Wake-Up-America's topics - tribe.net

FREE MP3 - HEMP 4 FUEL - LOTS OF MUSIC!

2008-08-22T00:02:21Z

Gatewood Galbraith, one of the Founding Fathers of the Marijuana Movement, joins Casper Leitch in a joint effort to RE-INTRODUCE the use of Hemp for FUEL in America. In this very special segment, the two discuses the Pickens' Plan that's being hyped by T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore's historic speech to Congress in which the former Vice-President called for America to be free from dependence of foreign fuel in 10-years or less. This podcast (and 5 short video clips) is FREE TO DOWNLOAD at http://www.Time4Hemp.TV

Featured Musical Artists (in order of appearance):

Human - Hemp St Rhythymz - Willie Nelson
Counting Crows & Vanessa Carlton - Green fever
Pink Floyd - Stevie Wonder & Ray Charles
George Harrison - Sharl Crow
Los Marijuanaous - Michel Jackson

We also hear from Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens.

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I.O.U.S.A. the Movie - a new documentary about America's economic crisis

2008-08-21T00:24:10Z

I.O.U.S.A. the Movie - a new documentary about America's economic crisis and what we can do to change course.

August 21: Exclusive In-Theatre Event
http://www.iousathemovie.com/events/calendar/?event=7&period=month

About the movie:

"Wake up, America! We're on the brink of a financial meltdown. I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.

Throughout history, the American government has found it nearly impossible to spend only what has been raised through taxes. Wielding candid interviews with both average American taxpayers and government officials, Sundance veteran Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) helps demystify the nation's financial practices and policies. The film follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker as he crisscrosses the country explaining America's unsustainable fiscal policies to its citizens.

With surgical precision, Creadon interweaves archival footage and economic data to paint a vivid and alarming profile of America's current economic situation. The ultimate power of I.O.U.S.A. is that the film moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how we can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations.

Creadon uses candid interviews and his featured subjects include Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, Robert Rubin, and Paul Volcker, along with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's own David Walker and Bob Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a Foundation grantee.

Pointedly topical and consummately nonpartisan, I.O.U.S.A. drives home the message that the only time for America's financial future is now."

http://www.iousathemovie.com/about/

http://www.youtube.com/user/IOUSAtheMovie

http://www.iousathemovie.com

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DNC Protest, Split, and the Principled Stand of Cynthia McKinney

2008-08-17T18:50:31Z

DNC Protest, Split, and the Principled Stand of Cynthia McKinney

By Steven Argue

Protest plans have been in the works against the Democratic National Convention (DNC) for some time now, with organizers opposing the Democrat Party’s policies of war and occupation, backing of continued corporate policies that cause global warming, and their attacks on immigrants.

The people who have been organizing the protest schedule formed a coalition called Recreate ‘68. A rightward split has occurred in this coalition, and another group has also been formed called the Alliance for Real Democracy. The Alliance for Real Democracy is organizing their own separate events, one of which is a reception for Democrat Party delegates complete with drinks and BBQ.

The Alliance for Real Democracy is made up of the Colorado Green Party, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, the American Friends Service Committee, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Colorado Street Medics, and Students for Peace and Justice.

While the Alliance for Real Democracy consists largely of white liberals who are trying to influence the hopelessly corporate run Democrat Party, Recreate ‘68 is made up primarily of minorities, socialists, anarchists, communists, and other radicals who have fewer illusions in reforming the Democrat Party and who instead want to organize the power of the people.

Glen Spagnuelo, spokesperson of Recreate ‘68, says he’s not bothered by the formation of the Alliance for Real Democracy, because both groups oppose the war in Iraq and neither is advocating a violent protest.

Yet, the Alliance for Real Democracy has gotten extensive coverage in the corporate media of Colorado for their violence baiting of Recreate ‘68. The stand of Recreate ‘68 is, however, one where they simply explain that they are not planning violence, but if the police attack them, they do not disavow the right of protesters to self-defense.

As Benjamin Whitmer of Denver explained in the letters column of the Rocky Mountain Times in a June 5, 2008 letter entitled, “Re-create 68 members aren't violent extremists”:

“I’m a little confused as to the media’s portrayal of Glenn Spagnuolo and the members of Re-create 68 as violent extremists. Though Mr. Spagnuolo is getting painted as Vlad the Impaler with a bag full of severed heads, I’ve yet to hear of him engaging in a single act of violent protest. Moreover, I’ve attended several Re-create 68 meetings – meetings which, it’s worth noting, are never without a media presence – and have yet to hear a single suggestion of violent protest from him or from anyone else attending.

“The controversy seems to stem from Re-create 68’s refusal to disallow the right to self-defense to its members. Re-create 68’s explanation of this refusal is clear. There will be people protesting with Re-create 68 arm-in-arm with their children and elders. In large part, these will be representatives of communities which have most suffered from the never-ending betrayal of the Democrats. To attempt to deny them the right to defend themselves is to deny a fundamental human right.”

Yet, the Alliance for Real Democracy is demanding everyone roll over and die when and if they are violently attacked by the police, and painting those who do not have such a commitment as “violent”. The coverage their denunciations have received in the corporate media play into the hands of government attempts to deny permits, and, ultimately plays into the hands of police violence if the government does decide to physically attack these protests. In fact, the Alliance for Real Democracy’s denunciations of the right to self-defense and denunciations of Recreate ‘68 as “violent” creates a ready made excuse for the police and government that may actually cause police violence.

In addition, the Green Party of Colorado has issued false statements to the press and all over the internet claiming that Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney will not be participating in the Recreate ’68 events. Here is one such statement from Dave Chandler, co-chair of the Colorado Green Party, Green Party candidate for U.S. Congress in the Seventh Congressional District, and supporter of a Denver ballot measure that would seize the vehicles of illegal immigrants:

“Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate for President, and Rosa Clemente, Green Party candidate for Vice President are NOT participating in any Recreate ‘68 activities. Both candidates, and the Green Party of Colorado, are refuting this announcement and are stating that neither candidate, nor the Green Party of Colorado, are in any way associated with Recreate ’68, nor will any of their candidates be speaking at or attending any event, nor are they in any way associated with the group Recreate ’68.”

This is a blatant lie. Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente will be speaking at the Recreate ’68 events.

Liberation News does not endorse the Cynthia McKinney campaign, partly because she is running on the Green Party ticket, a capitalist party. Yet, she has the right positions on many issues, and does show what a candidate who is not beholden to corporate interests can speak out on, such as for single payer healthcare, immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and for freeing political prisoners in the U.S. like Mumia Abu-Jamal.

It is for these reasons, and the good principled stand that McKinney is taking on the protests at the Democrat National Committee, standing up to the leadership of the Green Party of Colorado, that Liberation News prints Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente’s statement on the DNC in full:

*******
Open Letter from Cynthia McKinney

As the United States activated Navy ships and the Air Force to begin an airlift of non-specified goods into the former Soviet state of Georgia, and military exercises began in the Persian Gulf near Iran, I received communications from certain individuals among the Colorado Greens who were organizing campaign support events there, suggesting that I not participate in an anti-war program being organized by other individuals in Colorado.

Perplexed, I began to do my research to understand the nature of the fissure that I seemed to be placing myself in the middle of. The communications to me about not participating in one of the scheduled events became more and more shrill. The events ran through August 26th. When the lineup of speakers, including Rosa and me, was announced for the events in question, I received multiple communications stating in various ways that the sender from the Green Party of Colorado, was on the verge of desperation over the latter.

Within a few hours, I was reading messages stating that the Green Party of Colorado would be ruined if I participated in the End the Occupations/End the War march and rally slated to take place on the morning of August 24th on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol, or if Rosa participated in a Freedom March and Rally for Human Rights and Political Prisoners at Civic Center Park the following day.

An article appeared in a local Colorado newspaper stating that Rosa and I would not appear at the events for which we had been scheduled. Rosa responded to our Colorado Green Party contact that yes, indeed, we were appearing at the two events. Both Rosa and I then received messages demanding to know by a time certain what our plans were, and asserting that the Green Party of Colorado would be totally ruined if we associated with the group sponsoring the events. In addition, we were told that at least one resignation and sustaining membership would be tendered to the Party, and that Rosa and I could expect no support on the ground in Denver from the Green Party of Colorado, including a planned fundraiser and a place to stay.

