003 and 2005, URS' share price doubled. In late 2005, Blum resigned from the URS board of directors, after 30 years as a member. Simultaneously, he sold 5.5 million URS shares, worth about $220 million at market price. The Congressional Record shows that in year after year of MILCON hearings, Feinstein successfully lobbied defense officials to increase the budget for military base cleanup and redevelopment, especially at the decommissioned McClellan Air Force Base. The detoxification of McClellan is a plum job: it is estimated to cost $1.3 billion and take many years to complete. There is, of course, nothing unusual about a senator advocating for projects that improve environmental health, particularly when the project is in her home state; and the Pentagon is notoriously lax about cleaning up its Superfund sites. It turns out, though, that URS specializes in environmental consulting and engineering work at military installations. It holds a $69 million contract to manage the cleanup of Hill Air Force Base in Utah, which was awarded in 2004. It has a $320 million contract to remediate pollution at U.S. Army bases in the United States and the Caribbean, which was awarded in 2005. And from 2000 to 2005, URS and its partners were paid $204 million for work at McClellan Air Force Base, according to Eagle Eye. At a MILCON hearing in 2001, Feinstein cited the environmental work at McClellan as needing more money. "That is a base that I am very familiar with, and I am glad that we were able to provide that funding so that work at McClellan can proceed," she said. Feinstein then asked for and received detailed information concerning the Pentagon's projected schedule to finish the McClellan cleanup and the effect of delaying cleanup upon its potential for commercial reuse. At a MILCON hearing in March 2002, Chairwoman Feinstein interrogated Assistant Secretary of Defense Nelson F. Gibbs: Sen. Feinstein: Is the Air Force capable of executing greater [cleanup] funding in 2003 at McClellan? Mr. Gibbs: Yes, ma'am. Feinstein: And how much would that be? How about $22 million? Gibbs: That would be very close. That would be almost exact as a matter of fact. ... If you would like, I can provide for you a list of those individual projects. Feinstein: I would. If you would not mind. Thank you very much. The next week, Gibbs sent Feinstein a memo showing the addition of $23 million to the McClellan environmental budget, mostly for groundwater remediation, URS' specialty. In the 2003 MILCON hearings, Feinstein told Dov S. Zakheim, then the Defense Department comptroller, that she "was really struck by the hit that environmental remediation [at McClellan Air Force Base] took. ... However, I have just [received] a list from the Air Force of what they could use to clean up ... McClellan, and one other base, and it is 64 million additional dollars this year." Dr. Zakheim replied, "Well, let me first say that I remember your concern last year, and I am glad that we took care of [McClellan]. That is important." Feinstein remarked that the Pentagon had already spent $7 billion on environmental cleanup of closed bases, and that another $3.5 billion should be immediately allocated so that the clean bases can be transferred to the private sector. Demonstrating her grasp of technical details, she remarked, "I am particularly concerned with the dilapidated condition of the sewer line at McClellan that continues to impede significant economic redevelopment of the base." That is where CB Richard Ellis comes in. The real estate firm is politically well-connected. Sen. Feinstein's husband chairs the board of directors. Bill Clinton's secretary of commerce, Michael Kantor, joined in 2004. Former Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle signed on in 2005. The firm specializes in consulting with local governments and developers from California to Puerto Rico on how best to redevelop cleaned-up military bases. It also brokers the sale and lease of redeveloped base lands to the private sector. Since Blum took over CB Richard Ellis, for example, the company has closed deals leasing tens of thousands of square feet of commercial space on cleaned-up portions of McClellan to private developers. In a 2003 MILCON hearing, Sacramento County redevelopment official Robert B. Leonard told Feinstein, "We wanted to express our appreciation for your efforts over the last year in supporting our needs at McClellan." During the five years that Feinstein led the subcommittee, support for the McClellan cleanup and the redevelopment deals were particular focuses of her attention. URS declined to comment for this story. The sole comment that Feinstein's office made in response to a series of written questions about facts in this story is that "Sen. Feinstein has never had any knowledge nor has she exercised any influence on the award of environmental cleanup contracts under the jurisdiction of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee." Let the Sunlight In Last week, the Senate voted to close some significant loopholes in its ethics rules. But it stopped short of creating an office of public integrity, which would independently monitor lobbyists and members of Congress for ethical compliance. Setting her own limits on the extent of reform she will countenance, Feinstein says she is opposed to the creation of an independent congressional ethics watchdog. "If the law is clear and precise, members will follow it," she assured The New York Times on Nov. 18, 2006. The problem with the existing rules governing congressional ethics is that they are neither clear nor precise, and neither are they effective. Senate rules governing conflicts of interest are so vaguely worded, say government watchdogs, that short of stashing cash bribes in the refrigerator, the line between serving constituents and serving oneself is often blurred. The public record shows that Feinstein has a history of crossing that blurry line. Charles Tiefer is a professor of law specializing in legislation and government contracting at the University of Baltimore in Maryland. He served as solicitor and deputy counsel to the House of Representatives for 11 years. He has taught at Yale Law School and written books on congressional procedures and separation of powers. Tiefer observes that, unlike the executive and judiciary branches of government, Congress does not have enforceable conflict of interest rules. It is up to Sen. Feinstein's constituents, Tiefer says, to decide if she has a conflict of interest and to take whatever action they want. To make that possible, Feinstein should have publicly disclosed the details of her family investments in Perini, URS and CB Richard Ellis as they related to her actions on MILCON. Tiefer avers that when Klein gave Feinstein lists of Perini's interests, he worsened her conflict of interest. "The senator should, at a minimum, have posted Klein's lists on her Senate website, so that the press and the public would be warned of her potential conflicts," Tiefer says, noting that she should also make public her correspondence with the Senate Ethics Committee. As the arbiter of Senate rules on ethics, it is incumbent on Feinstein to provide the public with an explanation of why she did not recuse herself from acting on MILCON details that served her financial interests, and why she failed to resign from the subcommittee after she recognized the potential for conflicts of interest, which, unfortunately, materialized in an obvious way and over a long period of time. Research assistance for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.Source: www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Aug 18, 2007 15:10:02 GMT 4
Hey, you Middle Class out there [well, what's left of you], wave them flags, support those wars and more military aggression, but don't forget to open your purses so people like the ever so patriotic Corley sisters can live well while sons, daughters, parents, grandparents, and little kids die...for nothing! Oh, and while you're fuming at the sisters, don't forget, the Pentagon has been paying for these costs since 2000; great bunch of intellects we have deciding the world's fate....MichellePentagon Paid $998,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers (Update3) By Tony Capaccio Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said. The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show. The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina -- twin sisters -- exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled ``priority'' were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator. C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said. Corley, 46, was fined $750,000. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced soon, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year. Corley didn't immediately return a phone message left on her answering machine at her office in Lexington. Her attorney, Gregory Harris, didn't immediately return a phone call placed to his office in Columbia. `Got More Aggressive' C&D's fraudulent billing started in 2000, Stroot, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's chief agent in Raleigh, North Carolina, said in an interview. ``As time went on they got more aggressive in the amounts they put in.'' The price the military paid for each item shipped rarely reached $100 and totaled just $68,000 over the six years in contrast to the $20.5 million paid for shipping, she said. ``The majority, if not all of these parts, were going to high-priority, conflict areas -- that's why they got paid,'' Stroot said. If the item was earmarked ``priority,'' destined for the military in Iraq, Afghanistan or certain other locations, ``there was no oversight.'' Scheme Detected The scheme unraveled in September after a purchasing agent noticed a bill for shipping two more 19-cent washers: $969,000. That order was rejected and a review turned up the $998,798 payment earlier that month for shipping two 19-cent washers to Fort Bliss, Texas, Stroot said. The Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency orders millions of parts a year. ``These shipping claims were processed automatically to streamline the re-supply of items to combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,'' the Justice Department said in a press release announcing today's verdict. Stroot said the logistics agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which pays contractors, have made major changes, including thorough evaluations of the priciest shipping charges. Dawn Dearden, a spokeswoman for the logistics agency, said finance and procurement officials immediately examined all billing records. Stroot said the review showed that fraudulent billing is ``not a widespread problem.'' ``C&D was a rogue contractor,'' Stroot said. While other questionable billing has been uncovered, nothing came close to C&D's, she said. The next-highest billing for questionable costs totaled $2 million, she said. Stroot said the Pentagon hopes to recoup most of the $20.5 million by auctioning homes, beach property, jewelry and ``high- end automobiles'' that the sisters spent the money on. ``They took a lot of vacations,'' she said. To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio at acapaccio@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: August 16, 2007 15:16 EDT Source:www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=ardg6DwCCMFI
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 10, 2007 0:45:18 GMT 4
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 A Culture of Violence
A Culture of Violence - by Stephen Lendman Part 1 of 2
What do you call a country that glorifies wars and violence in the name of peace. One that's been at war every year in its history against one or more adversaries. It has the highest homicide rate of all western nations and a passion for owning guns, yet the two seem oddly unconnected. Violent films are some of its most popular, and similar video games crowd out the simpler, more innocent street play of generations earlier. Prescription and illicit drug use is out of control as well when tobacco, alcohol and other legal ones are included.
