Tag: Democracy

Feed The Wisconsin Demonstrators Pizza!!

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I just ordered 2 pizzas to be delivered to demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin.  Rachel Maddow has the story:


You’re probably already familiar with ordering take-out food online. Some restaurants let you do it directly and others use a middle man service, but the idea is that you log on, place your order, plug in your credit card info and tell it where to deliver the food. But there’s nothing that says you have to have the food delivered to yourself. In fact, there’s nothing that says you have to even be in the same country as the food you’ve just ordered.

And so we arrive at Ian’s Pizza by the Slice where donations literally from around the world are coming into their State Street store in the form of online pizza orders to feed Wisconsin protesters. As Politico reports, “On Saturday alone, Ian’s gave away 1,057 free slices in their store and delivered more than 300 pizzas to the Capitol itself.”

You get it.  I got it.  I sent 2 20″ 3 topping pizzas to the assembled democracy demonstrators.  Join me.  It’s easy.  You go to badgerbites.com and order a pie for the demonstrators.  You know how to order for yourself.  It’s just as easy to order for others.  Go for it.  It will make you smile.

And by the way.  This does not mean that my allegiance to Pizza Bob’s in Ann Arbor has been violated in any regard.  The way I see it, when in Madison, you do like the Badgers.

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

Wild Wild Left Radio #99 John Kozy Interview

Friday, February 18th at 6pm EST!

Listen live by clicking the link icon below:

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PhotobucketTonight the brilliant sooth & truthsayer Professor John Kozy returns to grace WWL Radio with his views on his two latest articles, Demented Democracy and A Revolting World.

He speaks of ideologies and the lack of persuasion, how Politics has become Religion, and how true Democracy is often not the true goal of the US elsewhere. He speaks of revolutionaries must never quit being revolutionary for true change to occur. Revolution is happening in the Middle East and has begun to spread. We need to heed John’s words!

I love talking to the brightest and the best, and am honored to bring John Kozy to our working class audience! Viva la revolucion!

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm EST, via Blog Talk Radio, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….  her Joplinesque voice speaking straight from the heart about the real-life implications of the Political and the Class War on everyday American Citizens like you.

Controversy? We face it. Cutting Edge? We step over it. Revolutions start with information, and The Wild Wild Left Radio brings you the best in information and op/eds from a position that others on the Left fear to tread…. all with a grain shaker of irreverent humor.

WWL Radio: Bringing you “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective with interviews, op/eds and straight talk since January of 2009!

An Interview with Adlai Stevenson III, Part One: Government Transparency



Editor’s Note:

Earlier this week I had the great honor to be able to interview former Illinois Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III. He is promoting a new book entitled The Black Book, in which he summarizes a career spent in public service as well as sharing his thoughts about the current day.  We covered a lot of ground in our hour-long talk, so I intend to write a series of posts as a result.  This, then, is Part One.

Thanks,

Cabaretic

 

On The View From Egypt, Part Six, Or, Let’s Review Where We Are

We’re a week into the Egyptian uprising now, and it’s time to reassess what has taken place so far and what might come next.

We know a few things, and we don’t know a lot-and from what we can tell, the folks on the ground are also not sure what might happen. That said, we do know enough to begin to figure out the right questions to be asking.

As was true Friday, things are moving fast, so let’s jump right in.

Egypt’s Struggle is also Our Own

I have watched the violence and the revolt in Egypt with a heavy heart.  On one hand, I am overjoyed to see a people long held in shackles struggling to attain freedom.  I hope this sentiment will someday encircle the world, so that, as it is written, the wolf and the lamb will live together.   As a pacifist, however, it causes me much distress to see police out in the street, blazes set alight, and the familiar signs of overheated passion.  In observing everything from a distance of thousands of miles, I am forced to confront my own beliefs.  It may be that physical force alone can bring needed reform and change.  But, as others far wiser than I have noted, war and warlike impulses are easy, but peaceful solutions are difficult.

On The View From Egypt, Part Five, Or, The Emergency Is Here

It has been a couple of years since we first started writing about Egypt; at that time we did a series of stories that described how the country’s Constitution is designed to ensure that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) remains the ruling party, how corruption and torture and rape are part of the justice system, how there’s a looming Presidential succession crisis, and how we better pay attention, because one day all of this was going to blow up into a national emergency, with the potential for disastrous consequences that ripple all the way from Turkey to Morocco to Pakistan.