Without receiving any additional response or information from either Rosa or I, the correspondent sent a message informing us that all Green Party of Colorado events previously scheduled for us had been canceled. Further, the message stated that ballot access petitioning by Green Party of Colorado would cease in neighboring Wyoming and that all efforts would be made to remove Rosa's and my names from the ballot in Colorado. The message also noted that the Colorado delegation overwhelmingly supported Elaine Brown at the Green Party Convention.

With the e-mail messages flying "fast and furious," I hope I have mentioned the highlights of this episode in somewhat chronological order. What Rosa and I would like to address now, is the ideological and rational order that produced this outcome. At the very first Green Party debate held in San Francisco earlier this year, I pleaded for unity of action and purpose as we face the challenges that confront us as a country. Rosa and I are proud to join with others who are sick and tired of war, occupation, human rights abuses, and the continued incarceration of our political prisoners. We are proud to join with others who are willing to do something about it. In the context of activities in Denver, that means cooperating with some organizations new to us and others with which Rosa and I have had a long-standing relationship. Let me explain some of those relationships.

I am proud to have received a Backbone Award from the Backbone Campaign, one of the co-participants of the anti-war, anti-occupation events in question, according to the organizers.

Rosa and I are pleased to have received the endorsement of M-1 of Dead Prez, who put out a video of endorsement and is rallying other conscious Hip Hop, Generation X voters to the Green Party with Rosa and I as its nominees. Rebel Diaz was on the stage with Rosa as she accepted her Green Party nomination for Vice President. Both Dead Prez and Rebel Diaz are participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

Fred Hampton, Jr.'s mother, a victim of COINTELPRO, came to Georgia in the mid-1990s to help me gain reelection after a malicious redistricting case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Ward Churchill has traveled to my Congressional district to educate my former constituents on the COINTELPRO of yesterday and the COINTELPRO of today. Natsu Saito introduced me to other victims of COINTELPRO. I asked Kathleen Cleaver to co-author a report that was submitted to Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time of the World Conference Against Racism, on the unsolved murders of Black Panther Party members who were victims of COINTELPRO. Fred Hampton, Jr., Ward Churchill, Natsu Saito, and Kathleen Cleaver are all participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

As a Member of Congress, I supported the release of all political prisoners and welcomed information from the American Indian Movement about Leonard Peltier. I have at many times in my political career been allied with the ACLU, and have always supported Pam and Ramona Africa and the MOVE Organization. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, King Downing of the ACLU, and Pam and Ramona Africa of MOVE are all participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

Mumia Abu Jamal has endorsed the Power to the People Campaign and my Green Party candidacy. According to the organizers, Mumia will transmit a message to all of us participating in the events in question.

Finally, I have appeared on various stages with many Palestinians; I have proudly spoken at rallies organized by Larry Holmes. Debra Sweet with World Can't Wait was among the very first to my knowledge to organize around impeachment as an imperative and I support hers and all other impeachment groups in their efforts. And finally, I have known Ben Manski for a long time as a socially conscious activist who is also a member of the Green Party. According to the organizers, a Palestinian refugee is slated to speak at the events in question, as well as Larry Holmes, Debra Sweet, and Ben Manski.

Rosa and I have not been given any rational, ideological, or strategically-acceptable reason by the Green Party of Colorado to dissociate ourselves from the movement that this country so desperately needs and that these individuals and organizations participating represent, as we all attempt to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its complicity in all of the crimes of the Bush Administration. Therefore Rosa and I will keep our appointments in Denver and we hope that the members of the Green Party of Colorado will attend our sessions and listen to what we have to say. I have faith that by taking principled stands against war and occupation, human rights abuse, the prison-industrial complex, and in support of freedom for political prisoners, the Green party will emerge stronger.

Cynthia McKinney
Green Party Nominee for President of the United States

Rosa Clemente
Green Party Nominee for Vice President of the United States

*******
Liberation News endorses and encourages people to attend:
Recreate ‘68 Protest: Speakers and Free Concerts Schedule
http://recreate68.com/?p=135

FYI:
Alliance for Real Democracy: drinks and BBQ for Democrat Party delegates and their other scheduled events:
http://slapstickpolitics.blogspot.com/2008/07/alliance-for-real-democracy-dnc.html

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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Do you know of any web sites, that should be on our list?

2008-08-07T06:19:46Z

Hi Gang. I have been busy starting a tribe that is simply a list of must see web sites that powerful people hope we will never see. Sites about corporate corruption, government corruption, Rip offs and sleazy business practices, art with a message, important documentaries on line and access to information you won't find on the 6:00 news.

If you know of any sites, you think should be on the list, please post it here.
http://tribes.tribe.net/importantwebsites

Thanks everybody. I am looking forward to seeing what interesting sites you post.

Leslee

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Do you know of any web sites, that should be on our list?