It get's worse. It's society is called a "rape culture" with data showing:
-- one-fourth of its adult women victims of forcible rape sometime in their lives, often by someone they know, including family members;
-- one-third of them are victims of sexual abuse by a husband or boyfriend;
-- 30% of people in the country say they know a woman who's been physically abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year;
-- one in four of its women report being sexually molested in childhood, usually repeatedly over extended periods by a family member or other close relative;
-- its women overall experience extreme levels of violence; an astonishing 75% of them are victims of some form of it in their lifetimes;
--domestic violence is their leading cause of injury and second leading cause of death;
-- statistically, homes are their most dangerous place if men are in them as millions experience battering by husbands, male partners or fathers;
-- for most women with children, there's no escape for lack of means and because male assailants pursue them causing greater harm;
-- adding further injury, its society is often unsupportive; it affords women second class status, privileges and redress when they're abused so many suffer in silence fearing coming forward may cause more harm than help;
-- its children are abused as well; millions suffer serious neglect, physical mistreatment and/or sexual abuse; many get relief only through escape to dangerous streets; they end up alone, more vulnerable and at greater danger away than at home where there, too, families act more like strangers or predators forcing young kids to flee in the first place.
What country is it where things like these are normal and commonplace; where peace, tranquility and safety are illusions; where they're crowded out by foreign wars and violence at home in communities, neighborhoods, schools, throughout the media and in core families. What kind of country glorifies mass killing, assaults and abuse; one that looks down on pacifist non-violence as sissy or unpatriotic, yet claims to be peace loving. It's not in the third world, under dictatorship or controlled by religious extremists. It's the "land of the free and home of the brave, America the Beautiful" where human rights, civil liberties, common dignity and personal safety are more illusion than fact. More on this below.
War As "the Ultimate Economic Shock Therapy"
Mahdi Nazemroaya writes in his August 29 "War and the 'New World Order' " article on Global Research.ca that war is "the ultimate (and most effective) economic shock therapy (that can) change societies and reshape nations," and that America today is embarked on achieving a long-standing vision for "global ascendancy" and supremacy. For the Trilateral Commission of "powerful" US, EU and Japanese "elites," its operative 1973 founding goal was a "New International Economic Order." For George HW Bush it became the "New World Order," and for GW Bush a permanent state of war for global hegemony.
Nazemroaya writes America's "foreign policy is based on economic interests" with military might used to enforce them. He states various US administrations have pursued "An (unbroken) agenda of perpetual warfare and violence (for) global domination through economic means." George Bush's current "war on terrorism" in the Middle East and Central Asia are just "stepping stones" toward that "global order" unipolar Pax Americana vision under which no nation is exempt.
It's nearly always been this way in a nation addicted to war and a culture of violence that's as commonplace at home as in foreign conflicts. It's in our DNA, our schools and reinforced through the media with seductive symbols and slogans glorifying wars for peace, their warriors, and righteousness of waging them. They're packaged as liberating ones, promoting democracy, and spreading the benefits of western civilization.
We're taught our essential goodness and what Edward Herman calls our status as an "indispensable state" that lets us do what no other nation may - wage perpetual wars for an elusive peace in the name of freedom and justice for all we preach but don't practice. We manipulate false notions of exceptionalism and moral superiority giving us the right to spread our ways to others while hiding our darker imperial side delivered through the barrel of a gun. It shames the notion of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people."
Expansionism and Militarism: An American Tradition
Expansionism has always been our way and militarism our method. It's been since winning the West meant taking it from the millions there thousands of years earlier. No matter. "Manifest Destiny" meant a divine right for settlers only to enjoy the nation's "spacious skies....amber waves of grain....and purple mountain majesties....from sea to shining sea." Others already there had to go, and mass slaughter was the method.
Our forefathers loathed Native Indians, and George Washington showed it in his language. He called them "red savages," compared them to wolves and "beasts of prey," and aimed to exterminate the Onieda people who aided him in his darkest hours at Valley Forge. He also dispatched General John Sullivan and 5000 troops against the noncombatant Onondaga people with orders to destroy their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds, orchards and then annihilate them and seize their land.
Hitler modeled his "Final Solution" on the "American Holocaust." He targeted Untermenschen (subhumans) and Slavs he called "redskins." We know what happened. Raphael Lemkin called it "genocide" as he first defined it in 1944 to mean:
"the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" that corresponds to other terms like "tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc." Genocide "does not necessarily mean the....destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings....It is intended....to signify a coordinated plan (to destroy the) the essential foundations of the life of national groups" with intent to destroy them. Genocidal plans involve the disintegration of....political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion....economic existence, personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and" human lives.
Throughout our history, it's been our way, and since 1990, three US Presidents waged genocidal war in Iraq to erase the "cradle of civilization" and remake it in our own image. Two and a half million are dead and counting from it, the country is plagued by out-of-control violence, one-third of its people need emergency aid, millions go hungry, and a once prosperous nation is now a surreal lawless occupied wasteland with few or no essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel and most everything else needed for sustenance and survival. That's the ugly face of "genocide" in real time.
Native peoples were its earlier victim. Puritans saw them as "brutes, devils" and "devil-worshippers" in a godless, howling wilderness filled with evil spirits and "dangerous wild beasts." They were targeted for removal as settlers moved west. They cleansed the land through violence, bloodletting and 40 Native Indian wars from 1622 - 1900 to win the West, North and South. Wars became our national pastime, and we've waged them like sport ever since in an endless unbroken cycle.
We fought four imperial ones as well from 1689 to 1763 with England, France, Spain and Holland. Throughout the period, numerous settler outbreaks and insurrections arose that were also put down along with dozens of riots. Then there were the major wars we know by name. First was the American War of Independence (or Revolutionary War) from 1775 - 83. A minority of colonists supported it, little changed, and the outcome repackaged Crown rule under new management.
The so-called War of 1812 (to early 1815) was more about American expansionism than Brits impressing our seamen. "Manifest Destiny" then became a catch phrase when Jacksonian Democrats proclaimed it in 1845 as the nation's "destiny" for all the land "from sea to shining sea." It was packaged as a noble mission, propagated as ruling orthodoxy, and used to justify other acquisitions.
We then headed south of the border from 1846 - 1848 in what Mexicans called "la invasion estadounidense" that easily self-translates as the US invasion. It was our Mexican War that began after the annexation of Texas and ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It forced Mexico to cede half its country to avoid losing it all in what's now Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Utah. The country is still cursed the way former Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, meant when he said: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States." Today that holds for all nations with a rogue superpower on the march and liberty and justice nowhere in sight.
Nor was it earlier when wars had similar aims as now with one exception. The Civil War from 1861 - 1865 was sort of a family squabble. Some squabble. Before it ended, it was our bloodiest ever. Three million were in it and over 600,000 died at a time the total population was 31 million, including 4 million slaves. That was double the battle deaths from WW II when 12 million fought from a population of 132 million, and if the same proportionate number had perished it would have been around 2.5 million.
Next came the Spanish-American War against Spain. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt (as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and later 1906 Nobel Peace Prize laureate) wrote a friend...."I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one," and the next year it began. We won, they lost and America had its coming out party on a world stage. A half century later, we control much of it, want the rest, and plan, as a birthright, to take it as disdainfully as our forefathers.
The war with Spain was quick and little more than a skirmish for three and a half months. It was our first offshore imperial foray netting us control of Cuba as a de facto colony for starters. Following the war, Congress passed the Platt Amendment in 1901. It granted us jurisdictional right to intervene freely in Cuban affairs and ceded Guantanamo Bay (as a coaling or naval station only) to the US in perpetuity (provided annual rent is paid) unless later terminated by mutual consent of both countries. It was just the beginning.
We also took the Philippines (slaughtering 200,000 of its people), Hawaii, Haiti, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Samoa, assorted other territories later and the Canal Zone from Colombia to fulfill Theodore Roosevelt's dream to link the Atlantic and Pacific with a canal across its isthmus.
Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on a campaign promise: "He Kept Us Out of War." He lied. He wanted war and established the Committee on Public Information under George Creel in 1917 to get it. It turned a pacifist nation into raging German-haters, America declared war in April, 1917 and was in it until it ended in November, 1918. This writer's dad fought in France and returned unharmed. The US empire was on a roll.
Today, mainstream historians perceive Wilson as a liberal Democrat. He was quite opposite, and his imperial record alone proves it. He occupied Haiti in 1915 beginning 20 hellish years for its people until Franklin Roosevelt withdraw US forces in 1934. He sent US troops to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and in 1914 invaded Mexico, occupying its main seaport city of Veracruz. It was a dress rehearsal for WW I and might have become a full-scale war had Wilson not pulled US forces out ahead of the greater conflict he aimed for in Europe.
The defining event of the 20th century was WW II from which the US emerged the only dominant nation left standing. We became the world's unchallengeable superpower as though we planned it that way, which we did. From it emerged our "imperial grand strategy" under the Truman Doctrine as well as a plan for US global military and economic dominance. The Cold War began with "containment" the policy. The US empire was on a roll and would never look back.
Continued.....