And now…that day has arrived.

After protests that led to a change of government (sort of) in Tunisia, rioting is spreading across Egypt, quickly, the ISI (Egypt’s internal security police) is out grabbing citizens and doing what they do (we’ll talk more about that later), and the question of Presidential succession, which many people thought was headed in one direction, may now be headed off to a place that outside observers might not have previously considered.

Lucky for you, I have some reach inside Egypt, and we’re going to get a peek inside the story that you might not have seen otherwise.  

Dec 26th 1971-Statue of Liberty, Liberation

Back on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 I posted this VVAW Anniversary-Dec 26th 1971-Statue of Liberty, Liberation on my first blog, still in my infancy of blog posting but I had gotten better, like embedding links etc.. This action took place only months after I returned from Vietnam, my last year of my four, and getting discharged back into civilian life. I wasn’t with these brothers but I had already started down the path of activism against Wars of Choice and those that create them for profit and power. That post is below slightly refined and updated, had to find a link and embedded a document pdf player.

Over the past couple of months I have also moved my **IN HONOR TO THE FALLEN in Iraq and Afghanistan** posts from that original site to a stand alone site, this is a page listing each post on that site.

The Bonfire of the Insanities

Bobby Kennedy . . .

Whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children.  Whenever we do this, the whole nation is degraded.  Too often, we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force, too often, we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.

The degradation is far worse now than it was in the last year of Bobby Kennedy’s life.  Those who build their lives and careers on the shattered dreams of others control everything–the corporations, the banks, the media, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and that presidency Obama has turned into a dream shattering ride into a firestorm.    

Welcome to Dresden.  

Welcome to the slaughterhouse of shattered dreams.

Where the only thing the votes of We the People determine is whether we burn or bleed to death.

End the Farce at Least in Your Own Mind

Chris Hedges has written a book called The Death of the Liberal Class that says a lot just by its title. He is saying, essentially, that the liberal class which is the class of intellectuals, professionals and so on that are the cornerstone of any economy or ruling coalition, is finished and reform is impossible. Liberals in our context are people who have been able to “solve” the contradictions of capitalism by putting pressure on the oligarchs to provide reforms that can keep the system functioning. Liberals are and always have been anti-communist and anti-socialist, in this country at least, because they believe that capitalism can evolve into a friendly and progressive system through things like humane treatment of workers, social-safety nets, and universal health insurance (the last gasp of liberalism was the failure of HCR).

But let’s be clear here: liberals exist at the pleasure of the ruling elites. The minute liberal ideas threaten the system in any way liberals are crushed–and this goes for any society not just ours. Hedges is saying that this class in this country is finished as a class because it can no longer deliver reforms to the system. This is what I’ve been saying for some time. There was no need to put liberals in prison or assassinate them. Liberals have purged themselves by accepting cushy jobs in the system and learning to keep quiet all the while engaged in the illusion that they were “doing” something by voting for Democratic Party politicians who are designed and branded by Madison Avenue to keep the liberal class from facing reality or looking in the mirror.

Cross posted at Writing in the Raw.

Reasons Washington is Broken, Part 17

Since I moved to Washington, DC, I have obtained piece by piece of a massive jigsaw puzzle.  No one bothered to explain the rules, or what the picture is supposed to look like when you’re finished with it, but that’s just not how things work here.  Because I don’t believe that truth ought to be granted on a need-to-know basis, I have written about what I’ve uncovered.  Perhaps enough of us will chip away at the Sphinx long enough to find the answers to the riddles it holds close to the vest.  What follows is another one recently explained.

OBAMA’S WAR ON THE LEFT HAS NO EXIT STRATEGY

Obama’s War On The Left Has No Exit Strategy:

  1. We’ve heard President Obama himself snidely mock a group of single payer Health Care advocates, at a Town Hall meeting, as:   “the little people“.