2008-08-07T06:18:00Z

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

2008-08-04T14:06:44Z

http://www.prosecutionofbush.com

posted in Wake-Up-America - 2 replies

````^>{[(FULL DISKLOSURE)]}<^````

2008-08-03T08:59:49Z

Online Joan d'Arc article entitled Official UFO Disclosure and Darwinian Evolution

at

www.ufodigest.com

Please post far and wide.

Official UFO Disclosure and
Darwinian Evolution
by Joan d'Arc

Posted: 14:30 July 24, 2008 - UPDATED: July 29, 2008

July 23, 2008 was an historic day! I awoke to hear on the Internet an astounding interview on Kerrang Radio (UK) with Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who announced matter of factly, "yes, we have been visited." Did this sudden announcement signal the beginning of Official UFO Disclosure? I transcribed much of the conversation wherein Edgar Mitchell finally briefed us all. www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/6168/

The radio announcer asked Dr. Mitchell, "Are we alone in the Universe?" to which he responded, "Oh, I know for sure we're not alone in the Universe." The radio announcer expressed his shock at this disclosure and wondered if Mitchell was "pulling his leg" with "astronaut humor." Mitchell assured him the Roswell crash was real, and a number of contacts are real and ongoing. "Why is it being covered up?" he asked. The U.S. chose to do this after World War II, explained Mitchell, but it's starting to open up now in the international press. Mitchell also discussed the Catholic Church's recent press releases that we are not alone in the Universe. He explained that the amount of covert attempts to cover-up and the amount of disinformation is decreasing. Mitchell stated, "there's more nonsense out there about this than is real, but it IS a real phenomenon. … Some of us are privileged enough to have been briefed on some of it." He stated, "We're not alone in the Universe. We have been visited."

Dr. Mitchell went on to briefly discuss Roswell in 1947, saying he grew up in Roswell and it was a real extraterrestrial crash there. He admitted involvement in intelligence and military circles, and UFO committees and groups, and admitted it has been "well covered up in the past sixty years." He claimed there has been "quite a bit of contact" and that "contact is real and ongoing," but that he does not know where the visitors are from. He admitted to "back-engineering" of spacecraft, but claimed the "homegrown" vehicles "are not as sophisticated as what the visitors have." When asked if there will be an actual disclosure this year, Mitchell said there are serious organizations moving toward disclosure, and that it has already begun, since the Belgian, French, Brazilian and Mexican governments have opened their files and some British files were recently released. He indicated, "I think we're heading toward serious disclosure, but I can't say how fast." He said "public acceptance is increasing and disinformation seems to be decreasing." When asked "what will the reaction be?" he said it's "ho-hum so what's new?" and that "well over 70% of people accept it as fact."

"Do others involved in the moon landings know about this?" Mitchell responded, "Some of them do." When asked if the visitor's intent is hostile or peaceful, Mitchell stated, "It's pretty obvious that if it were hostile we'd have been gone by now. Or could have been. We had no defense if that's what their real intent was." When asked what they look like, he claimed there to be many groups, but described only one of them, "You've seen some of the pictures … little people that look strange to us. … pretty accurate." Finally, when asked if he was worried for his own safety, Mitchell replied, "Oh no. They're not knocking anybody off for that anymore."

Good News For Modern Man?

Mitchell indicated that over 70 percent of people accept extraterrestrial visitation as fact. I find that number to be unbelievably large. He perhaps is referring to globally, not in the U.S. If true, I believe Mitchell underplays the reaction of the remaining 30 percent, who are in profound denial in an isolated, outback cosmos—namely the scientific "Darwinists." He underplays the effect on science—a "naturalist" paradigm unbelievably rigid in its fundamentalist and insular premise that "intelligent" life is Earth-based only.

Is Official UFO Disclosure good news for modern man? Well, it is and, then again, it isn't. The effect on Darwinian evolution will be profound. This is what the cover-up is and has been all about. After all science is not about flexibility but is about security; and the alarm for this potential breach in security was pushed by NASA in 1960, when it tasked the Brookings Institute to think through the implications of the possible discovery of artifacts on the moon or other planets on which we may land or send probes.

The Brookings Study was concerned about the impact of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) on religion, but it also feared the impact on science. In part, the Brookings Study noted that "scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with mastery of nature." The study also noted, "Advanced understanding of nature might vitiate all our theories."

Darwinian evolution epitomizes mankind's mastery over nature. Indeed, as I have noted in my book, Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form, the evolution story dramatizes the "natural" transfiguration of mankind through a linear procession of metamorphoses that eventually separate him from the animals of his ancestry. Evolution is Western man's totem; essentially, it represents mastery over our own nature. Since the entire realm of modern biology and chemistry is based on the Darwinian paradigm, the discovery, or should I say, the official disclosure, of extraterrestrial intelligence would completely shatter the Darwinian mythology of humanity's accidental climb out of the muck of our local habitat Earth.

From the perspective of Darwinian theory, mankind may be seen as the winner of a preposterous survival lottery which, we are told, given the incredible odds should not have occurred even once. Thus, if the humanoid form evolved from the great ape lineage on planet Earth, the mathematical odds are incredibly against the possibility of that same chain of random and incremental steps, contingent upon an interplay with a similar biological environment, occurring elsewhere in the Universe. Therefore, the assumptions of Darwinian evolution presuppose the humanoid form to be an entirely Earth-based phenomenon.

Darwinian evolution is a metaphysical genesis tale of life on Earth. In her book Evolution as a Religion, philosopher Mary Midgley argued that "evolution is not just an inert piece of theoretical science," but is also "a powerful folk tale about human origins." It must be pointed out that creationism and evolutionism have one main factor in agreement: they are both Earth-centric genesis tales. Both oppose the idea of intelligence at large in the Universe, including the idea of space travelers. In both theories, the Earth is the center of the Universe and WE are IT!

It must also be understood that the theory of evolution essentially views the human or humanoid form as merely an accident in a chain of accidents. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould argued that the evolution of the human form is not a "repeatable occurrence." In the Journal of British Interplanetary Society (1992), E.J. Coffey also argued that "the survivors resemble the winners of a lottery rather than creatures better designed than the unlucky majority who do not survive."

For quite the same reasons as above, British astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, proponent of the Modern Theory of Panspermia, mathematically dismissed the chance of Darwinian evolution being an actual occurrence, arguing that "even if the whole Universe consisted of organic soup ... the chance of producing merely the basic enzymes of life by random processes without intelligent direction would be about 1 over a 1 with 40,000 zeros after it; a probability too small to imagine." Hoyle concluded that "Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide sequence right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for survival."

Given that there are trillions of different kinds of cells in the body, all in delicate balance with each other, each of these varied cellular structures would also have to develop by chance. In a Times-Advocate interview in December 1982, Hoyle declared that this mathematical impossibility is well known to scientists, yet nobody seems willing to "blow the whistle" on the absurdity of Darwinian theory. Hoyle claims "most scientists still cling to Darwinism because of its grip on the educational system," and because they don't want to be branded as "heretics." Let's hope this allegation is at least partially true.

Others have "done the math" as well. British molecular biologist Francis Crick, who received the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, wondered if we weren't from around here. After discovering the astonishingly huge and complex information storage capacity of the DNA molecule (humans have three billion coding letters in each nucleus), Crick could not imagine any conditions under which this information vehicle could have evolved from non-living chemicals. He argued that since the earth has too short a history for life to have developed here, it must have developed on another planet in a solar system several billion years older than ours.

Crick's aversion to religion led him and Leslie Orgel, in 1973, to put forth the theory of Directed Panspermia. To get around the idea of God, Crick proposed that the primordial seeds of life were shipped to earth in spaceships billions of years ago by intelligent beings. After proposing this idea, Crick was left in the predicament of explaining the origin of the ET beings, and finally had to acknowledge the paucity of the idea, saying, "Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts." (Life Itself, 1981)

Although an atheist, Crick was quoted as saying, "An honest man, armed with the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle." William Hamilton in his essay "Astrogenesis" suggests, "The real paradigm shift is to consider that the Universe is a life-producing nursery and that the genesis and evolution of life is not earth-centered but rather is distributed among the stars of the galaxies."

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn defines a scientific revolution as a "non-cumulative developmental episode" whereby an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an "incompatible new one." Such scientific revolutions begin with a growing sense that "an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature." The emergence of new theories is usually preceded by a period of "pronounced professional insecurity," since it involves large-scale paradigm destruction. Kuhn explains, under normal rules a scientific theory "is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place."

Unfortunately for them, academia and its inflexible materialist skeptics have persistently disallowed any alternative candidates from the Vitalist arena to impose on their Nature party: such as Lovelock and Margulis's Gaia Theory (in this case they made it conform to Naturalism before allowing a baby toe in); Rupert Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation (they absolutely spit on the idea of morphogenetic fields); Extraterrestrial theories such as Panspermia, Visitor Genetic Breeding or Planetary Seeding experiments ("little green men" anybody?); the mathematical theories of Intelligent Design ("Creationism in a cheap tuxedo"); and we all know where they stand on the "Super-natural" theory of Creationism (oh well, I say, if it walks like a duck).