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 10, 2007 1:04:03 GMT 4
....continued from previous post:A Culture of Violence - by Stephen Lendman Part 2 of 2US Imperialism Post-WW II When the Cold War ended in 1991, George HW Bush's Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz were tasked to shape a new strategy that emerged in 1992 as the Defense Planning Guidance or Wolfowitz Doctrine. It was so extreme, it was kept under wraps, but not for long. It was leaked to the New York Times causing uproar enough for the elder Bush to shelve it until the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) revived it in a document called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century." It was an imperial plan for global dominance for well into the future to be enforced with unchallengeable military power. It became the blueprint for the "war on terror" and all the hot ones planned to wage it. WW II was more a beginning than an end to war. The US kept Korea and Vietnam divided and targeted independent-minded leaders. It was part of our imperial designs on East Asia that included containing Soviet Russia as well as China. It led us to incite civil wars in Korea and Vietnam expecting both times to prevail but were stalemated in one and lost the other. North Korea's Fatherland Liberation War began June 25, 1950 when the DPRK retaliated in force following months of US influenced Republic of Korean (ROK) provocations. It ended in an uneasy cease-fire July 27, 1953 and is still unresolved to this day. The North and South are technically at war, the US refuses to negotiate an honorable peace, and 57 years later 37,000 American forces are in the South with no intention to leave. Korea taught us nothing. Vietnam was next, and now we're embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan with a potentially disastrous war looming against Iran. It proves Ben Franklin right that "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results." Adventurism in Vietnam began under Truman and Eisenhower supporting France. It expanded full-blown under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before ending in a humiliating final pullout from the US Saigon Embassy rooftop April 30, 1975. The 1980s brought more conflict with Ronald Reagan's war against "international terrorism." He invaded tiny Grenada in 1983 against a left-leaning regime for a pro-western one we installed. Scorched earth proxy wars then upped the stakes in Central America, Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East. We tread lightly nowhere, and these conflicts left hundreds of thousands dead and immiserated in the name of democracy, humanitarian intervention, and the benefits of western civilization by our method of choice - gun barrels blazing. GHW Bush then followed with Panama his prey. He deposed its leader, then targeted Saddam for the only crime that mattered - disobeying the lord and master of the universe and its rules of imperial management, especially Rule No. 1: We're boss, and what we say goes. The Gulf war followed with 12 crushing years of sanctions its legacy. They left 1.5 million Iraqis dead and the living devastated. The current cycle of permanent wars began post-9/11 in October, 2001. First came the Taliban with Iraq ahead as the prime target of choice. It's huge oil reserves made it the most sought after real estate on earth with a plan to seize them simple at its core - a bold new experiment to erase a nation and create a new one by invasion, occupation and reconstruction for pillage. It would transform Iraq into a fully privatized free market paradise with blank check public funding for profit but none for Iraqis for essential needs, a sustainable economy or critical local infrastructure. It's been a disaster with the toll on Iraqis horrific - an inferno of uncontrolled violence throughout the country with new British O.R.B. independent polling data estimating 1.2 million Iraqi deaths since March, 2003 on top of the 1.5 million others since 1990. The war is now longer in duration than WWs I or II and will likely exceed the latter one in inflation-adjusted cost before it ends. It's not in sight thanks to a complicit Democrat-led Congress that's long on theater but short on action it can take but won't. Allied with the administration, it flaunts public demands to end the war, bring home the troops, and will shortly accede to another Bush supplemental request for billions more in funding. Public sentiment might be stronger if Jeff Nygaard's June, 2007 Z Magazine article titled "The Secret Air Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" got wider play, so here's hoping this article gives it some. He explained US Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) posts its daily "airpower summaries" online that makes for horrifying reading "aside (from) the blatant propaganda." Nygaard explained "relentless" air attacks against Iran and Afghanistan have gone on for years - on average 75 - 100 each day against both countries. It's a huge unreported story in the dominant media. The death toll is unknown, he says, "but a reasonable estimate" is between 100,000 - 150,000 in Iraq alone, and it's anyone's guess in Afghanistan. That's on top of all other war-related deaths estimated in both countries. Further, these attacks exclude "guided missiles and unguided rockets fired....cannon rounds (and) munitions used by some Marine Corps and other 'coalition' aircraft or any of the Army's helicopter gunships (plus) munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many 'private (mercenary hired gun) security contractors' flying their own missions in Iraq." If the true human toll were known, it might be shockingly above the most gruesome current estimates and growing daily. The public has a right to know this, and Congress is obligated to find out, tell them, cut off all funding and end two illegal wars of aggression. Instead, Democrats and Republicans back a further administration aggression against Iran in spite of silenced high level opposition to it. It may come from two large nuclear-armed US carrier strike groups conducting provocative exercises near Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Medditerranean. Washington makes no secret it wants regime change in Iran, and time is running out for the Bush administration to get it. For months, covert black operations have been ongoing inside the country. It's aimed to incite internal ethnic and political opposition, and CIA operatives have also been sending Baluchi tribal warriors from neighboring Pakistan on terror raids into neighboring Iranian areas. Now 350 British forces have been provocatively sent from Basra to the volatile Iranian border, and the Pentagon announced it's building a US base and fortified checkpoints nearby as well. General Petraeus also implied to Congress he'll act inside Iranian territory to stop its "proxy war" against US Iraqi forces. In the meantime, Iran claims Washington backs Israeli-trained Kurdish Party for Free Life (PJAK) as well as Arab, Azeri and Baluchi incursions inside their territory to undermine its leadership, provoke a response, and provide cover for a US attack. Without a touch of irony, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi held four hours of face-to-face talks in Baghdad in May that was the first official bilateral meeting between the countries in almost three decades. It amounted to nothing more than the usual US duplicity that pointed to what's now happening and likely to escalate. Earlier, George Bush demanded and will soon get harsher US-imposed sanctions through the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007 that's designed to strangle the country economically. He earlier signed off on a commitment of economic destabilization through media-driven propaganda, now heightened, as well as manipulation of Iran's currency and international transactions. That, in turn, just prompted Tehran in response to demand foreign energy companies do business in euros and yen. So far, it's anyone's guess what's ahead with war a real possibility. The Bush administration is pounding Iran with menacing claims of meddling in Iraq and covertly advancing a nuclear weapons program despite having no proof of either. Whatever's planned could be devastating to the region (and world economy if oil shipments are disrupted), and the kinds of options being considered may cause dire unintended consequences if the worst of them involving nuclear weapons are used. Bill Clinton's 1990s Balkan wars took their toll earlier at a time most people shamefully bought the US-led NATO propaganda of a good war against a demonized enemy and a well-intentioned intervention to remove him. It divided and destroyed a country under the guise of humanitarian intervention that provided cover for naked imperialism. Most observers on the left got it wrong and still don't know NATO (meaning the US) committed illegal aggression to expand into Central and Eastern Europe. The Balkan wars kept predatory capitalism on a roll for more new markets, resources and cheap exploitable labor by the same ugly methods of choice - wars, subversion or coercion with "uncooperative" leaders like Slobadon Milosevic playing fall guy. He ended up abducted to the Hague and hung out to dry by the ICTY US-run kangaroo court that silenced him (like Saddam in Baghdad) so his secrets went to the grave with him. So much for democracy in a nation stained by a near-unblemished record of illegal aggression throughout its history and in every post-WW II conflict fought. The only exception was the so-called 1991 Gulf war. It was authorized, as required, by the Security Council but only through bribes and coercion. The US public opposed it until a lot of Kuwaiti government PR massaging turned it around, and the rest is history. The Harmful Effects of Imperialism at Home The price at home has been high as well with democracy here just as fake as wherever we leave our imperial footprint. Ordinary Americans are the losers. Repressive laws and crumbling social services are their reward for patriotism. Then there's the military and what's diverted to fund it. Annual Pentagon budgets are soaring with the FY 2008 DOD one calling for an astonishing $648.8 billion plus an additional $147.5 billion war supplemental and around $50 billion or more now requested. The final total will likely top out over $850 billion with the usual pork factored in and Congress ready to authorize whatever more is needed. Then come the 16 US spy agencies and their secret off-the-books budgets. CIA, NSA and the others get tens of billions more without accountability. The CIA is an especially out-of-control, rogue agency accountable only to the President. Post-WW II, it began intervening throughout the world covertly and overtly. No dirty trick is off the table, and CIA invented their fair share of them. It uses them spying, fomenting and supporting wars, deposing foreign heads of state, and now they're in play on US soil against American citizens. Noted academic and administration critic, Chalmers Johnson, calls the agency "the president's private army" serving in the same capacity as imperial Rome's praetorian guard. The agency is secret and lawless, unaccountable to the public, Congress or the courts with intelligence gathering a sideline operation at most. Since it was created in 1947, but especially now, CIA has an appalling record of toppling democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and other key officials, propping up friendly dictators, and now snatching targeted individuals for "extraordinary rendition" to secret torture-prison hellholes from which many won't emerge or ever get justice. It takes lots of cover-up and myth-building to create the illusion America wants peace, is "beautiful," and respects the law and rights of people everywhere. The truth is quite opposite abroad and at home where essential needs go unmet and violence is a way of life. It recently showed up in the newly launched Global Peace Index's (GPI) ranking of 121 nations. It was prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an international panel of peace experts from peace institutes and think tanks, and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. It aims to "highlight the relationship between Global Peace and Sustainability (stressing) unless we can achieve" a peaceful world, humanity's major challenges won't be solved. GPI ranked nations by their relative internal and external "peacefulness" using 24 indicators. They include its: -- military expenditures as a percent of GDP and number of