  2. We’ve heard the President’s own White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, bash all progressives (the very people who voted for him) and call them “FU*KING RETARDS”.
  3. And now we’ve heard the President’s own White House Spokesman, Robert Gibbs, derail that the Political Left as all just a bunch of “drug addicts“, and also crazy apparently as well (the equvialent of: “FU*king Retards” – hence a common theme emerges).
  4. We’ve also heard Gibbs insist that the agenda of “the Left” is solely to abolish the Pentagon in it’s entirety altogether, and claim that Dennis Kucinich campaigned on this point (even though Kucinich did no such thing).  And more Rush-Limbaugh-esque smears and attacks by Gibbs on “The Left” were that they would never be statisfied with Obama under any scenario, unless a full Canadian style Health Care system had been passed into Law (which is also more lying nonsense).

In answering the question: Did he still stand by his comments?“, Robert Gibbs said an unequivocal YES    (and this is about the only thing in the entire world that Barack Obama, and his administration, have ever been unequivocal about in their lives).

What we have been witnessing here is the real, behind-the-scenes, governing sentiment being expressed here by President Obama and his entire All-Neocon, All-WallStreet, Pro-WarCrimes, pro-BankOligarchMonopoly, faux-Reform administration…just finally spilling over the edges and into public view. Obama’s pure contempt and haterd of The Left is now undeniable and absolute, and can never be taken back. It was not simply the case, that he was outflanked by a minority of GOP politicians, or intimidated by Fox News. The truth is that Obama hates “The Left” and is committed to the wrong side (the Dark side) on all the important issues where real government reforms and government action is absolutely required (to reverse the damage to our Country over the last 8 years).

The man who cynically campaigned for Election purposes (not unlike Richard Nixon) on ending the Wars, and also “ending the mindset that got us into the Wars“, and on insincerely made platitudes of “change from the bottom-up” and “hope” while whoring for Campaign donatations from “the little people”, has now revealed himself to be a total Political Fraud, and a wholesale bait and switch deceiver of the public — both in his policy terms and choice of advisors (which are obvious), and now also even in his public messaging as well.

It’s important not to view these statements as mere abberations, or some sequence of unrelated events. What they are is just the inner monologue of Obama, and his political cronies, bursting out for the World to see. No mere teleprompter speech or scripted Press Conference could ever now erase that.  Only actual job firings, and real policy changes could ever display any indication that an End to Obama’s War on the Left could even be a remote, credible possibility. But we already know that we won’t be seeing any of that.

and so it begins… again [updated]

UPDATE: Presser at 1:30pm EST (now-ish) SFGate live blog HERE.

UPDATE #2: okay it’s over, Ill look for analysis I guess…. I have no idea what they said. ;-/  There’s a very long joint statement here.

UPDATE #3: Okay, kids, the Orwellian spin machine is set to … spin. Here ya go: Google, Verizon CEOs announce pact for no wireless net neutrality rules, some paid prioritization [more at WaPo]

Summary: Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg announced a joint agreement on how traffic can be controlled on the Internet. Here’s the joint policy statement on Google and Verizon’s Web sites.

In short: what you’ve read about so far about the deal is true:

1) no net neutrality rules for mobile networks, except for a “transparency” requirement that makes public how traffic is managed.

2) greenlight on “managed services” that would allow for special priority for some content on other parts of the pipe, but not the public internet.

This is not going to be a popular announcement among advocates of net neutrality, particularly public interest groups. Google said it doesn’t want to play in the sandbox of managed service. “We like the public Internet,” Schmidt said in the call. But some say this will give an unfair advantage to companies that are able to pay for priority access (imagine a Netflix channel on FiOs offered at better quality).

LL

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” ~ Robert M. Hutchins

So after the dumbing down, which they’ve had pretty good success with so far, next up is the shutting down. They learned. They don’t have to gun us down, like in the 60’s and 70’s. No. This (lockdown) is way more effective. Because they know…

“Anger is more useful than despair.” T-101, Terminator 3

Despair = apathy and indifference. And that “undernourishment” …. sigh … man, I’m hungry.

Josh Silver is angry (sign a petition via that link).

Al Franken is angry.

If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we’d be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy.

Well, our free speech rights are under assault — not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.

If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.

A ha! This just in: mcjoan is angry. Phew. Saved. I’m sure if we all call the White House Hotline, it’ll all be okay.

:-/

He that lives upon hope will die fasting. ~ Benjamin Franklin

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