Many people I talk to are under the assumption that Darwinism is playfully malleable and open to their mishmash of supernatural ideas. I try to inform them that Darwinian evolution is an all-or-nothing theory; it will not allow inclusion of any Vitalist or Supra-natural process—or, goddess forbid, any anthropomorphism. It is very exacting on that rule. If you are espousing any form of Supernaturalism, you are clearly not a Darwinian. Perhaps you are a Vitalist.

The essential problem is, according to Kuhn, scientists cannot do research in the absence of a controlling and overarching (i.e., tightly closed and uncompromising) paradigm: in this case Naturalism (Materialism) as opposed to Supernaturalism (Vitalism). Under normal circumstances they do not and can not pull the floor out from under themselves by either switching paradigms or allowing an alternative toe in the door. But in the face of Official UFO Disclosure, the door will be blown out for them.

Extraterrestrial space travelers and Darwinian evolution are incompatible! Do not underestimate the reaction from the fundamentalist Scientism camp: the discovery of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and specifically of the extraterrestrial humanoid form, blows Earth-centric evolutionary biology straight out of the water!

BAM! SPLASH! HIGH AND DRY!

"Pronounced professional insecurity" does not even begin to describe what unbending Darwinists will go through under Official UFO Disclosure, should it actually occur. The Catholic Church has already announced its acceptance of extraterrestrial beinghood. Science has not. It will not be the followers of fundamentalist religions but the followers of rigid, unyielding Scientism who will be in the herd of lemmings headed straight for the edge of the cliff.

Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form, and Phenomenal World, published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com"). She is the co-publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader (www.paranoiamagazine.com) and is the founder of the website "BIPED: Beings for Intelligent Purpose in Evolutionary Design" (www.biped.info). She is also the founder of HunterGatheress Journal (www.huntergatheress.com).

http://people.tribe.net/ionamiller/blog/590a2ad6-b5fe-482f-8236-1bf387994f4e

posted in Wake-Up-America - 1 reply

Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr

2008-08-02T23:56:27Z

Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. -- Some workers at a local plant will no longer to be able to take their Labor Day holiday because of religious reasons.

Workers at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but will instead be granted the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.

Tyson drops Labor Day for Muslim holiday
http://www.wrcbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=8773811

Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr
http://www.t-g.com/story/1449487.html

"Tyson Replaces Labor Day With Muslim Holiday" VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GoHooTg5Do

"Food Plant (Tyson) Drops Labor Day For Muslim Holiday" VIDEO
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d05_1217706550

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posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan

2008-07-27T07:35:18Z

New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/outnow#

Massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan began in 1978 and continues to this day. The ongoing war in Afghanistan continues to kill thousands of Afghan civilians and cause extreme suffering due to horrendous injuries, the displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods, home invasions, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests and torture, and the general humiliation of the Afghani people.

As this author stated for Liberation News on September 12, 2001:

“Americans watched in horror as the World Trade Center collapsed. Yet it was a horror no different from what the U.S. government has done with it's bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. The U.S. bombings of just these countries, not to mention many other U.S. acts of war, murdered millions of civilians. Terror against civilians is never justified…

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen. With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate [oil pipeline] interests.” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2001

The Taliban was put in power by U.S. intervention. U.S. occupation today is a cause for war and continues to keep an extremely reactionary religious government in power. Afghanistan had secular governments with much wider women's rights before the U.S. began its massive intervention in Afghanistan in the 1970's. All U.S. imposed governments have been religious and anti-women. In Afghanistan, the Afghanis are better qualified to solve the problems caused by U.S. imperialism than U.S. imperialism is.

Yet rather than get out of Afghanistan Obama and McCain are proposing more troops, more helicopters, and more war.

NO TO THE BIPARTISAN OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN!!!!

NO TO OBAMA and MCCAIN'S PROPOSED SURGE IN AFGHANISTAN!

U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW!

http://tribes.tribe.net/outnow#

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Naomi Klein Debunks Bush's offshore drilling plans

2008-07-18T19:38:54Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlEt86dMFTE

Fox Business Channel has an “after-the-market-closes” show, called Happy Hour, which appears to exist in a surreal space of unreality: bar setting, complete with a bartender and business men with their brewskis in the background, host Rebecca Gomez looking like she’s ready to hook up and whose only research before interviewing Naomi Klein ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein ) appears to be skimming the reviews of The Shock Doctrine ( http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine ) on Amazon, and to top it off, guest host Eric Bolling admits to not only being an oil trader, but never looking at the book! That’s respect, I’ll tell you, for the collective intelligence of their viewers as well as Naomi.

Still, with all the obstacles FBC places in the way of having an intelligent discussion, Klein manages to get in some great points that leave the embarrassingly ill-informed Faux hosts with little to do but sputter inanities like “Naomi, do you like capitalism?”

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

McDonald's pays $1 million in illegal immigration case

2008-07-18T06:38:16Z

McDonald's pays $1 million in illegal immigration case

McDonald's franchisee will pay $1 million in Nevada illegal immigration case

By Associated Press

"NEW YORK (AP) _ A McDonald's Corp. franchisee will pay a $1 million fine after pleading guilty in Las Vegas federal court to felony immigration offenses for giving false Social Security numbers to illegal aliens.

The charges follow an investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who have said management of Mack Associates Inc. knowingly hired illegal alien workers in Reno, Nev.-area McDonald's restaurants, supplying them with false identification.

The Justice Department released details of the plea agreement late Wednesday.

In U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, attorneys for Mack Associates filed guilty pleas to one count of conspiracy to encourage and induce an alien's unlawful residence in the U.S. and one count of aiding and abetting an alien to remain in the U.S., which are felony offenses.

According to the plea agreement, Mack Associates management hired people known to reside in the U.S. illegally, and gave them names and Social Security numbers belonging to other individuals.

In addition to the fine, the government and Mack Associates agreed that the company be placed on probation during the period the fine is outstanding.

Joe Gillespie, director of operations for Mack Associates, and the franchisee's former vice president, Jimmy Moore, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting an alien to remain in the U.S. Both men face a maximum penalty of no more than five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In September, agents encountered 58 people working illegally at 11 McDonald's restaurants owned by Mack Associates near Reno, Nev., and were arrested. About 30 of these workers have been returned to their native countries. The remaining workers were provided with documentation to stay in the U.S., pending an outcome of the criminal investigation.

Representatives for Mack Associates and McDonald's were not immediately available to comment."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-mcdonalds-investigation,0,3392325.story

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posted in Wake-Up-America - 1 reply

Swimming through apologies

2008-07-17T00:43:40Z

I believe that people should not be forced to apologize. This is because I believe apologies should be completely sincere. And forced apologies are rarely sincere. As such, I'd prefer not to receive an apology than receive a forced apology which is, therefore, a fake apology. Besides, forcing people to apologize is a form of bullying. And since I believe bullying is a counterproductive form of behavior, I'd rather let the person who did me wrong apologize on their own.

I recently came to the conclusion that this view is a form of forgiveness or at least something close to it. Forgiveness, as I understand it, is an important step toward conflict resolution. On the most part, I suck at forgiveness. But hopefully my tolerance toward not receiving apologies might help improve my capacity for forgiveness eventually.

posted in Wake-Up-America - 1 reply

Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

2008-07-17T00:29:00Z

Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

By Steven Argue

In a July 14, 2008 New York Times Op Ed, Barack Obama says:

"As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces."

In other words, he does not plan to get all of the troops out of Iraq and he will only get most of the troops out in two years. And what does he explain he will do with these troops? Redeploy them. Redeployed where? His rhetoric has been clear: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

Obama goes on to call for a surge in Afghanistan as well as war in Pakistan:

"Ending the war [in Iraq] is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan [...] As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters [...]"

U.S. intervention has also been very bad for the people of Pakistan. It is US intervention that has kept a long series of dictators in power there. The US has no right to intervene against those fighting that dictatorship that it labels "terrorists". Likewise, it is US intervention in support of a long series of Pakistani dictators that is the cause of Bhutto's death, brutal repression against the majority, exploitation, and poverty, all of which has resulted in rebellion against the Pakistani government. The US has already harmed the Pakistani people enough with massive aid to dictators and would do more harm by sending in troops.

NO TO OBAMA’S PROPOSED MILITARY INTERVENTION IN PAKISTAN!

Massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan began in 1978 and continues to this day. The ongoing war in Afghanistan continues to kill thousands of Afghan civilians and cause extreme suffering due to horrendous injuries, the displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods, home invasions, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests and torture, and the general humiliation of the Afghani people.

As this author stated for Liberation News on September 12, 2001:

“Americans watched in horror as the World Trade Center collapsed. Yet it was a horror no different from what the U.S. government has done with it's bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. The U.S. bombings of just these countries, not to mention many other U.S. acts of war, murdered millions of civilians. Terror against civilians is never justified…

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen. With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate (oil) interests.” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2001

The Taliban was put in power by U.S. intervention. U.S. occupation today is a cause for war and continues to keep an extremely reactionary religious government in power. Afghanistan had secular governments with much wider women's rights before the U.S. began its massive intervention in Afghanistan in the 1970's. All U.S. imposed governments have been religious and anti-women. In Afghanistan, the Afghanis are better qualified to solve the problems caused by U.S. imperialism than U.S. imperialism is.

Yet rather than get out of Afghanistan Obama is proposing more troops, more helicopters, and more war.

NO TO OBAMA”S PROPOSED SURGE IN AFGHANISTAN!

U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW!

In addition, at AIPAC, Obama’s speech laid the groundwork for war with Iran:

“The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. [...] The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.”

A war on a major oil producing nation under the imperialist excuse of weapons of mass destruction. Sound familiar? Bush would have a good case for a charge of plagiarism against Obama.

And what will the Iranians think of more imperialist intervention?

In 1953 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and put the brutal dictatorship of the Shah in power. Mossadegh had plans to nationalize the Iranian oil fields, a plan that would have taken a good chunk of the oil profits out of the private control of major international oil companies. Such nationalizations have greatly helped people in other countries, such as Venezuela, where oil wealth is used to better the conditions of the poor and provide needed programs like healthcare.

The CIA sponsored overthrow of the Mossadegh government paved the way for 26 years of dictatorship under the U.S. backed Shah. Freedom of speech did not exist under the Shah, and the CIA participated in the torture of political opponents to the Shah. Meanwhile, U.S. oil corporations made massive profits from Iranian oil while the vast majority of the Iranian people lived in extreme poverty and did not benefit from the oil wealth.

The Iranian people rightly saw the Shah as a puppet of U.S. imperialism, and finally overthrew his dictatorship in 1979. Unfortunately, repression was so bad under the Shah that the only place that people could organize opposition was in the Mosques. This gave the Mullahs a tremendous advantage in taking control of the revolution. The Islamic nature of the revolution led to a deterioration of women's rights and socialists, many of whom had naively supported the Islamic Revolution, were executed by the clerical fascist state.

Despite the brutal nature of the new Iranian government, in that respect the same as the old regime the U.S. had supported, the U.S. was not satisfied. The new regime nationalized the Iranian oil fields under government control. In addition, the new government was full of anti-imperialist rhetoric and took American hostages; a natural result of 26 years of U.S. imposed dictatorship and exploitation. The U.S. government hated the Iranian revolution most for nationalizing the oil, and they feared that the Iranian Revolution may become an influence for similar anti-imperialist revolutions in the region.

As a result, the U.S. encouraged then ally, Saddam Hussein, to send Iraqi troops to invade Iran. During the war, the U.S. armed both sides, but most armed Iraq and provided Iraq with military intelligence. The Iraqi invasion of Iran began on September 22, 1980 and the war continued until 1988. As a result of the war, between half million and a million and a half people died. This U.S. support to Iraq also helped enable Iraq to murder between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign of 1988. At the time, the U.S. corporate media was silent about this crime, and only exposed it later when U.S. alliances changed.

So U.S. intervention against Iran imposed decades of dictatorship, repression, war, exploitation, poverty, and, just in the Iran-Iraq war alone, the deaths of around a million Iranian people. Like Iraq, U.S. troops on the ground in Iran will not be treated as liberators.

The Iranian working class has many scores to settle with their Iranian rulers, but as bad as the current regime in Iran is, Iranians need only look across the border into Iraq to see that U.S. occupation will be much worse. War, a puppet capitalist regime, a million dead, torture, millions of refugees, and an occupier mainly interested in privatization to loot resources. As Iraq shows, there is no liberation at the hands of U.S. occupation. And as the CIA’s Shah showed; there is no liberation under a U.S. imposed puppet. Only anti-imperialist socialist revolution can begin to solve the problems faced by women, ethnic minorities, and the working class of Iran.

NO TO OBAMA’S THREATS AGAINST IRAN!

U.S. HANDS OFF IRAN!

On Iraq, Obama has never promised to fully withdraw. In a debate in September 2007, when asked if he would have U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013 Barack Obama said "I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out." ("The Democratic Presidential Debate on MSNBC", New York Times 9/26/07).

The U.S. must leave by air, sea, and land as quickly as possible. U.S. imperialism has created a horrible situation, but that is no excuse to stay, and U.S. troops, Halliburton, etc. are only making matters worse. Over a million Iraqis are dead. These deaths are not just caused by the civil war that the U.S. has ignited, nor are they just caused by the death-squad government that the U.S. has put in power. U.S. guns and bombers are also the direct cause of a large number of deaths. Iraq needs to be turned over to the Iraqi people through immediate withdrawal.

In addition, Obama has directly supported the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq by voting in the Senate to fund it. If it were not for the Democrat votes in congress, the recent $162 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have never passed.

This most recent New York Times Op Ed from Obama continues on with a pro-war position. Obama is clear. He wants a gradual redeployment of the majority of troops to fight other wars while calling for continuing to keep some troops fighting in Iraq.

On Blackwater mercenaries fighting in Iraq, Obama also refuses to support a ban, and promised to continue to use Blackwater when he becomes president (Democracy Now!, June 2, 2008).

The US government has no right to be in Iraq murdering, torturing, and humiliating their people while making massive profits for the military industry and other contractors. The U.S. is attempting to privatize Iraqi oil to eliminate Iraqi control over this most important resource and give U.S. and British oil companies control over the oil. The puppet government the US has set up is a death squad government that should not be protected by U.S. troops. Continued occupation of Iraq is a continued attempt to subvert the national will of the Iraqi people and it must end immediately, yet Obama's plan is to only leave, partially, after a couple years, and this, assuredly, only after the oil law has been passed and oil ownership handed over to the multi-nationals. This, as Obama's own use of the term "redeployment" indicates, will free U.S. troops up for other oil wars.

NO TO OBAMA’S “PHASED REDEPLOYMENT”!

U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!

U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD!

Another major cause for war in the Middle East is U.S. military support to the racist regime in Israel. Obama promises to continue this practice. At AIPAC Obama promised:

“Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As president, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade — investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation. First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defense. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO.”

This despite Israel’s recent war of aggression against Lebanon, a war that, if it were not for the heroic resistance of Hezbollah fighters, would have ended in another Israeli occupation like Israel’s brutal occupation of Lebanon that took place in the 1980’s. That occupation included crimes against humanity committed by Israeli and allied Christian Phalangists when they massacred thousands of Palestinians in cold-blood at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.

In addition, Obama’s speech made no reference to the suffering faced by the Palestinian people as a result of the creation and continuation of the Jewish state. Israel is a state that created a homeland for one people, through force and violence, by denying the homeland of Palestine’s original inhabitants. Also missing from Obama’s speech was the brutal blockade currently being carried out against Palestinians in Gaza. Obama expressed zero sympathy for the Palestinians and other Arabs, only promises to supply Israel with the weapons to kill more Arabs.

Massive U.S. military aid helps keep the repressive governments of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in power. Instead of promising more U.S. military aid, that aid should be cut off to better allow the people of the Middle East to decide their own future.

NO TO OBAMA’S PROMISE OF BILLIONS TO ISRAEL!

Another indicator of where Obama stands on imperialist war is how he sees the past wars of the United States. Of H. W. Bush and his war on Iraq Obama recently stated, "I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don't have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm." (Barack Obama, from David Brooks article, "Obama Admires Bush, NY Times, May 16, 2008)

Leading up to that war, Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi Ramaila oil fields. Iraq saw this as theft. In addition, the Kuwaiti monarchy went against OPEC quotas and increased oil production by 40%, bringing down the price of oil on the world market, something Saddam Hussein called economic warfare.

Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was, at that time an ally of the United States in the wars against Iran and the Kurds. He had received massive U.S. military backing in those wars. When he assembled troops on the Kuwaiti border, US ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein and told him, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

Saddam Hussein saw this as a green light from his powerful U.S. ally to invade Kuwait. Soon after, he did.

But Saddam Hussein was set up by the United States because the U.S. wanted a war. The reason for this was to prop up the profits of the military industrial complex. The Soviet Union had just fallen, and the military industries needed an excuse to keep spending billions of dollars of our tax dollars on the military.