armed service personnel per 100,000 population; -- number of external and internal wars including the estimated number of deaths from them externally and internally; -- relations with other countries; -- respect for human rights; -- potential for terrorist acts; -- number of homicides per 100,000 population including infanticide; -- level of violent crime; -- aggregate number of heavy weapons per 100,000 population and ease of access to small arms and light weapons; -- number of jailed population per 100,000 population; and -- number of internal security officers and police per 100,000 population. The US was a shocking 96th in the overall rankings - to the naive and innocent, that is. Norway, New Zealand and Denmark scored best in that order while Iraq ranked lowest followed by Sudan and Israel, that should be a wake-up call for its supporters. Violence in America - A Way of Life at Home and Abroad This article began with a snapshot account of our violent history and culture. So much is in our communities and homes that it's easy selling foreign wars to people used to settling disputes confrontationally, not calmly. It may start with bloody noses in school yards or playgrounds. It's then made to seem commonplace in films and on prime time TV where assaults, violent crime, murder and even torture are everyday forms of entertainment. Then there's sports. The most popular ones involve contact, often brutal, with one played on ice once described as a fight with occasional hockey breaking out. Television features sports of all kinds, the more violent the better. Studies show nearly every home has at least one TV set, and 54% of children have their own in their bedrooms. They spend 28 hours a week on average watching, double the time spent in school, so they learn more about life through the media than anywhere else. Before age 18, the average American child sees 200,000 acts of violence on TV including 16,000 murders, and studies show homicide rates doubled 10 - 15 years after television was introduced. They also link the following potential adverse effects to excessive media exposure: -- increased violent behavior; -- impaired school performance; -- increased sexual activity and use of tobacco and alcohol; and -- decreased family communication among other negative influences unrelated to violence. A National Television Violence Study showed two-thirds of children's programming had violence, three-fourths of it went unpunished, and most often victims weren't shown experiencing pain. Even more disturbing, the study identified nearly half the violence children see is in TV cartoons. They're most often portrayed in humor with victims hardly ever experiencing long-term consequences. There's more: -- Unsurprisingly, it's no different on the big screen as film studios produce entertainment for theater viewing and at home. -- There's a great, but unmeasurable, amount of different types of violence online, including pedophile cyber-seduction on unsuspecting, vulnerable children leading to sexual assaults. -- Studies show violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Mortal Kombat can increase aggressive thoughts, beliefs and behavior both in laboratory settings and real life. They're even worse than TV or films because they're interactive and engrossing. They get players to identify with aggressors since they act like them while playing. These games teach violence. Many young people play them often and parents allow it. It's no wonder they become aggressive and continue the same behavior later as adults for real. -- Music also teaches violence. The Parents Music Resource Center reports teenagers hear an estimated 10,500 hours of rock music between grades 7 and 12 alone or nearly as much time as they spend in school. Entertainment Monitor reported three-fourths of popular CDs sold in 1995 included profanity or lyrics about drugs, violence and sex with some popular rap artists' music glorifying guns, rape and murder. With this as backdrop after 500 years of belligerency, it's no wonder violence in the country and attitudes toward it are out of control. The record includes harsh private and government homeland crackdowns against dissidents, labor, minorities, street protesters, rioters, ethnic or religious groups and others plus all the one-on-one confrontations as well. For centuries, violence was monstrous against our Native peoples and nearly exterminated them all. It was used against black slaves as well with whippings, other beatings, rapes, mutilations, forced family separations and even amputations as punishment for runaways. Post-slavery, the pattern continued, mostly in the South, under forced Jim Crow segregation that enforced white supremacy over blacks that played out violently for those "stepping out of line." A snapshot of recent data on violent crimes provides more evidence. It comes from the Department of Justice (DOJ), other sources, and shows the following: -- 960,000 violent acts against a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend and up to three million women physically abused by their husband, male partner or boyfriend annually; -- in 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner; -- intimate violence is mainly a crime against women accounting for 85% of these incidences; -- women are up to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner; -- in 2001, 20% of violent crimes against women were by intimate partners; -- up to 324,000 women experience intimate partner violence during pregnancy; -- women of all races are about equally vulnerable to intimate partner violence; -- women are up to 14 times more likely than men to report suffering severe physical assaults from an intimate partner; -- 20% of female high school students report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner and 40% of 14 - 17 year old girls report knowing someone their age struck or beaten by a boyfriend; -- in a national survey of 6000 American families, 50% of the men who frequently assaulted their wives also abused their children; -- studies show up to 10 million children witness some form of domestic violence annually; -- over half a million women report being stalked annually by an intimate partner while 80% stalked by former husbands are physically assaulted and 30% sexually assaulted by that partner; -- the FBI divides violent crime into four categories: "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault." It uses the International Association of Chiefs of Police Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program's definition of violent crime as involving force or threat of force. The annual data show these crimes topped one million in 1975 and from the mid-1980s ranged from around 1.5 - 1.9 million annually; -- since 1975, annual violent crimes of murder and reported rape ranged from around 100,000 - 130,000; -- Every year over the past century, 10% or more of all crimes committed were violent ones; and -- More Americans killed other Americans at home than the total death toll from all foreign wars in our history combined. Violence, of course, becomes ingrained in the culture. It leads to crackdowns against society's least "worthy" victims of state-sponsored repression. It made America the incarceration capital of the world with over 2.2 million in our homeland "gulag" prison system today, a greater number than in China with four times our population and a history of governments not known for gentleness toward those breaking its rules. Here 1000 new inmates weekly join others locked in cages, most for non-violent offenses. They're brutalized by prison guards and other inmates while there and become more likely to exact revenge on release for society's unjust treatment. Many, in fact, do and end up back in prison for longer sentences. This kind of information and our national predilection for violence isn't taught in schools or explained in the media. Instead we accept the illusion of "American exceptionalism," moral superiority, and innate goodness in a nation chosen by the Almighy to lead the world. That's provided it's by rules made in Washington with people everywhere told accept them, or else. Going to war, we're told, is a last resort choice and one never taken lightly. It's to liberate the oppressed, bring democracy when we arrive, and target "national security" threats too great to ignore. It takes powerful propaganda persuasion convincing people to accept this, but it's made easier if they're already predisposed to violence and receptive to more of it. Five centuries at home and abroad add up to potent conditioning, but the dangers were less threatening earlier than now. Today's super-weapons make older ones look like toys. They leave no margin of error, and if we slip up we'll endanger what Noam Chomsky calls "biology's only experiment with higher intelligence." Unless we confront the threat to our survival from foreign wars and a violent culture accustomed to them, we face what Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell warned 50 years ago saying: "Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war" and a culture of violence and live in peace because no other way is possible.Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also, visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.From: sjlendman.blogspot.com/Note from Michelle: And what type of leader has our culture of violence given us? Please go to today's post and read more at:Re: The Immoral Presidency of George W. Bush « Reply #53 on Today [10/09/07]at 12:55am »
Commentary: Bush fulfills H.L. Mencken's prophecyBy Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers Posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 Go To:airdance.proboards50.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=america&thread=1126880472&page=4"What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world."
— Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
"More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Feb 25, 2008 12:53:10 GMT 4
Taxi to the Dark SideHearty congratulations to Alex Gibney, Director of Taxi to the Dark Side who just won the oscar for best documentary, wearing an orange ribbon against torture.Gibney's speech: "Wow. Thank you very much, Academy. Here's to all doc filmmakers. And, truth is, I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I'd make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition that simply wasn't possible. This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let's hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light. Thank you very much." See the film: www.taxitothedarkside.com/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Alex Gibney in Conversation With Robert ScheerFrom:www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20080224_alex_gibney_in_conversation_with_robert_scheer/Posted on Feb 24, 2008 Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer interviews documentarian Alex Gibney about this year’s Academy Award winning documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a compelling examination of the circumstances that led Americans to commit torture. Transcript:Robert Scheer: Hi, it’s Robert Scheer, Editor of Truthdig. I’ve interviewed a lot of people, but I’m really excited to talk to Alex Gibney here, because I have enormous admiration for your work, and I’m not just blowing smoke here. I thought your film “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, was just about the best way to teach about the American economy. I use it in classes. It’s a great film. You worked as the producer, the executive producer, on “No End in Sight,” which is also this Sunday up for an Academy Award for documentary, competing against the film that you directed, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which I think is the most compelling movie, certainly in the last 10 years, maybe one of the most compelling movies ever made, about the subject of torture. And I want to tell people you can see it up the road, maybe you can rent it, see it in some theaters. Alex Gibney: It’s in some theaters now. Scheer: It can win the Academy Award. Gibney: And then it will come back again, and soon, this fall, it will be on HBO. Scheer: And it will be on Link TV for those who get Link where they are. What I felt compelling about this movie—first I wasn’t going to see it. I only saw it because we were going to do a discussion after I watched and thought it was going to bum me out. Gibney: See the problem. Scheer: I know the problem. We all avoid seeing it, and I didn’t have any trouble watching it, because, I don’t want to use