Death Panels

Well, the death panels are at it again. I've ranted here about the VA and their lack of interest in maintaining my health. So, I went to Missouri Medicaid. Now, they have terminated me... in violation of the Ryan White Act, I might add. Asked for a hearing. Preparing to die. Fuck this world.

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It's that pot/kettle thing again

So, Rupert now says:

"Scientology back in news," Murdoch tweeted. "Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in [hierarchy]."

The owner of Fox News, Wall Street Journal and New York Post followed the "cult" comment with another tweet.

"Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop," Murdoch wrote. "Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people."

While Cruise is often associated with Viacom's Paramount Pictures, the Los Angeles Times noted, he has also starred in films for 20th Century Fox--the studio owned by News Corporation--and is "known for being prickly about being challenged about his involvement with Scientology."

Murdoch, though, is standing by his comments.

"Since Scientology tweet hundreds of attacks," he wrote later. "Expect they will increase and get worse and maybe threatening. Still stick to my story."

After a user asked Murdoch for his thoughts on Mormonism, he responded: "Mormonism a mystery to me, but Mormons certainly not evil."

Source

I'm not one to often leap to the rescue of religion. For my part they are all weird! But this simply strikes me as the pot calling the kettle black. And, besides, isn't it the Amerikun way to kill anything that is "a mystery" or different in any way?

And, evil? Jeez, ya wanna talk evil? How about money? Doesn't the Bible, Capitalisms primary minions cattle prod, explicitly state that money is the root of ALL evil? Doesn't Rupert have a boat load of that stuff? Wouldn't that, aside from all the truly creepy and evil stuff we all know he does, make him evil?

Maybe Scientology is creepy. But Rupert is a creep in his own right... a creep to be held up as a shining example to aspiring creeps.

Those Crazy Amerikuns!

The whole point of this blog from its beginning is to point out how stupid Americans have allowed themselves to become... not that they were ever that bright. But what we have here now is simply willful ignorance. Much of it is fueled by that fantasy world known as religion; some of it is just plain lazy slothfulness. When one consumes a steady diet of myth and fantasy (religion, patriotism) and misdirection and propaganda (CNN, DWTS, "reality tv", game shows, etc.), one makes ones' self clay for the potters' hands.

Again, I am ashamed of my small role as a United States Marine. I also often regret my service with the Department of Health. It was all lies, and I wanted to believe.

I occasionally wear a USMC ball cap. Here in the mid-south it either garners one a small measure of respect in an otherwise disrespectful culture, or it allows one to go on ones' way unmolested by the "crazies". The day before yesterday I wore it to the intensive care unit where my mother currently is and a nurse placed her hand on my shoulder and said, "I'd like to thank you for your service". I never quite know what to say when this happens. So, as usual, I simply replied, "You're welcome". If folks only knew what was really going on inside my head...

America: Drugged Up, Dumbed Down and Crazy Dangerous

By Robert Bridge

...

If you were planning to conquer the world, or at least a broad swath of it, the war would necessarily start at home. After all, no general worth his salt would rush into battle with his rear exposed. You’d have to muzzle the media, severely curtail political choice and dissent, while preaching to the world about democracy and human rights to cover your tracks. You’d have to construct the mother of all propaganda machines, which proclaims over every available wavelength that it’s the best darn civilization since Atlantis sunk to its watery grave thousands of years ago. It would be a bit like decorating the halls of a mental asylum with idyllic nature scenes. You’d also have to hire an army of loud-mouth talking heads to shout down any and all dissenters, accuse them of being conspiracy theorists and lunatics and commies, while keeping a paramilitary police force on the standby 24/7 should the bullying tactics fail.

You’d have to spoon-feed the populace with a liberal dose of anti-depressants, Jersey Shore, American Idol and 24-hour shopping channels with easy credit to prevent them from giving a moment’s thought to real-time, third-dimensional issues. You could also fuel battles over trifling cultural issues, like homosexuals in the military, Mel Gibson’s latest rant and Charlie Sheen’s complicated love life. What we are left with after the smoke has cleared bears no resemblance to a classic, text-book democracy. What we are left with is an obese, drug-addled Burlesque Empire, bursting at the seams with electronic circuses, cocaine and corn puffs, physically and mentally incapable of finding the remote control when the scenes of war become too unappetizing.

We are overstretched at home, and like despotic Rome, overstretched overseas. Now it is anybody’s guess where this depressing joyride will take us. 