Saddam Hussein was the perfect boogie-man to meet their needs. The U.S. corporate media pointed out that he had murdered tens of thousands of Kurds, never mentioning why they were silent when the operations were taking place with weapons supplied by the United States.

The U.S. corporate media also claimed that premature babies in Kuwait had been taken out of incubators and left to die so that the incubators could be shipped back to Baghdad. The whole story was a complete fabrication, and the corporate media even admitted it after the war, but the lie served its purpose in swaying many people who otherwise questioned going to war for the repressive Kuwaiti monarchy.

In addition, President H.W. Bush claimed as reason for war, "Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then that I decided to act to check that aggression." This was based on supposed Pentagon satellite photos. Yet, from commercial satellite photos acquired by the St. Petersburg Times, this was proven to be a lie, the desert Bush senior and the Pentagon referred to was nothing but empty desert.

While playing up false stories of baby killers and the new Hitler that was going to march across the Middle East, the U.S. corporate media ignored Kuwait’s theft of Iraqi oil as well the historic claim of Iraq to Kuwait, with Kuwait being a construct of British imperialism to divide the territory and limit Iraqi access to the sea.

In addition, the U.S. corporate media completely ignored the repressive nature of the Kuwaiti monarchy that U.S. troops were sent to fight and die for. The vast majority of those living in Kuwait were denied the right to vote and other more basic rights. This included women and people labeled foreigners, many of whom had been in Kuwait for generations. Some who had ancestors in Kuwait prior to 1920 were even denied Kuwaiti citizenship. Palestinian workers built modern Kuwait, but they were kept in second class status. This situation was so bad that many Palestinians aided the Iraqi troops and saw them as a liberation army. After the U.S. re-installed the monarchy, most Kuwaiti Palestinians were driven out of Kuwait.

For women in Kuwait the Iraqi invasion also brought hope. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Under Saddam Hussein, over 50% of Iraqi doctors were women. Iraqi women were allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They were allowed to drive. Iraqi women could even freely criticize men. In addition, Iraqi women had the right to work and control their own funds. This was in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive monarchy of Kuwait where women had / have no rights what-so-ever.

In carrying out the war to defend the Kuwaiti monarchy the U.S. used depleted uranium (DU) weapons that have contaminated Iraqi water, soil, and food with radiation. This radiation has caused large numbers of birth defects and other diseases for the Iraqi people. In addition, U.S. soldiers were not given protection and, as a result, became ill in massive numbers with the symptoms of radiation poisoning. Like Agent Orange poisoning in Vietnam, the military brass pretended they had no clue to the cause of this illness that became dubbed “Persian Gulf War Syndrome”. Yet this was later exposed as a lie when reports were made public warning the military brass of the health risks of DU weapons before the war.

Government demographer Beth Osborn Duponte lost her job when she estimated the civilian loss of life in Iraq to be around 83,000, 13,000 directly from U.S. bombing and another 70,000 civilians dead as a result of U.S. targeting of civilian necessities such as water treatment facilities, medical facilities and supplies, and the electric power grid.

In addition, Duponte estimated deaths of Iraqi troops to be around 40,000. Many of the Iraqi troops killed were buried alive. In defense of U.S. actions Col. Lon Maggart said, "People somehow have the notion that burying guys alive is nastier than blowing them up with hand grenades or sticking them in gut with bayonets, well it's not."

So Obama has no problems with Bush targeting civilians, irradiating U.S. troops and the Iraqi people, burying people alive, lying to the American people, and re-installing a repressive monarchy in Kuwait. In addition, Obama wants to escalate the war in Afghanistan, send troops into Pakistan, is already threatening Iran with war, will never fully pull out of Iraq and only promises to pull out most troops in two years after an extended gradual re-deployment of troops to other wars, will continue to use murderous Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, and promises billions in military aid to Israel. Enough said.

Obama will be nominated the presidential candidate of the Democrat Party on August 24-28 at the Democrat Party National Convention (DNC). In opposition to the DNC convention, protests are being organized, with organizers stating:

"On August 24-28, the ruling elite and their defenders will converge in Denver Colorado, in an attempt to recuperate the gains of global social movements and produce another myth of progress. Lip service to global warming, the economic crisis and the war will endow them with the magic to spread amnesia across the hearts and minds of North America... Outside those doors, however, so many will exclaim, smash and sing a harmonious ‘no.’...”

In addition, there will be protests at the equally pro-war Republican National convention being held September 1-4 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Although virtually ignored by the corporate press, there are other presidential candidates who are running in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans who are for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. These include Cynthia McKinney running on the Green Party ticket, Brian Moore of the Socialist Party, Gloria La Riva on the Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket, and Róger Calero on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Corporate controlled elections and media assure that these authentic anti-war candidates will not get elected, but these candidacies do help expose people to positions of politicians not controlled by corporate interests and the pro-war Democrat Party machine. In addition, through some of these campaigns, more people become exposed to socialist ideas and the ideas of class struggle methods to bring about change.

A vote for Obama or McCain is a vote for war! So that's what, in active terms, you're really voting for when you vote Democrat or Republican. Those of us voting for third parties in order to try to help build the kinds of parties and ideas that would really bring change, and those of us refusing to vote in order to not participate in such a blatantly rigged system, neither will change the country through these up-coming elections either, but at least we won’t be dumb enough to vote for own oppressors and exploiters that are waging imperialist war. And we will not be drawn into making apologies for imperialist war politicians like Obama. Instead, we will have the sense to be working for something different.

And those of us in unions should be angry that our hard earned union dues are being squandered on the Democrat Party when that money should instead be put into stronger strike funds to strengthen our ability to fight for better contracts, for socialized medicine, and for bigger strikes against the wars.

Build the Anti-War Movement! For More Strikes for Immediate Withdrawal Like the May 1st ILWU Anti-War Strike That Shut Down 29 Ports! Support Soldiers Refusing to Fight Including the 10,000 U.S. Soldiers Who Have Gone AWOL! Build the Socialist and Anti-Imperialist Movements! U.S. Hands off Iran! U.S. Out of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Join the Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

IT'S THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!!

2008-07-13T11:24:12Z

Like I said before, IT'S THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!! If you are a regular American who wants to retain the high standard of living you're so used to, the best way to maintain it is to ACCESS THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!! Earth has limited resources. Accessing those resources here on this LIVING PLANET does damge to the environment on this LIVING PLANET. If you mined for reseources on the moon, which is a DEAD WORLD, you will not be disturbing the life there because the moon has no life. "But the moon hasn't been totally explored. There could life that hasn't been found yet." Yes, that's possible. But the preponderance of availbalbe evidence says there's no life on the moon. There also no evidence of life anywhere else in this solar system. So if you still want to maintain that high standard of living you love so much, you should support accessing THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!!

I'm of the mind that opposition to the space program is mostly based on the fact that space exploration is currently unpopular. So even though space exploration can provide the people of Earth with THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE (STUPID!!!), many people will still oppose it. And I don't think I'll ever understand why so many people want to shoot themselves in the foot like that. For example, imagine that you are in some region on Earth where food is scarce and you're starving to death, and yet there is a vast supply of food across a small river. You say, "No! We should never cross that river until we solve all the problems on our side of the river. Once we've done that, then we'll cross the river." In other words, certain people hate space exploration so much, they don't want it to be used to SOLVE THE PROBLEMS ON EARTH. Ho ve! Ho ve forever!

What I'd like to see is a person or persons so persuasive and influential that they can popularize space travel. Then finally we won't end up running out of resources, remain trapped in this planet and drown in our own filth. IT'S THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!! Yup! IT'S THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!!

Also, here's a web comic I did on the subject:
http://www.100megsfree4.com/outorb/sideways2/resource_splashpage.htm

posted in Wake-Up-America - 7 replies

US longshore union leader: "don't vote for Obama"

2008-07-12T19:29:16Z

US longshore union leader: "don't vote for Obama"

SHORT VIDEO OF JACK HEYMAN'S COMMENTS ON OBAMA AT PERMANENT REVOLUTION WEEKEND SCHOOL IN LONDON

Try either of the links below for the video

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=2202

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2202

Also from Jack Heyman, see:

Longshoremen to close ports on West Coast to protest war

http://uspolitics.tribe.net/thread/0de5539d-06be-406e-a4a8-e45eaef28b9f

******************************************

Distributed by Liberation News:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Declaring Our Independence, Creating the Next Society

2008-07-11T07:13:19Z

In honor of Independence Day, I think it's appropriate to begin a thread focused on the kind of society that we, the people, would like to replace the American Empire after its inevitable collapse. Let's attempt to do our best at keeping the comments constructive, limiting the criticism to the ideas, without moving into ad hominem attacks. What kinds of Revolutionary Ideas do you propose, and can begin to implement, as we turn the corner on the end of an era?