the word educational. ... I kept learning, I kept learning about human beings. And what’s compelling about this movie is you get inside the heads of people who did the torturing. Gibney: That’s right. Scheer: And some of them fall apart. Why don’t you talk about that? Gibney: Well, generally speaking, I’m more interested in perps than the victims. It was that way with Enron, too. I was interested in these traders who broke down the California grid. I was interested in actually what made Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling tick. And in the case of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” I was interested in these guys who brutally tortured and murdered this young Afghan taxicab driver. And some of them were interrogators, some of them were military police. They had felt scapegoated because the people who either condoned or ordered [them] to do what they did weren’t even investigated, much less convicted of anything. So I think that gave them a motivation—. Scheer: Right up to the president of—. Gibney: Right up to the president of the United States. So in talking about—. Scheer: So for people who haven’t seen the film, we should stress that. Some of these guys are kids. Gibney: They’re all kids. And they had exactly one day of guard training, these guards. And the interrogators sometimes had three-four hours of interrogation training before they performed their first interrogation. That gives you some sense of the kind of science of interrogation and detention that we were dealing with. There were kids thrown into a situation at a time when the Bush administration were saying the gloves were off, there are no rules anymore, forget the rules, throw out the rules. Just get the information however you can. And so these kids went into that situation and were being pushed harder and harder by their superior officers. One sergeant told one of these kids, “Take that prisoner out of his comfort zone ... ,” meaning, beat him up. And in retrospect, they’re deeply haunted by what they have seen and what they did. As one very big, burly guard said, “I wish I had done stuff according to my own morality instead of what was common.” Scheer: But these are kids who’ve never been out of the country before? Some may have found themselves—. Gibney: A lot of them were National Guard and suddenly they’re in a foreign country, where bullets are flying and your buddies are dying. ... Scheer: Now this taxi driver, he was totally innocent? Gibney: That’s one of the things of this story that have always haunted me. There are two things that will always haunt me. One is, this kid, he’s a 122-pound kid, he was 22 years old, I believe. He was driving home in his taxi and was picked up by Afghan militia, turned over to American forces. [The Americans were told] that he was responsible for a rocket attack. It turned out that the people who turned him over were the ones who launched the rocket attack. The Americans didn’t know it. They tortured him so badly that, they beat him so badly that ultimately he died of his injuries after five days. On the third day, though, they discovered he was innocent and, for another two days, they tormented him until he died. They literally kicked his legs so often that they became pulpified. Scheer: Even though they knew he was innocent? Gibney: Even though they know he was innocent. And that was one of the things—. Scheer: It was that the inner barbarian had been released? Gibney: I think so. There is kind of a momentum to torture, as later on I discovered in the process of making this film. They have a term, it’s called “forced drift,” and so when you’re interrogating somebody, you’re trying to get information out of somebody and they don’t give you it, then you ramp it up. Particularly if there are no rules to guide you. And then you go more and more. And the next thing you know, you’re starting to brutalize somebody because they’re no longer a human being. And the military does understand this, and that’s why the military had rules in place, because you want a disciplined unit. You don’t want a mob, a lynch mob, in effect. But the Bush administration removed those guidelines. ... Scheer: And in your movie, you interviewed people who were higher up, but not the highest? Gibney: We go up the chain of command. Scheer: You go to Colin Powell’s chief of staff. Gibney: We go to Colin Powell’s chief of staff. And also Alberto Mora, who was a former general counselor for the Navy. We also talked to the commanding officer of Guantanamo. And the man inside the Bush administration who was responsible for manipulation of all the laws, or at least manipulating the interpretations of all the laws. So that we could imagine a policy of torture and so the people at the top of the administration could elude prosecution for war crimes. Scheer: You know what I was thinking is, why your film is not being discussed in the presidential debate. If you think about it, the whole image of the United States has been tarnished, maybe like it’s never been before, by this torture. ... And here we have a campaign going on, a presidential campaign, and here it sounds like only a marginal issue. Gibney: I don’t understand it either. At its fundamental ... there are two things that are fundamental about this film. One is, it’s about how you fight the war on terror, and how badly it’s being fought now. It’s also, it’s about corruption of the rule of law, which is so essential to who we are and who we want to be, I think. ... Scheer: Which, by the way, is what the war on terror is supposed to be all about ... Gibney: That’s right. Scheer: ... to educate the people of the world about limits, about the rule of law, about discipline. Gibney: That’s right. Scheer: But on your first point, about how we fight the war on terror, what your movie shows is really how we get bad information? Gibney: That’s right. Scheer: This is really an exercise about not being alert to the truth about how you are attacking, why you are attacking. It’s getting information that will support your president’s exploitation of 9/11. Gibney: Ultimately, torture can be a political tool. That’s where it’s been most dangerous. When you start to get the information you want to hear because you’re coercing people, then it’s undergirding your policies ... not only that it’s covering up your mistakes. You think you got the wrong guy? You know you got the wrong guy? Oh, my God! Torture him until he’ll confess. Then he’s no longer the wrong guy. Now he’s the right guy. He’s one of the worst of the worst. Scheer: Let me ask you a question. You’re a producer for one film that’s up for an Academy Award this Sunday night, and you’re a director for another. You’re up against Michael Moore. There’s some competition here. You have to give Michael Moore credit for opening up the documentary field, don’t you? Gibney: I give Michael Moore credit. I had dinner with him last night. I give him tremendous credit for opening up the field. He created the sense that documentaries can be commercial. My film about Enron was a big commercial success. And my documentary on Enron gave me freedom; it allowed me to say it the way I wanted to say it because it was entertaining enough that it could be commercially viable. It’s been great. And Michael’s done other terrific stuff. He has a film festival, the Traverse City [Mich.] Film Festival. A couple of my films have been shown there. Interesting crowds; not all Democrats—Republicans. ... There’s a sense of possibility that these documentaries, as they get to be more and more entertaining but also more informative, give people stuff that they normally don’t get in the TV media, at the very least. People are starting to get interested. So Michael, I think, has done a tremendously good job of being a kind of blocking back for the rest of us who follow through the lines. Scheer: So even though you guys are going for the big prize here—I mean, it’s very important to be nominated for an Academy Award. It will help your film, help your career in the best way, you’d be able to make other good movies. But winning the Academy Award is a pretty big deal. You already were nominated for an Academy Award? Gibney: I lost to the penguins ["March of the Penguins"] last time. It would be nice to win this time. Scheer: But you guys—. Gibney: But at the same time, Michael did a nice thing last night. He took all of us out to dinner. All five of the nominees sat down and broke bread. It was great. And so there’s a pretty collegial spirit. But because Michael’s a celebrity, they’re seating him separately from the rest of us [at the awards show]. That didn’t go down too well with us. But I think everything else about it feels pretty collegial. We’ll see who wins, but at this point being nominated is to be in a pretty good group. Scheer: And since the voting has already taken place, what did you think about the other documentaries? Gibney: I liked them. ... I liked them all. They were different, and it was intriguing for me. I voted because I’m a member of the academy. And I can tell you I voted for myself. But the other ones were good. Scheer: By the way, I don’t mind being on record saying that from the ones I’ve seen, yours is the most important. Not just because of the subject being the most important, but you deal with it, as you said before, in a way that makes it accessible. If it was a dreary project, crying-type movie, which it could be—. Gibney: It’s kind of like a detective story: You follow the murder. Scheer: You humanize the torturers as well as the tortured. That’s what I felt was absolutely compelling about this documentary, and I’m encouraging people if they haven’t seen it to try to get to see it. I remember in the old days, when I used to go to Academy Award things, I remember seeing “Panama” and it took me two months to get a copy of it. Gibney: “Panama Deception”? Scheer: Yeah. To actually see it. At that time, you made a documentary and nobody saw it. At this time, people are seeing them. Gibney: People are seeing them. Scheer: Your film got a bigger distribution because you won a film festival, right? Gibney: Right. I won the Tribeca Film Festival [in 2007]. Out of Tribeca, a distributor picked it up. It’s available in theaters. Hopefully, if it wins an Oscar, more theaters will open it up. HBO will show it. Scheer: What about the formula Robert Greenwald used, where he had MoveOn distribute the film, the DVD? Gibney: MoveOn, he had them do these things, I can’t remember what they’re called, these little groups. Scheer: Well, how about sending it out through Truthdig? Win or lose, we’ll make an offer. Gibney: Maybe ... maybe ... maybe that’s what we should do ... OK. People see it right now: the beginning of a conspiracy. Scheer: All right, Alex. Thanks for bringing us to the cesspool and having us look deep down into it. Gibney: Looking right down to the bottom. My specialty: films that will make you sick. [Laughter]
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Apr 7, 2008 8:57:42 GMT 4