Source

This this article was first published at RT

US Military caught endorsing Christianity... again

The Crusades never really ended, did they. The problem, as I see it, with gallivanting around the globe killing folks in the name of spreading Christianity is that it shows the "missionary expedition" as exactly what it is: ignorant, arrogant, judgmental pricks with no understanding of (nor desire to understand) their fellow man... nor the teachings of their own prophet - or is that "Profit". They make no effort to know or understand the culture of the people they choose to dominate.

A little understanding and tolerance could go a long way toward bettering the world in which we live. But just try telling that to a bunch of Bible Thumpers with guns!

Do you really expect me to believe that all four branches of the armed forces are only just learning of this clear and direct violation of The Constitution? HAYELL no! They are only just realizing that they may be held to account.

ALBUQUERQUE, NM – Following efforts by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), all four branches of the U.S. Military have revoked their approval of the Military series of Holman Christian Standard Bibles (HCSB). The Holman Bible is a modern English, Baptist translation that was completed in 2004 and is published by LifeWay Christian Resources’ Holman Bible Publishers, a subsidiary of the Evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist Bible Convention. These editions were prominently emblazoned with exact replicas of the trademarked emblems of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.

Read the article...

What's in a Post Titile, I told ya so's, and more...

Really. What's a post title for? It doesn't really matter to anyone anyway. I've prattled on for years screaming warnings at the top of my lungs to no avail. Not that I am important in any way - I am not. But when someone, ANYONE, speaks truth and no one even thinks enough of it to comment, let alone actually try to take some corrective action, it makes me wonder why I even bother. But then I remember the words I wrote to the right - "This blog is therapy". So, it's not really even about you, the reader - if there actually are any, anyway.

Yes. I'm a crotchety old cranky asshole. No one likes me and I know it. But that's OK. I don't really like anyone else, either. My last post was a bit fatalistic. And why not? My own physicians cannot hear the words that are coming out of my mouth! They insist on prescribing medications to which I have KNOWN AND DOCUMENTED ADVERSE REACTIONS EVEN AS I REMIND THEM OVER AND OVER! I've been down that "refusing to follow a doctor's recommendations" road before. I know how that turns out! And when I have an adverse reaction to their treatment, and then remind them that I reminded them over and over, their response is, "Well, you shouldn't have taken it if you knew it would make you sick." NO, COCK SUCKER, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE PRESCIBED IT IF YOU KNEW IT WOULD MAKE ME SICK - AND YOU KNEW IT WOULD - ASSHOLE!

But I think the thing that I find most offensive about this whole thing is that this is the way the Veteran's Administration treats its Veterans. And what's more, a Constituent Services Representative from Representative Jo Ann Emerson's Cape Girardeau office has been basically holding my hand through all this VA shit since the early to mid 2000's. It's not like our elected officials don't know how broken the VA is... or the entire medical establishment in this country is, for that matter! And they may actually care - they just don't give enough of a fuck to do anything to fix it.

I'll also mention here in passing that the Veteran's Administration, by decree of Congress, practices institutionalized, legislated discrimination. But that's a whole other post! I'll say this now, though: I have it in writing. And when I write that other post I will be including that documentation, in somewhat redacted form of course. (Hey, they do it. So, what the fuck?!) So, stay tuned for that update coming soon.

But what I really wanted to do with this post is ask a rhetorical question about the current economic crisis. You know, the one about which the current party line is "It's getting better every day"? (You know it's not really, don't you?). I just want to ask how anyone could have read this blog, or one of many others like it, and not known the bastards were robbing us blind? It's not like I didn't warn of its coming.

So, I'll leave you for now with this jeer and the following link - it's certainly no surprise to me. Of course, my head isn't burried in the sand and my eyes are wide open. I may be considered a radical crank but at least I'm aware.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jun2012/pers-j04.shtml

External links do not necessarily mean that I endorse those sites or the views expressed by them.

Goodbye again...

I don't have the energy to continue this blog nor any of my other activities and activism. Why? Not that anyone cares, but primarily because I am sick and in pain and cannot seem to motivate the Veterans Administration, nor anyone else for that matter, to help me.

I received a letter in response to my complaint to my Congressional Representative about discrimination and the lack of staffing to handle anyone other than what I call "New Millennium Veterans", those who have served in Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom, which reads in part:

"[VA Staff] explained to [the Heartland Heretic] that the [New Millennium Veterans] are not given preferential treatment but that VA is mandated by Congress to provide certain staffing to ensure these Veterans needs are met."

