On the occasion of the BP oil spill disaster, President Obama’s delivered an Oval Office speech last night-a masterpiece of milquetoast faux-outrage. The speech was all about “clean energy” and “ending our dependence on fossil fuels”. Faced with the BP oil spill-likely the most severe environmental disaster ever-this was President Obama’s response: Polite outrage, and vague plans to “get tough”, “set aside just compensation” and “do something”.
President Obama missed what the BP oil spill disaster is really about. Though unquestionably an environmental disaster, the BP oil spill is much much more.
The BP oil spill is part of the same problem as the financial crisis: The BP oil spill and the banking crisis are two examples of the era we are living in, the era of corporate anarchy.
It’s easy to be outraged at Israel’s outlandish, criminal and immoral behavior. Israel murdered a bunch of peace activists on the high seas with total disregard for international and maritime law. Israel runs the biggest prison camp in the world. Israel is an apartheid state. The current government of Israel is a global pariah.
What’s not to be outraged about?
But what I want to know is where is the outrage against the United States of America who makes Israel look like Utopia?
It could be cruel and unjust if you were poor, gay, a woman, or an immigrant, but there was hope it could be better. It was a country I loved and honored. It paid its workers wages envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions….It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights.
—Chris Hedges
And today?
The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself, the same symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be unrecognizable.
—Chris Hedges
I use this poignant observation because it has a deep emotional resonance. Unlike me, Hedges has deep roots in this country. His life is far more deeply shaped by America than mine could ever be. I can tell when I see him on videos and hear him interviewed how much he is in pain. His last book is angry and bitter as he looks around him without flinching. When you’ve seen a lot of death–you don’t flinch so much. Once you decide to see things squarely, you can’t stop just because the thought of seeing your country being flushed down the toilet by fucking criminals haunts you. Worse, for Hedges (and me) is to see people who call themselves Americans degrade into a cowardly group of junkies living in fantasies.
Ronald Reagan once claimed that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
But of course that senile stooge for Big Money got it wrong. The nine most terrifying words in any language are…
“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”
My update of the Reagan Doctrine (insofar as that senile stooge ever had a “doctrine,” or even an idea, except stooging for Big Money) occurred to me when Baghdad was selected as the worst city in the world on the Mercer 2010 Quality of Life Survey.
After seven years of beneficent American occupation!
And Baghdad had to beat out some real humdingers among messed up cities to win that prize!
Bill Moyers Journal, aired his last show on April 30th 2010 as he goes into a well deserved retirement after many years of service to his fellow American’s with his outstanding and one of a kind journalism, real journalism, joining the ranks of the few before him and the very few still practicing their craft and profession as professionals!
With this technology and it’s coming advancements everything can be archived and much easier to search out to not only find the past, and it’s lessons, but what really is and not that spoken by some as to what isn’t but quickly grasped by some as their gospel without bothering to join the realities!.
In the aftermath of a tragedy 50 years ago, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the deaths of migrant workers in a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon. They were being deported, and when they died, the newspapers didn’t consider it necessary to mention their names. They’d been born on the other side of the Rio Grande River, which rendered them inferior to white, church-attending Americans and negated the need for any respect.
The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning that shook all our hills.
Who were all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio said they were just deportees . . .
Woody Guthrie didn’t consider them to be just deportees. They were human beings, their lives mattered, so he honored them with a eulogy, he said goodbye to them.
He knew a river runs through this land of capitalism. The wealthiest one-percent of Americans live on one side of that river. The rest of us live on the other side. To the wealthiest one-percent, we have no names. Our lives don’t matter, we’re just migrant workers in their fields, we’re just miners in their mines, we’re just numbers on a balance sheet, and unless we cross that river and scatter them like dry leaves on the wind, workers in their fields and miners in their mines is all our children will ever be.
Keep wondering when a certain group gets their wish and that name ceases to exist!
I wasn’t going to post the below as a diary I used some of on a couple of my sites concerning the Veterans issues.
But there’s one report with video that speaks volumes especially if you expand your mind, related to another recent report, I mention that a couple of times below as well.