The Upside of Nationalism By David Sirota In These Times Friday 04 April 2008 America-first fervor could be the driving force behind economic populism. You don't need to listen to presidential speeches or watch party attack ads to know that full-throated nationalism is now lodged in the ideological center of American politics. Look at social networking expert Valdis Krebs' January chart to see what we - the royal We - are reading. Krebs amassed data from Amazon.com, examining what other titles buyers of conservative and liberal political books purchased in 2007. Most of this "also bought" data showed buyers of one liberal book buying other liberal books - and conservatives doing the same on their side. Krebs' chart, which draws a line connecting each "also bought" book, looks like a dumbbell, with two big clusters on the right and left - a cliché of the media's "polarized America" meme. However, right in the middle are two books that both liberals and conservatives purchased: War on the Middle Class and Independents Day by Lou Dobbs, America's most famous nationalist. As economic anxiety grips America, the controversial CNN anchor vents history's conservative and liberal expressions of contemporary nationalism - an ideology built around a self-interested, America-first fervor. When Dobbs tilts right, he rails against undocumented immigrants and "broken borders," tapping into nationalism's law-and-order pride and its xenophobic-tinged desire for cultural stasis that typically spikes during recessions. When he goes populist, he is the only major TV journalist in America to express nationalism's disdain for global economic policies written by, and for, a transnational elite. As evidenced by his surging ratings, Dobbs reflects powerful mass emotions. And thanks to the presidential election, some of those emotions may forge a political mandate. The key word is "some," because the GOP nominee will be Arizona Sen. John McCain. Unlike most congressional Republicans, McCain has shied away from the anti-immigrant edge of today's nationalism, effectively shoving the most extreme immigration positions off the presidential stage, at least in 2008. Thus, today's nationalistic sentiment will likely crystallize as economic nationalism - good news for progressives. "What Do We Do Now?" As the campaign wends its way through the heartland's crumbling factory towns, the election is pivoting on debates over globalization and economic sovereignty. Polls from the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine show that voters of both parties have had it with trade policies that they believe help other countries and slash jobs and wages here at home. A February Bloomberg poll found that by two-to-one, Americans say acquisitions of U.S. companies by other countries' so-called "sovereign wealth" funds have a negative impact on our economy. More than two-thirds said that "allowing foreign investment in U.S. companies gives foreign governments too much control over the U.S. market." With blue-collar swing states central to both the nominating and general election contests, the Democratic candidates have responded forcefully to this ferment, sometimes even trampling their own records. Before the Ohio primary, both Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) were applauded for promising to reform America's trade policy. Clinton, pretending she never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), even held a press conference to feign outrage that anyone would remind the public about her repeated speeches championing NAFTA. If the Democrats win, they will take the White House thanks to economic nationalism and their ability to amplify it with a populist message. But when the election ends, many who supported that message will be asking the question actor Robert Redford famously asked in The Candidate: "What do we do now?" Specifically, how will rhetorical populism be cobbled into a concrete agenda, and how can economic nationalism be successfully legislated? The answer is in how we trade, tax and spend. The Trade Transformation In the early '90s, economic nationalism spiked. Gallup polls showed almost half of all Americans saw free trade policies as "a threat to the economy." Around this time, Bill Clinton was campaigning for president on a promise to oppose trade preferences for China and NAFTA until China and Mexico improved their wages, environmental standards and human rights. Meanwhile, Texas billionaire Ross Perot was demanding the government "impose a 'social tariff' at a level equal to the difference between the wage paid in the developing nation and the wage paid in the United States for comparable work." As the tech boom of the mid-'90s hit, the number of Americans seeing free trade as a threat dipped to about a third, and the Clinton administration used the lull to ram NAFTA and China trade preferences through Congress. Now, however, Gallup's numbers have returned to early '90s levels. And unlike before, the economy doesn't look ready for a fast recovery. At a bare minimum, today's surge in economic nationalism will likely stop Congress from passing more NAFTA-style agreements. Such a "time out" is not the wave of protectionism that corporate interests claim it is, nor is it any move toward new tariffs, social or otherwise. But stopping the current trade trajectory would be significant progress. A Three-Pronged Approach More proactively, a three-pronged package of reforms has a realistic chance of moving forward. First, a proposal by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) would make new trade agreements harder to pass "unless they are accompanied by a more thorough financial analysis," as the Washington Post reported. Their bill would end the practice of flying blindly into the free trade abyss by forcing the government to provide estimates of potential job losses with any trade pact. (That's right - Congress currently makes trade policy without even asking what the consequences are.) Second, for pacts that do pass, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) is developing a proposal that would give nonprofit groups and individuals the same enforcement powers that corporations currently enjoy. Ellison floated a truncated version of this concept during the 2007 debate over the Peru Free Trade Agreement, arguing that if a trade deal gives a corporation the right to sue in international courts for enforcement of investor rights (copyrights, patents, intellectual property, etc.), then individuals and advocacy organizations should also have the same right to sue for enforcement of other rights (labor, environmental, etc.). A Democratic administration could incorporate this forward thinking into the core text of any future trade pact. Finally, there are the concerns about foreign economic influence. The 2006 brouhaha over a Dubai company attempting to buy a group of American ports focused the public's attention on the larger issue of state-owned companies and investment funds buying up large segments of the American economy. Today, these sovereign wealth funds hold $2.5 trillion in assets, and Morgan Stanley estimates they could hold $17 trillion within a decade. Many fear that these state-controlled entities, which often operate in secret, could use such assets as a political weapon. Unlike the typical investor concerned only with the bottom line, foreign governments have agendas beyond making a buck. They could easily push companies to behave in ways that are politically advantageous to the owner country. That nationalist concern has led to congressional hearings, and according to Financial Week, some Democratic legislators appear poised to introduce a bill to strengthen the weak regulatory regime that currently oversees these international economic transactions. Redefining "Tax and Spend" Since 2004, when Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) lambasted "Benedict Arnold" companies that move jobs and operations overseas to avoid taxes, tax reform in the name of economic nationalism has become a staple of Democratic Party orthodoxy. Now, that orthodoxy has a bill name. The Patriot Corporation Act, a bill sponsored by Obama, would provide tax advantages and federal contracting preferences to companies that maintain their operations and employment base in the United States. This renewed effort to legislatively distinguish - and target - companies based on geographic employment and tax decisions started in 2002 with two little-noticed bills. Back then, Connecticut tool company Stanley Works was making plans to exploit a tax loophole and officially reincorporate in Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The story spurred a local outbreak of economic nationalism, and, in response, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) passed a high-profile amendment banning federal contracts from going to companies that perform such "inversions," as they are called. At the same time, Reps. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) forced a House vote on their bill to ban the government's Export-Import Bank from continuing to subsidize companies that are simultaneously reducing their domestic workforce and increasing their foreign workforce. Both initiatives were ultimately killed, as was Sanders' follow-up in the Senate in 2007, when he authored legislation to prohibit companies that announce mass domestic layoffs from receiving H-1B visas that allow them to import foreign workers at lower wages. The rise of economic nationalism could help these kinds of spending limitation bills make a big comeback - and not just in Congress. In January, Oklahoma Rep. Rebecca Hamilton (D-Oklahoma City) introduced a bill to prohibit her state from contracting with any company that has shut down domestic facilities and opened up foreign ones, unless that company agrees to comply with American wage, safety and human rights standards. Hamilton has smartly wrapped her initiative in the immigration issue. She notes that one of the root causes of illegal immigration is corporate exploitation of foreign countries' poor standards, which forces many people to cross the border in search of better conditions. "The state of Oklahoma is basically targeting Hispanic people and other immigrants when we should be targeting the companies that take advantage of lax border enforcement to exploit lower-wage workers in both countries," Hamilton says. That message and her bill are easily replicable, and may serve as a national model in state legislatures across the country. Neutral "Nationalism" Admittedly, the term "nationalism" can elicit legitimate fear. The impulse to prioritize the home nation over everything else has an ugly side, one that at least some members of the media seem interested in stoking, as shown by the recurring hysteria over Obama's multinational and religious heritage. Indeed, in February, Time's Mark Halperin advised Republicans to "emphasize Barack Hussein Obama's unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism." But as with most impulses, nationalism is really value neutral. It can be used for both horrific and terrific causes, and today's political tectonics suggest the chance for the latter to ascend over the former. Progressive populism has proven to be an electoral force nationwide. Congress and state legislatures are designing an agenda that turns today's economic nationalism into a legislative program. Last month, a coalition of progressive groups launched a national antiwar campaign to make the public see Iraq War spending as the cause of the recession and underinvestment here at home - a nationalist, America-first message at its core. And because the war is sending so much money overseas, Republicans attempting to appease their "fiscal conservative" base could be increasingly unwilling to obstruct measures that reduce corporate welfare and redirect taxpayer resources to the homeland. In short, American politics is perfectly aligned to help progressives use nationalism for our economic agenda. David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," will be released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network - both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota. Source: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040608Z.shtml
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 29, 2008 16:13:37 GMT 4
Some Items Concerning Memorial Day
I let Memorial Day pass with no post.....Yeah well, it's impossible to keep up with the daily spin and I refuse to try anymore, especially since all I do here is....what....basically charity work. So, I let it pass in favor of working in my gardens and playing outside under a beautiful sky.
Anyway, I have some time this morning and a few things came to my attention concerning our most recent holiday. First, a video and plea from champion activist and friend, Monique...Please give her your attention; she works hard for all of us.
And finally an enlightening article which states that Memorial Day, in the 1950's, was a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. That's a new one on me. I couldn't find anything regarding that statement; but I could see how they wouldn't want to tell us that. While Waterloo N.Y. was officially declared the birthplace of Memorial Day by President Lyndon Johnson in May 1966, it's difficult to prove conclusively the origins of the day. It is more likely that it had many separate beginnings in the 1860's when towns planned spontaneous gatherings of people to honor the dead from the Civil War. Back to the point, this article offers much to think about.
MichelleFriends,
Perhaps you do not know but for the second year in a row we were not allowed to get the space we always had at the Constitution Center for our tombstones display. Why? Nathan Hot Dog has been holding a hot dog eating contest . Yes, on Memorial Day, on the side of a tombstones display in honor of the Fallen. Forget (not) that many people do not have anything to eat in America yet some are stuffing their faces for a contest? But to have the guts to do this on this solemn day while people mourn their loved one and visit the display in search for a name, I find this scandalous.