 My written response to this preposterous response to my allegation of discrimination read simply:

"Legislated Discrimination is still discrimination, is wrong, and is still illegal."

I would like to make clear that I don't believe that a single consideration given to New Millennium Veterans should be taken away. If anything they also are under served. It is my contention that ALL Veterans deserve the same considerations and services.

All Veterans have been duped and used by the greedy imperialist powers that be.

It is with deep sorrow and physical pain that I resign myself to lay down my keyboard and my head to await the inevitable. But I leave you with these thoughts:

There is no point to this life other than pain and suffering. And the vast majority of that is inflicted upon us by out fellow man. Death awaits each and every one of us and most of us deserve a painful death for our apathy in reaching out to each other and protecting one another from those of us who seek to inflict pain upon others out of greed and selfishness.

Because in reality it is greed that drives us all. It is uncontrolled greed that kills us all.

Goodbye.

Rep. Jenkins caught lying again, Ms. Smith speaks out
by Mike Nellis

Thu Sep 03, 2009 at 09:04:13 AM PDT

Rep. Lynn Jenkins' terrible awful no good very bad August is definitely extending into September.

Yesterday, her parade of failure marched on. Elizabeth Smith, the uninsured single mother Jenkins laughed at, is now telling her story. Last night on the Ed Show, she made it clear that she was "frustrated" with her Congresswoman and that she "wasn't looking for a handout" in insurance reform.

After this week, I bet Lynn Jenkins can't wait to get back home to Washington. Video below the fold...

* Mike Nellis's diary 

Here's the video of Ed Schultz's interview with Ottawa's Elizabeth Smith. I'd post it but there seems to be some trouble getting it to embed here.

Elizabeth Smith wasn't just speaking out on the Ed Show. She took her story to the streets last night speaking at a health care rally in Ottawa. We haven't been able to get our hands on the video but reports from the event says it was well very attended and organized.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how can Lynn Jenkins dig a deeper hole for herself? Apparently, by more lying. Jenkins released this statment via Scott Rothschild from the Lawrence Journal World:

Instead of playing gotcha politics on blogs and zipping off press releases to MSNBC, and using the young woman?s situation as a fundraising appeal for her political party, Congresswoman Jenkins?s office is looking into current resources available to the mother in existing programs.

There are two problems with this statement. First, in what is an obvious attempt to marginalize her, that statement implies that Elizabeth Smith is a Democrat. She is not -- she is a registered independent. Second, the LJ World spoke with Ms. Smith and she hasn't heard from Jenkins or any member of her staff. How can they help her, if they aren't talking to her?

What we've done is found Lynn Jenkins failing to do her job again. Kansans are starting to have buyers remorse. Lynn Jenkins has failed to read legislation she's voted on, she failed again by saying she won't read the health bills she opposes, she failed on a compassion level when she laughed at Ms. Smith last week, and now's she failing to do her job and help her constituents.

It's a pattern, and it's a disturbing one. Failure is the name of the game with Lynn Jenkins.

But like I wrote yesterday, it won't mean a thing if we don't have resources to build an infrastructure for our eventual candidate in the district. So many of you dug deep and helped us yesterday, but we still need your help.

Here's what I wrote yesterday for reference:

Can you help us build our party by making a small donation of $10? The stronger we are, and the more resources we have, the better chance we have of being successful in 2010. Every penny will go toward building a grassroots infrastructure -- both online and offline -- that we will utilize to ensure victory in November. Any support you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for your continued support and friendship.

To execute or not?

So, ya really dig the "eye for an eye" philosophy of Christianity when Jesus actually taught to "turn the other cheek"?

The Future of our hellth care

No. I didn't misspell "health". I mean that all we have to look forward to is more hell

We're more alike than we are different...

Raha Iranian Feminist Collective has written an extraordinary article "Solidarity and Its Discontents," that should be read by every peace activist and anti-war group in this country. The article concludes with these words:

"There is no contradiction between opposing every instance of US meddling in Iran--and every other  country--and supporting the popular, democratic  struggles of ordinary Iranians against dictatorship. Effective international solidarity requires that the two go hand in hand, for example, by linking the struggles of political prisoners in Iran and with those of political prisoners in the US, not by counterposing them. Iranian dissidents, like dissidents in the US, see their own government as their main enemy. The fact that Iranian activists also have to deal with sanctions and threats of military action from the US only makes their work and their lives more difficult. The US and Iranian governments are, of course, not equal in their global reach, but both stand in the way of popular democracy and human liberation. US-based activists must not undermine the brave and endangered work of Iranian opposition groups by supporting the regime that is ruthlessly trying to crush them.