Here, to get us started, is an interesting article I found well worth reading that explores some of the reasons and suggestions for the Next Society:

http://rinf.com/alt-news/activism/creating-the-next-society-your-revolutionary-ideas-needed-now/3988/

>>> It’s fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that the American Empire, as currently configured and operated, is simply not sustainable. Financial collapse is inevitable (and accelerating, it seems), and even mainstream America can no longer deny the obvious signs that things have gone terribly wrong: Skyrocketing fuel prices, unprecedented inflation in food prices, rampant epidemics of preventable degenerative disease, plummeting real estate prices, an increasingly-worthless national currency, disastrous war failures, rampant dishonesty in Washington, and accelerating climate changes that are causing flooding, crop failures, droughts and worse. It is becoming increasingly difficult for even the Pollyannas of the world to argue that the United States of America has a bright future. <<<

<snip>

>>>>Now, those are just my ideas. You may not agree with them all, and in fact I hope you don’t! What we need are YOUR ideas (and other people’s ideas) to be part of the conversation in creating The Next Society. It will soon be time to put the new ideas on the table, throw out the old ideas, and create a new society. Consider: What hasn’t worked? What has worked? What makes sense today that didn’t make sense in 1776? (Like internet voting, for example, which eliminates the entire need for the U.S. Congress, since the whole idea of “representatives” was based on the need for remote representation of people living in far-off places without connectivity…) Does our tax system currently work? Do you like the IRS? If not, what would work better? (The Flat Tax, perhaps?) Does voting work? Not very well. Instant Runoff Voting works much better. Why not implement that in the Next Society?<<<<

posted in Wake-Up-America - 1 reply

President Bush Can Torture if He Wants To! (So There!)

2008-06-28T00:25:38Z

Yoo Won't Answer Whether President Can Bury Detainees Alive

On June 26, the authors of the Bush administration's torture policies, David Addington and John Yoo, testified before the House Judiciary Committee. When Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) asked Yoo whether the president could bury a detainee alive, Yoo stonewalled and ultimately refused to answer the question. He also refused to say if there was any torture tactic the president was prohibited from using.

Go here to watch the CSPAN clip (1): http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/26/yoo-burry-alive/

Lee's note:
The context of this is that Chairman Conyers was questioning Yoo whether he would rule out anything as off limits in interrogating a suspect, and Yoo wouldn't answer. I think Conyers initially asked this question as an extreme example Yoo could easily say no to, but Yoo surprised him.

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Message From Iraqi Resistance

2008-06-26T21:17:10Z

While I have disagreements with the following group, they make many good points in this video, and I agree most fundamentally with the right of Iraqis to run their country as they see fit without the US occupation.

Message From Iraqi Resistance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccMuRyBnTIs&feature=related

The following are insane US troops caught on tape in Iraq. Would you want this occupation army in your country?

US Marines Throw Puppy Off Cliff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6zXpgcpW5w&feature=related

US Soldier on tape admits to rape and torture in Iraq!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3dvoBhevOQ&feature=related

Iraq - Soldiers shoot civilians
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWE5hu4z_8Y&NR=1

Abu Ghraib - Iraq
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz7UNxnOI3M&NR=1

American Soldiers attack on Terrorist sheep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQdgyEapvw&feature=related

KILL EVERYBODY: American soldier exposes US policy in Iraq
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwwMF6biCJU&feature=related

Iraqi Kids Begging For Water
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnHudm5Cmk&feature=related

Apache killing Iraqi Truck drivers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbVTfrm06v8&feature=related

Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyRPYMTICRM&feature=related

Soldiers beat teenage Iraqis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnp0C0PNZT4&feature=related

US Soldiers Shoot A Dog!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bQU89FyVw0&feature=related

US soldiers Killing a wounded Iraqi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0qs71TYwoM&feature=related

American Soldiers having fun Killing Civilians in Iraq
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FD1jHueZZc&feature=related

American Soldiers Taunt Thirsty Iraqi Kids
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=667SaGS-Jqg&feature=related

US / British Troops Out of Iraq!

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

ATTN:::ALL PERSONEL::::N KOMING TRANCE MISHUN

2008-06-19T03:12:37Z

http://people.tribe.net/bedouin/blog/3f94a04c-ae02-4136-ab56-871fc6e892d0

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

false M printing and meme N gin ear ring

2008-06-15T02:44:23Z

http://people.tribe.net/bedouin/blog/e18ed718-775a-4538-be81-df4e01469b7c

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Islam in America's public schools: Education or indoctrination?

2008-06-11T18:06:31Z

Islam in America's public schools: Education or indoctrination?

"With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the educational realm. Islamists have taken what's come to be known as the "soft jihad" into America's classrooms and children in K-12 are the first casualties. Whether it is textbooks, curriculum, classroom exercises, film screenings, speakers or teacher training, public education in America is under assault.

Capitalizing on the post-9/11 demand for Arabic instruction, some public, charter and voucher-funded private schools are inappropriately using taxpayer dollars to implement a religious curriculum. They are also bringing in outside speakers with Islamist ties or sympathies. As a result, not only are children receiving a biased education, but possible violations of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause abound. Consider the following cases: "

Please read the full article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/11/cstillwell.DTL

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posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

We Need to Wake Up About John McCain Too!

2008-06-11T18:06:11Z

For all the coverage this week of Senator John McCain's background, there are some important things you won't learn about him from the TV networks. His carefully crafted positive image relies on people not knowing this stuff—and you might be surprised by some of it.

Please check out the list below, and then forward it to your friends, family, and coworkers. We can't rely on the media to tell folks about the real John McCain—but if we all pass this along, we can reach as many people as CNN Headline News does on a good night.

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."2

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.3

4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."4

5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.5

6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations.6

7. Many of McCain's fellow Republican senators say he's too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He's erratic. He's hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."7

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.8

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a "false religion." McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church "the Antichrist" and a "false cult."9

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.10

John McCain is not who the Washington press corps make him out to be. Please help get the word out—forward this email to your personal network. And if you want us to keep you posted ..On's work to get the truth out about John McCain, sign up here:

http://pol.moveon.org/mccaintruth/

Sources:
1. "The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day," ABC News, April 3, 2008
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/04/the-complicated.html

"McCain Facts," ColorOfChange.org, April 4, 2008
http://colorofchange.org/mccain_facts/

2. "McCain More Hawkish Than Bush on Russia, China, Iraq," Bloomberg News, March 12, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aF28rSCtk0ZM&refer=us

"Buchanan: John McCain 'Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi,'" ThinkProgress, February 6, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/06/buchanan-gandhi-mccain/

3. "McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill," ThinkProgress, February 20, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/20/mccain-torture-veto/

4. "McCain says Roe v. Wade should be overturned," MSNBC, February 18, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17222147/

5. "2007 Children's Defense Fund Action CouncilÂ® Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard," February 2008
http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_learn_scorecard2007

"McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion," CNN, October 3, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/03/mccain.interview/

6. "Beer Executive Could Be Next First Lady," Associated Press, April 3, 2008
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-S1sWHm0tchtdMP5LcLywg5ZtMgD8VQ86M80

"McCain Says Bank Bailout Should End ..Systemic Risk,'" Bloomberg News, March 25, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHMiDVYaXZFM&refer=home

7. "Will McCain's Temper Be a Liability?," Associated Press, February 16, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4301022

"Famed McCain temper is tamed," Boston Globe, January 27, 2008
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/27/famed_mccain_temper_is_tamed/

8. "Black Claims McCain's Campaign Is Above Lobbyist Influence: 'I Don't Know What The Criticism Is,'" ThinkProgress, April 2, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/02/mccain-black-lobbyist/

"McCain's Lobbyist Friends Rally 'Round Their Man," ABC News, January 29, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4210251

9. "McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam," Mother Jones Magazine, March 12, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html

"Will McCain Specifically 'Repudiate' Hagee's Anti-Gay Comments?," ThinkProgress, March 12, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/12/mccain-hagee-anti-gay/

"McCain 'Very Honored' By Support Of Pastor Preaching 'End-Time Confrontation With Iran,'" ThinkProgress, February 28, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/hagee-mccain-endorsement/

10. "John McCain Gets a Zero Rating for His Environmental Record," Sierra Club, February 28, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/environment/77913/

Support our member-driven organization: MoveOn.org Political Action is entirely funded by our 3.2 million members. We have no corporate contributors, no foundation grants, no money from unions. Our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. If you'd like to support our work, you can give now at:

http://political.moveon.org/donate/email.html

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

posted in Wake-Up-America - 1 reply

The peaceful exploration of space vs. the violence of warfare on Earth

2008-06-10T00:35:13Z

I'm of the mind that some people -- people who claim to be progressive and anti-war -- hate the space program so much that they would prefer 100 years of war in Iraq to the PEACEFUL exploration of the moon and Mars. I, of course, prefer the peaceful exploration of the moon and Mars to 100 years of war in Iraq. But in today's modern dystopia, I'm definitley in the minority here since the space program is extemely unpopular. And as you may know, "society" general hates any and all ideas that are unpopular.

That brings me to Barak Obama's plans for NASA. In short I think these plans are abysmal. As I recall, he wants to take $10 billion out of NASA's budget and use that money to pay for some sort of preschool education program. This will create a delay or even a cancellation of the Constellation program. "But we don't need to return to the moon. We need to solve our problems on Earth first!" That's a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of the situation. Consider this: NASA's budget (at $17.3 billion a year) is LESS THAT ONE PERCENT OF THE TOTAL U.S. FEDERAL BUDGET. Again I say that NASA's budget (at $17.3 billion a year) is LESS THAT ONE PERCENT OF THE TOTAL U.S. FEDERAL BUDGET. If Obama claims that he opposes the U.S. occupation in Iraq, then he should get the withdrawl done immediately if he becomes president. The savings acquired from withdrawing American military forces from Iraq should be enough to pay for BOTH the preschool education program AND the Constellation program. And with the U.S. military budget being as inconceivably massive as it is (at least $500 billion a year), reducing the military budge to, say, half of what it is shouldn't have a negative effect on national security (espeically if the military is used for REAL national defense and NOT to fuel the military-industrial-congressional complex). Even cut in half, the U.S. military budget would still be the largest military budget on Earth.

So why would Obama ignore such an obviously simple way to keep NASA on track without effecting social programs? Could it be that he really supports a massive military? If that's the case, then he's not all that different from John McCain. I also believe this issue is connected with Obama's obsession with pleasing everyone (or more specifically, the majority). With the space program being as unpopular as it is, he knows how popular bashing NASA is and how most of the public would support such bashing.

One of the reasons why I support space exploration is because I believe it is a viable alternative to war. If the energy channeled toward warfare and the misery and suffering that it causes were channeled toward space exploration, life on Earth might be improved in many ways. Things like spin-off technologies and access to the unlimited natural reseources of outer space are some ways the space program could improve the lives of people oin Earth. But since space exploration is very unpopular, I suspect that most people will disagree with me on this. But they wouldn't disagree if the space program were popular. Ho ve!

posted in Wake-Up-America - 1 reply

Pakistan Threatens Europe Over Islam?

2008-06-10T00:24:19Z

Pakistan Threatens Europe Over Islam?

"The Pakistani government has essentially threatened the European Union with violence if it doesn't accept Islam as the "one truth faith of God Almighty." Under the guise of making a simple request for the EU to rein in "freedom of expression" - i.e., freedom of speech - so as not to offend Muslims, Pakistan has basically given the European governments an ultimatum: Do not ever criticize Islam again, or you will be terrorized into submission.

The Pakistan Daily Times reports from Islamabad (6/8/08):

Pakistan will ask the European Union countries to amend laws regarding freedom of expression in order to prevent offensive incidents such as the printing of blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad...and the production of an anti-Islam film by a Dutch legislator, sources in the Interior Ministry told Daily Times on Saturday.

In other words, it will become illegal to object to Islamic doctrine, to deny Muhammad as the "Holy Prophet" of the God of the universe, and to criticize the Quran as a book filled with violent and insidious intentions towards non-Muslims."

http://tbknews.blogspot.com/2008/06/pakistan-threatens-europe-over-islam.html

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posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

McCain Criticized for Slur

2008-06-02T17:13:47Z

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/18/MN32194.DTL

posted in Wake-Up-America - 2 replies

The Pornography of Power

2008-06-02T14:46:11Z

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/30/veteran_journalist_robert_scheer_on_the

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Important petition TV Drug Ads

2008-06-01T07:10:40Z

TV Drug Ads Must Not Gloss Over Side Effects

Target: FDA

Sponsored by: Consumers Union

The FDA is currently debating whether to require a toll-free number and web address on all TV drug ads so we can easily report serious side effects to the agency.
But the FDA commissioner wants to study the idea for two more years. That’s too long! Prescription drug ads in magazines and newspapers already have this reporting information. Why not TV?

The benefits of making it easy to report serious drug side effects are clear:

• Better reporting of side effects will help the FDA do a better job of detecting dangerous drugs on the market sooner. Dangers often emerge only after millions of people start taking a drug.
• A recent poll found that only 7 percent knew how to report serious side effects to the FDA.
• The toll-free number and web address is already required in print drug ads; this would only put it on TV ads, so more consumers would see it.
An FDA panel convened recently to hear testimony on this, but now they need to hear from you.

Please take a minute to tell the FDA panel why it’s important they require a toll-free number and web address on all TV drug ads now!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/898887837?z00m=15342139

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

John Pilger: "From Kennedy to Obama; Liberalism's Last Fling"

2008-05-31T19:52:30Z

ZNet
May, 31 2008

"What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy's. By offering a 'new', young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party -- with the bonus of being a member of the black elite -- he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent." -- John Pilger
-------
From Kennedy To Obama; Liberalism's Last Fling
By John Pilger

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would "return government to the people" and bestow "dignity and justice" on the oppressed. "As Bernard Shaw once said," he would say, "'Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?'" That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of other people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skillfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.

"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.

"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy?

"Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said."

"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"

"How? . . . by charting a new direction for America."

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added]." McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing "terrorists" he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel. Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added]." Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of "100 years", his earlier option). Obama has now "reserved the right" to change his pledge to get troops out next year. "I will listen to our commanders on the ground," he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush's demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain's proposal for an aggressive "league of democracies", led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.

Like McCain, he would extend the crippling embargo on Cuba.

Amusingly, both have denounced their "preachers" for speaking out. Whereas McCain's man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama's man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that "terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms". So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not "primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel", but in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam". Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon 'the better angels of our nature'." At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: "I know it shouldn't be happening, but it is. I'm falling for John McCain." His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like "the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls".

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America's true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. "Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors," wrote the investigator Pam Martens, "consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages." A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. "Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign," said Obama in January, "they won't run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president." According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy's. By offering a "new", young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia's borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism's equivalent last fling. Most of the "philosophy" of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair's new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.

www.johnpilger.com

posted in Wake-Up-America - 0 replies

Wake-Up-America's topics - tribe.net

FREE MP3 - HEMP 4 FUEL - LOTS OF MUSIC!

I.O.U.S.A. the Movie - a new documentary about America's economic crisis

DNC Protest, Split, and the Principled Stand of Cynthia McKinney

Do you know of any web sites, that should be on our list?

Do you know of any web sites, that should be on our list?

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

`*`*`*`*^>{[(FULL DISKLOSURE)]}&lt;^*`*`*`*`

Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr

New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan

Naomi Klein Debunks Bush's offshore drilling plans

McDonald's pays $1 million in illegal immigration case

Swimming through apologies

Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

IT'S THE UNLIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES OF OUTER SPACE, STUPID!!!

US longshore union leader: "don't vote for Obama"

Declaring Our Independence, Creating the Next Society

President Bush Can Torture if He Wants To! (So There!)

Message From Iraqi Resistance

ATTN:::ALL PERSONEL::::N KOMING TRANCE MISHUN

false M printing and meme N gin ear ring

Islam in America's public schools: Education or indoctrination?

We Need to Wake Up About John McCain Too!

The peaceful exploration of space vs. the violence of warfare on Earth

Pakistan Threatens Europe Over Islam?

McCain Criticized for Slur

The Pornography of Power

Important petition TV Drug Ads

John Pilger: "From Kennedy to Obama; Liberalism's Last Fling"

````^>{[(FULL DISKLOSURE)]}<^````