Please write Nathan at: e-mail:cs@nathansfamous.com
And watch below my video of the day: A Sea Of Tombstones: The Cost of WarAdded: May 28, 2008 Memorial Day 2008 in Philadelphia where over 2,000 tombstones were displayed on the lawn of the Constitution Center. The display was to honor all of the Fallen and in particulary those who lost their lives in Iraq. This was put together by the Delaware Valley Veterans For America: DelValVets4America,org/ SEE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpnWPmWIhHAThank you, Monique[/b] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ War Immemorial DayTuesday 27 May 2008 by: Bill Quigley, t r u t h o u t | Perspective Memorial Day is not actually a day to pray for US troops who died in action, but rather a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. The 1950 Joint Resolution of Congress, which created Memorial Day, says, "Requesting the President to issue a proclamation designating May 30, Memorial Day, as a day for a Nation-wide prayer for peace." (64 Stat.158). Peace today is a nearly impossible challenge for the United States. The US is far and away the most militarized country in the world and the most aggressive. Unless the US dramatically reduces its emphasis on global military action, there will be many, many more families grieving on future Memorial Days. The US spends over $600 billion annually on our military, more than the rest of the world combined. China, our nearest competitor, spends about one-tenth of what we spend. The US also sells more weapons to other countries than any other nation in the world. The US has about 700 military bases in 130 countries worldwide, and another 6,000 bases in the US and our territories, according to Chalmers Johnson in his excellent book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (2007). The Department of Defense (DOD) reports nearly 1.4 million active duty military personnel today. Over a quarter of a million are in other countries from Iraq and Afghanistan to Europe, North Africa, South Asia and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. The DOD also employs more than 700,000 civilian employees. The US has used its armed forces abroad over 230 times, according to researchers at the Department of the Navy Historical Center. Their publications list over 60 military efforts outside the US since World War II. While the focus of most of the Memorial Day activities will be on US military dead, no effort is made to try to identify or remember the military or civilians of other countries, who have died in the same actions. For example, the US government reports 432 US military dead in Afghanistan and surrounding areas, but has refused to disclose civilian casualties. "We don't do body counts," General Tommy Franks said. Most people know of the deaths in World War I - 116,000 US soldiers killed. But how many in the US know that over eight million soldiers from other countries, and perhaps another eight million civilians also died during World War II? By World War II, about 408,000 US soldiers were killed. Worldwide, at least another 20 million soldiers and civilians died. The US is not only the largest and most expensive military on the planet, but it is also the most active. Since World War II, the US has used US military force in the following countries:1947-1949 Greece. Over 500 US armed forces military advisers were sent into Greece to administer hundreds of millions of dollars in their civil war. 1947-1949 Turkey. Over 400 US armed forces military advisers sent into Turkey, 1950-1953 Korea. In the Korean War and other global conflicts, 54,246 US service members died. 1957-1975 Vietnam. Over 58,219 US killed. 1958-1984 Lebanon. Sixth Fleet amphibious Marines and US Army troops landed in Beirut during their civil war. Over 3,000 US military participated. 268 US military killed in bombing. 1959 Haiti. US troops, Marines and Navy, landed in Haiti and joined in support of military dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier against rebels. 1962 Cuba. Naval and Marine forces blockade island. 1964 Panama. US troops stationed there since 1903. US troops used gunfire and tear gas to clear US Canal Zone. 1965-1966 Dominican Republic. US troops landed in the Dominican Republic during their civil war - eventually 23,000 were stationed in their country. 1969-1975 Cambodia. US and South Vietnam jets dropped more than 539,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia - three times the number dropped on Japan during WWII. 1964-1973 Laos. US flew 580,000 bombing runs over the country - more than two million tons of bombs dropped - double the amount dropped on Nazi Germany. US dropped more than 80 million cluster bombs on Laos - 10 to 30 percent did not explode, leaving 8 to 24 million scattered across the country. Since the war stopped, two or three Laotians are killed every month by leftover bombs - over 5,700 killed since the bombing stopped. 1980 Iran. Operation Desert One, eight US troops die in rescue effort. 1981 Libya. US planes aboard the Nimitz shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra. 1983 Grenada. US Army and Marines invaded - 19 US killed. 1983 Lebanon. Over 1,200 Marines deployed into the country during their civil war. 241 US service members killed in bombing. 1983-1991 El Salvador. Over 150 US soldiers participate in their civil war as military advisers. 1983 Honduras. Over 1,000 troops and National Guard members deployed into Honduras to help the contra fight against Nicaragua. 1986 Libya. US Naval airstrikes hit hundreds of targets - airfields, barracks and defense networks. 1986 Bolivia. US Army troops assist in anti-drug raids on cocaine growers. 1987 Iran. Operation Nimble Archer. US warships shelled two Iranian oil platforms during Iran-Iraq war. 1988 Iran. US naval warship Vincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down Iranian passenger airliner, Airbus A300, killing all 290 people on board. US said it thought it was an Iranian military jet. 1989 Libya. US Naval jets shot down two Libyan jets over Mediterranean. 1989-1990 Panama. US Army, Air Force and Navy forces invaded Panama to arrest President Manuel Noriega on drug charges. The UN put civilian death toll at 500. 1989 Philippines. US jets provided air cover to Philippine troops during their civil war. 1991 Gulf War. Over 500,000 US military involved. 700 plus US died. 1992-93 Somalia. Operation Provide Relief, Operation Restore Hope and Operation Continue Hope. Over 1,300 US Marines and Army Special Forces landed in 1992. A force of over 10,000 US was ultimately involved. Over 40 US soldiers killed. 1992-96 Yugoslavia. US Navy joined in naval blockade of Yugoslavia in Adriatic waters. 1993 Bosnia. Operation Deny Flight. US jets patrolled no-fly zone, naval ships launched cruise missiles, attacked Bosnian Serbs. 1994 Haiti. Operation Uphold Democracy. US-led force of 20,000 troops invaded to restore president. 1995 Saudi Arabia. US soldier killed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, outside US training facility. 1996 Saudi Arabia. Nineteen US service personnel died in blast at Saudi Air Base. 1998 Sudan. Operation Infinite Reach. US cruise missiles fired at pharmaceutical plant thought to be terrorist center. 1998 Afghanistan. Operation Infinite Reach. US fired 75 cruise missiles on four training camps. 1998 Iraq. Operation Desert Fox. US Navy bombed Iraq from striker jets and cruise missiles after weapons inspectors report Iraqi obstructions. 1999 Yugoslavia. US participated in months of air bombing and cruise missile strikes in Kosovo war. 2000 Yemen. Seventeen US sailors killed aboard US Navy guided missile destroyer USS Cole, docked in Aden, Yemen. 2001 Macedonia. US military landed troops during their civil war. 2001 to present day Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) includes Pakistan and Uzbekistan with Afghanistan. 432 US killed in those countries. Another 64 killed in other locations of OEF - Guantanamo Bay, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen. US military does not count deaths of non-US civilians, but estimates of over 8,000 Afghan troops killed, over 3,500 Afghan civilians killed. 2002 Yemen. US predator drone missile attack on al-Qaeda. 2002 Philippines. US sent over 1,800 troops and Special Forces in mission with local military. 2003-2004 Colombia. US sent in 800 military to back up Columbian military troops in their civil war. 2005 Haiti. US troops landed in Haiti after elected president forced to leave. 2005 Pakistan. US airstrikes inside Pakistan against suspected al-Qaeda, mostly civilians killed. 2007 Somalia. US Air Force gunship attacked suspected al-Qaeda members. US Navy joined in blockade against Islamic rebels. The US has the most powerful and expensive military force in the world. The US is the biggest arms merchant. And the US has been the most aggressive in worldwide interventions. If Memorial Day in the US is supposed to be about praying for peace, the US has a lot of praying (and changing) to do. -------- Bill is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His email is quigley77@gmail.com Source:www.truthout.org/article/war-immemorial-day
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 30, 2008 4:22:34 GMT 4
Here's another I would have added to the previous Memorial Day post, except that it just came out.....What a bunch of duped saps our armed forces are...the grunts I mean, not the brass. Included is David Michael Green's intro to his article, not found at the site. He might be my favorite journalist. How cool for his students to have him as their professor. After you read this, pass it along to any young people considering enlisting; point out the salary they'll receive to die a quick death in action or a long, slow, and painful one from DU poisoning....Michelle5/29/2008
Greetings, Good People -
I hope this message finds you well, happy and productive!