We are calling for a rethinking of what internationalism and international solidarity means from the vantage point of activists working in the US. Internationalism has to start from below, from the differently articulated aspirations of mass movements against state militarism, dictatorship, economic crisis, gender, sexual, religious, class and ethnic oppression, in Iran, in the US and all over the world. For activists in the US, this means being against sanctions on Iran, whether they are in the name of human rights or the nuclear issue. It means refusing to cast the US as the land of progress and freedom while Iran is demonized as backward and oppressive. Solidarity is not charity or pity; it flows from an understanding of mutual--though far from identical--struggle. It means consistent opposition to human rights violations in the US, to the rampant sexism and homophobia that lead to violence and destroy peoples lives right here. But we don t have to hide another state s brutality behind our complaints about conditions in America. We have to be just as clear in condemning state crimes against activists, journalists and others in Iran, just as critical of the Iranian versions of neo-liberalism and oligarchy, of attacks on trade unions, women and students, as we are of the US versions."

Homeland Security Coordinated 18-City Police Crackdown on Occupy Protest

http://alturl.com/hhqzg [Washington Blog]

Posted on November 16, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog

National Coordination Goes Against Protection of Local Accountability

According to Oakland Mayor Jean said that 18 cities coordinated police crack downs on Occupy protests.

Wonkette reports that Homeland Security likely organized the crack downs:

Remember when people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-to-go post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But it's also now confirmed that it's now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riot-cop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today. (Oh, and tonight, too: Seattle is being busted up by the riot cops right now, so be careful out there.)

Rick Ellis of the Minneapolis edition of Examiner.com has this, based on a "background conversation" he had with a Justice Department official on Monday night:

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

[...]

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

***

(And for those who are understandably doubtful about Examiner.com as a news source, here's an AP story from a couple hours ago that verifies everything except the specific mention of DHS coordination.)

Yves Smith notes:

The 18 police action was a national, coordinated effort. This is a more serious development that one might imagine. Reader Richard Kline has pointed out that one of the de facto protections of American freedoms is that policing is local, accountable to elected officials at a level of government where voters matter. National coordination vitiates the notion that policing is responsive to and accountable to the governed.

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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes.

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The Heretic

Missouri, United States of Amerika

Rural American Progressive

The Heartland Heretic

In Unity is Strength

The State of the U.S. Left and What We Can Do About It

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By Michael Albert and Gregory Wilpert

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Gregory Wilpert: What is the situation of the US left progressive forces, that is, left of the Democratic Party?

Michael Albert: I think the first honest answer is that we have no idea, that is to say, there's never been an accounting that I know of that is particularly revealing of the left, much less of what people are doing or are inclined to do. The problem is that my answer or anybody's answer is going to be a guess. My guess would be that there are a lot of people in the United States who are left of the Democratic Party, they might think the party is the lesser of two evils, but they are way left of any Democratic candidate. I think there are a huge number of people like that but they are completely separated from one another. They don't identify with any activism, they just comment on the day's events at the dinner table and are furious but are not part of an organized left.

Suppose we ask what about people who have a critique of the electoral political system and are seriously left. Now the numbers go down, but I think they are still in the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. But the numbers of those who then also have any significant ties to one another or do anything beyond perhaps reading and talking about politics around the dinner table is much, much, lower.

So now we get down to a much smaller group, perhaps a few tens of thousands. These are people who are involved in local activities and organizations of many sorts. Peace might be the biggest but also around economic issues, race issues, gender issues. These folks often have ties to other people around the same priority but very few ties to people outside of their priority.

Next, if you're asking about the ideological left, or people who identify around all of these issues and who have at least some working ties to people who identify with all of these issues, then the numbers go dramatically down. Yet that's the part on which any kind of comprehensive change depends. No matter how radical or revolutionary or focused around a single issue many folks may be, they are still focused around that one issue and there is no long-term future transition to a better society imbedded in that.