Most of the links are concerning Veterans, the news that doesn’t get reported much except in local reports and certainly not on one cable network that wraps itself in the flag and only uses these reports, if ever, for their own false representation of who they are.
Meanwhile, back in the chicken-heartland of America…
Red state “honchos” can’t stop pissing their pants for fear that prisoners from Guantanamo might be relocated at a super-maximum security prison in their backyard!
Omigod what if a terrorist escaped?
Abdul on the loose in Alabama!
Chicken-Heartland of America!
The good news is that blue states are just as brave!
New York can’t put KSM on trial without shutting down the city! Tanks in the streets! Black helicopters!
And in the Oval Office, our fearless leader, Barack Obama…
Harharharhar!!!
Our fearless leader, Barack Obama…
Harharharhar!!!
Barack Obama is throwing his own Attorney-General under the bus in a piss-pants scramble to move KSM out of Manhattan and maybe out of the federal courts anywhere.
Bomb a God-forsaken little town in Afghanistan for the fifth fucking time, in nine fucking years!
And that’s the news tonight, February 12, 2010, from Marjah in Helmand, in faraway Afghanistan, and from New York and Washington and Mobile and Petaluma and everywhere in between, in the chicken-heartland of America.
While former U.S. president George W. Bush talked about democracy inside a downtown Edmonton conference centre on Tuesday, hundreds of protesters were outside exercising their right to free speech with signs, songs and screams.
“Stop the killing, stop the war,” the protesters chanted to the beat of a drum. They held signs that said “Bush is a war criminal;” “Bush lied, 1,000s died;” and “Canada is not Bush Country.”
Several dozen police officers kept protesters away from the front of the Shaw Conference Centre and as the crowd grew, metal barricades went up between the police and the crowd.
Marilyn Gaa, who holds both American and Canadian citizenship, held a three-metre-tall black-clad Grim Reaper with a sign on his back that said: “GWB I am your biggest fan” and on the front, “Thanks for 8 great years.”
With all the uproar over Republican gloating over American failures, this bit of news has been almost totally overlooked, but it trumps any posturing over the Olympics by a long shot.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has announced that he will be visiting Honduras today to meet with the de facto regime of acting Honduran President Roberto Micheletti in sheer defiance of the position taken by the US government and (the) international community . . .
Senator DeMint (R-SC) has been revealed as a member of the C-Street Family, a fundamentalist Christian group that admires Hitler and believes in the Supremacy of a Free Market supporting Jesus, and has just violated the Logan Act, a law that states that ONLY unauthorized citizens are forbidden from negotiating with foreign Governments. As of now, DeMint is acting against American interests.
Earlier today White House spokesmen Robert Gibbs said that the recent protests against President Obama’s policies and the out burst by Congressman Joe Wilson wasn’t racist.
Spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday that Obama – the nation’s first black president – doesn’t think that criticism of his policies is “based on the color of his skin.
If it isn’t racism then what is it? Those signs equating President Obama with among others Stalin and Hitler what is one to thing about the meaning behind it. Or those who had written he should go back to Kenya believing that to be the country of his birth.
Or the pictures that were so offensive one would have thought the Jim Crow era had returned.
Rush Limbaugh’s playing of Barack The Magic Negro isn’t rascist? Who is Robert Gibbs trying to fool here? Himself?
The Repbnlican party is racist party no matter their protestations. It was the Republican Party under the leadership of Richard Nixon which created the Southern Strategy.
Michael Dukakis wasn’t one who ran the Willie Horton ad it was George W. H. Bush and it isn’t the Democratic Party who has a permanent injunction against them for Voter Caging
1980s
In 1981 and 1986 the Republican National Committee (RNC) sent out letters to predominately African-American neighborhoods. When tens of thousands of them were returned undeliverable, the party successfully challenged the voters and had them deleted from voting rolls. Due to the violation of the Voting Rights Act, the RNC was taken to court. Its officials entered a consent decree which prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that targeted minorities or conducting mail campaigns to “compile voter challenge lists.”
No matter how much Robbert Gibbs or the White House dismiss the issue race and racism is involved in fomenting the rage against America’s first African American President.