I must say, the (perhaps only) nice thing about the last decade is that I have been able to cut down my expenditures on hallucinogenic substances to zero. If I want to experience totally twisted reality, all I have to do is follow American politics instead. A stunning case in point has been the way regressive chickenhawks are continually wrapping themselves in their supposed concern for the troops, all while sending them off to die in wars they wouldn’t fight themselves, forgetting to give them adequate armor, and treating them like pariahs when they come home damaged. Now they’re trying to block college benefits for them too. Wow. All I can say is don’t eat the brown acid, man. That, and:
The Audacity of Dopes: The Regressive Right’s Happy Memorial Day Message to the TroopsGreetings, American Servicemen and Servicewomen (those of you who are still alive) –
‘Happy’ Memorial Day.This is a message from your good friends in America’s conservative movement – otherwise known as the regressive right – and our nice team running the country’s government, the Republican Party. You remember us, don’t you? We’re the folks who very much like to have our pictures taken with you, especially right before elections. You’ve been voting for us for years. Your drill instructors get you all pumped up with testosterone and adrenaline and then we’re kind enough to provide outlets for your energies in extended quagmires like Vietnam or Iraq. We want to let you know, especially on this Memorial Day, that the rumors you’ve been hearing about us these last few years are not, um, exactly correct. Just mostly. Look, we’ll be candid with you. It’s true that we’ve asked quite a lot from our country’s men and women in uniform these last few years. But, remember, the cause was good, and therefore highly worthy of the sacrifice involved, especially because that sacrifice was all yours, not ours. You may have come to think that you were fighting and dying for nothing, but in fact your service has been helping to make sure that we were continuing to win elect... er, that American corporations were continuing to domi... er, that the US was continuing to bring freedom and democracy to the world. Yes, that’s it, that’s it! Some of you have criticized us for not providing you with adequate armor in this war. Remember that grunt who publicly embarrassed Rumsfeld with his question about that, right before Rumsfeld publicly embarrassed himself with his answer about how you go to war with the Army you have? That was years ago, and we still haven’t gotten you the stuff you need. The important thing, though, was to enrich Jabba-The-Hut-size corpulent contractors at every opportunity by loading them up with fat no-bid contracts and then quietly letting them fail to provide the material they’ve been contracted to supply. I’m sure you can understand those priorities. Just duck a little faster when those pesky IEDs go off, and you should be okay. Oh, and we’re genuinely, truly sorry about that lousy care you’re getting when you come home injured. You know, like that Walter Reed scandal, and the way that the military uses every means possible to make sure you don’t get properly treated, including denying that you’re actually injured. We’d really like to help out here, since you fought our little war for us and everything, but the darned thing about it is that adequate medical care is hugely expensive, especially for all the PTSD cases and head injuries that are going to require vast amounts of money to treat over decades worth of time. Sure, the country has the cash, but not enough to also cover obscene tax breaks for the wealthiest elites. Guess what our priorities are? Maybe you’re a little pissed off about your salary, too, especially since we’re asking you to risk life and limb in the ungodly conditions of that hell-hole we created in Iraq. It’s true that the starting salary for a private in the US Army is only $14,904 (yes, that’s actually per year, not per month), but don’t forget you’re getting the chance to serve your country and see the world! Or, at least one little corner of it we’ve turned into charcoal, rubble, and burnt DNA samples that used to be human beings. Does it anger you that we award these outrageously lush contracts to Blackwater and other mercenary companies, so that the people you’re fighting next to are earning six to nine times the salary of a top Army sergeant? Are you bugged that the US government spends $1,222 per day for each Blackwater hired gun, for a total of $445,891 per mercenary, per year? Do you think it’s a bit, well, wrong, that General David Petraeus earns less than half what some Blackwater officials in Iraq are making? Sorry about all that. If it makes you feel any better, you might like to know that Blackwater contributed scads of money to make sure that we win elections against those wimpy, appeaser Democrats. It certainly makes us feel better. Maybe you’re upset that there are such mercenary forces in Iraq, anyhow, especially in numbers that actually exceed the amount of uniformed troops there. If so, you’re probably also irritated about the fact that you’ve had to do two, three and four rotations of combat duty now. That your rotations have been extended from twelve to fifteen months. That you’ve been stop-lossed, so that even when you’ve done your part and fulfilled your contract with the government you are being forced to stay in the military longer, while those who never signed-up at all are untouchable. That you signed up for the National Guard or Reserves to help out in an emergency, but not for these endless extended tours for which neither outfit was ever intended to be used.Maybe you’re thinking, “There are 300 million Americans. They haven’t even been asked to pay additional taxes for this war, let alone to serve. Why is the government balancing this entire war effort on the backs of less than one percent of the country’s population, including me?!?!” Of course, we’ve carefully trained you not to think like that, and indeed not really to think about politics at all, other than to vote-Republican-cause-they’re-gung-ho-and-that’s-all-you-really-need-to-know-soldier. But apparently we need to revise our training methods here in Oceania to make them just a bit tighter. Anyhow, the answer to all these questions is the same. We’ve got to stick it to you guys, then stick it to you again. First, because we can. And second, because the alternative is completely untenable. We know you won’t complain too much. You’ll spend the first half year in Iraq still living off your macho fumes. You’ll spend the next year silently enraged, but still careful to respect your chain of command and avoid politics. And you’ll spend the rest of your time sinking into despair and accumulating the unimaginably horrific experiences that will later put the ‘T’ into your PTSD.Sure, we could solve all of this in a heartbeat. In fact, we could do it the old-fashioned way. We could have a draft. That would mean that tens of millions of Americans would share the burdens and risks of this war, rather than just the few who were economically desperate or foolishly patriotic enough to enlist. That would mean that the country wouldn’t have to continue plummeting toward national bankruptcy by paying private mercenaries ten times what it costs to field a GI. Maybe some of that money could even be spent on treating the wounded, or preventing them from getting that way in the first place by providing them with sufficient armor. But the goddamned thing about a draft is that it would turn latent hostility toward us war profiteers and our Republican marionettes into outright fury, spilling out all over onto the streets. Already, two-thirds of the country opposes the war and thinks that it was the wrong thing for the country to do. A majority even believes that we deliberately lied about the WMD thing. (Of course we did! Jesus Christ, what did you expect? A lecture on energy sector economics?) Anyhow, these people are angry, and they’re showing it in elections. Can you even imagine what would happen if, on top of all that, we did the right thing – the thing that this country has always done – and went ahead and instituted a draft and raised taxes during wartime? Well, we can imagine. Our little regressive movement would be about as popular as the bubonic plague, and our front operation, the GOP, would make the Whigs look like a much-beloved popular party, by comparison. Which it looks like those idiots are about to do, anyhow, since they can’t seem to keep their peckers in their pants. Stupid jerks. Oh well, don’t get us started on that one. Perhaps you’re also a bit incensed that we who send you off to fight wars never bother to show up ourselves. Maybe you heard that Bush got his daddy to get him into the very safe Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam (and then didn’t even show up for that). Pretty shameful, eh? Well, at least he’s decided to give up golf for the duration of this war. No one can say that the man doesn’t sacrifice for his country. Or maybe you’re angry that Ashcroft got seven draft deferments, or that Cheney got five and literally even said “I had better things to do in the Sixties than fight in Vietnam”, or that Wolfowitz didn’t go, or Feith or Perle or any of the rest of them, or that Romney thinks that his five boys working on his presidential campaign is a contribution equivalent to serving in Iraq. We can see why that might make you mad, but sorry, friends, this is war, and everybody has a role to play. You dudes get to be the fodder. We’re the profiteers. Got it? We’d appreciate it very much if you’d just do your job, and let us do ours. That way, we don’t have to throw you into some Guantánamo-like pit for the rest of your miserable life on some trumped up charge, in order to discredit and silence you. Sure, it sucks. But don’t feel too bad. We do have one final gift for you – a special Memorial Day present. We’re going to do our best to make sure that the new GI Bill that would give you decent college benefits is treated to the same fate as we gave to Saddam, with about the same degree of dignity, too. Even though god knows you’ve earned it. Even though it was one of the smartest things this country ever did last time around. Even though the story we’re running around trumpeting as our excuse for opposing benefits for the people we always wrap ourselves in during election time – that it would result in sixteen percent of the armed forces retiring so they could obtain the benefit – is nonsense, because the same Congressional Budget Office study that produced that finding also showed that the bill would increase recruitment by exactly the same amount, as more people signed-up to receive the benefit.
And even though – in what is the most remarkably shameful behavior of all by people who wouldn’t know shame if it hit them like a bunker-buster bomb – the underlying logic of this argument is that we cannot give you this benefit because you’ve earned it, you more than deserve it, and damn if you wouldn’t actually use it. Therefore we’d lose you, and since we’re unwilling to risk our own fortunes by having a draft, we can’t have that. So, our way of saying thanks to you, our way of supporting the troops, our way of showing our patriotism this Memorial Day, is to deny you these benefits so that we can further exploit you yet further, after which time we will still be denying you these benefits.All of which might make you wonder, “How do these guys ever win elections? How is it these guys are in the White House, instead of cleaning up litter by the side of the road with the rest of the chain gang?” To which we might respond, “How come morons like you keep voting for us?” It’s really not so difficult to figure out. We use hate and fear and divisiveness to win elections, and they work great. Wetbacks, ragheads, niggers, fags, kikes, bitches. Whatever. As long as it isn’t plutocrats, we don’t really care what the prejudice du jour might be. Just as long as you’re thinking about something else as we pick your pocket or line you up in battle formation. Or, in the case of you dumb SOBs and this whole GI Bill thing, doing both at the same time. How can this happen in an America that claims to love and support the troops, that is as nationalistic and as armchair-patriotic as can be? It can happen because we make sure to keep this war as invisible as possible to the whole country. That’s why there’s no draft. That’s why there’s no tax increases. That’s why you don’t see the flag-draped caskets coming back to Dover Air Force Base anymore. That’s why the media are embedded and censored and perhaps even murdered. That’s why we pay whores like Scott McClellan to lie to you. Maybe the rest of you muttonheads weren’t paying attention during Vietnam, but we sure as hell were. Who says America didn’t learn any lessons in Southeast Asia?True, there are signs that the natives are restless. And desperate Republicans in Congress are voting for the GI Bill in the hopes they won’t ultimately need those resumes they are nevertheless furiously updating just in case. But, honestly, even on this Memorial Day, most Americans are completely clueless about what you’re doing in Iraq and why. It’s doubtful they could even find the place on a map. They sorta care about you, and they definitely know they’re supposed to, but let’s be honest. It’s very, very easy – one might even say purposely convenient – to simply and nonchalantly believe that you’re off fighting for our national security, and that’s a wonderful thing and all, but, hey, can we flip back to the celebrity channel or the game already, eh? Did you know that Katie Couric’s already dismal ratings actually plummeted even further when they sent her to Iraq to try to make her look like a serious journalist? Who wants to see that? Did you know that coverage of Iraq in the media is drying up faster nowadays than a puddle of blood under the Fallujan sun? So, yeah, sure. On this Memorial Day, Americans are appreciative of all that you do. But, more than anything, what they really appreciate is the day off work. Thank you for your service! Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/The_Audacity_of_Dopes.html
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