Now, we ought to ask, I think, what are the obstacles to having a whole lot of people who are a whole lot more committed and a whole lot more informed about the gamut of issues and who are intent upon new kind of social structure or society. I suspect this is mostly asking how do we get people into the first biggest group and from the biggest group into the smaller group and so on… I think the obstacles are many but unlike many other folks, I think the least important is the power of the state, fear of the police, things like that, which many people point to first. I suspect those things are real but relatively small in terms of preventing people from being part of the left. I think much more important are the attributes of the left. That is, the tendency of people who are in the Democratic Party and don't move beyond its goals, so that they are not even in that first biggest group, and then all the way down… the tendency to not to go another step is probably very substantially affected by the feeling that taking another step is taking a step into insanity. It's taking a step into aggravation, frustration, and pain, whether consciously or not. People are afraid of the next step toward greater commitment if they feel taking it gains little and costs a lot in terms of personal well-being and mindset and their ability to go about their daily business. So that's one obstacle. The only solution to that obstacle is to have movements and organizations with features that make people's lives better instead of worse when they take that extra step.

The next obstacle, which is related to the previous one, is a feeling of hopelessness and despair about going any further. So if around the dinner table someone asks you what you think of the attack on Libya or the events in Wisconsin, you have an opinion. But as far as acting on that opinion in any way, you feel it's a waste of time because nothing will be gained and it will take time and it may involve aggravation. That's in part because there's very little understanding of how you win change and of how possible it is to win change and, at the grandest level, of what it would be like to win change, not just on a single issue but toward attaining a whole new social system. There's little vision or strategy, people don't know it, people don't feel like what they are contributing to activism will somehow contribute to the desired outcome. So I think those are some the biggest problems.

Partly fear, partly time-constraints and structural things that have to do with the character of the United States. Some of these things we could help with, we could have movements that are more protective of their member and movements that as one of their demands free up people's time. The second part is people's expectation of alienation and frustration if they participate in another step to the left, the aggravation, etc., with no real gain. That can only be correcting by altering the nature of our movements. Finally there is the more general despair and hopelessness that there is no alternative and therefore even well conceived activism is a waste of time because "I don't want to be part of that, only crazy people do that."

GW: So it sounds like a vicious circle, if on the one hand you're saying people are resistant to getting more involved because of despair and because of their fears, and on the other hand, in order to become involved, some sort of organization is necessary, but then again we cannot have an organization without the people wanting one and contributing to it - so this is a vicious cycle, is that correct?

MA: Yes. And we have to find a way to break the circle. But this shouldn't surprise us. When we look at why the left isn't larger and more effective, after all, we should expect to see a serious and difficult problem because if we don't see that, then why hasn't the left at all those levels we talked about earlier, grown dramatically in the last four decades? There have to be serious obstacles - we would have overcome trivial ones a long time ago. If you look and you don't see serious obstacles, you are not yet seeing well. So I agree with you, yes it's a vicious circle. And yes, that's the problem to overcome.

One thing to wonder is why does the right seem to do so much better?

The tea party is appealing to a considerable degree – not only, since they also appeal to racism and fear-mongering and so on - but to a considerable extent they also say look, your lives are a mess, there is pain and suffering and there are rich powerful people who are benefitting from this and we need to get together and take back our country. It's asking people to "Step outside of the norms," which we ask, too. So why do they do better?

Well, they do better partly because they have a lot of money, because they have a lot of resources, because when you align with them you do not look like you are from Neptune to everyone else – by joining them you only look odd to us. We think it's weird, but for the mainstream joining them you seem just angrier at something that everybody's angry at, because you're not taking the left stance, which is ridiculed. The nice thing about a vicious cycle, however, is that it can work both ways. Once you get going it can have the opposite effect. So once the tea party gets going, now there's some hope, some momentum, and so it grows.

The same thing with Egypt. They went from relatively little, to huge, very quickly. It's because they're overcoming a lack of hope. It isn't as if everybody all of a sudden became fantastically smart or fantastically more knowledgeable. They all knew what they thought of Mubarak ten weeks earlier, too. That isn't what happens. What happens is that hope rises, and the feeling of efficacy rises. People start to feel, if I go out on the streets of Cairo something may happen, we may win.

In contrast people here feel, if I go out on the streets in Washington, then I lose a day I may get hit, I may look like an idiot to my friends. I become more alienated. So why should I do that? It is easier for me to ridicule the people who do it than it is for me to endure the ridicule. So for a while a vicious circle of hopelessness is very hard to overcome.

But consider the Vietnam War era. Back then it was not a question of a lack of vision that bred hopelessness, a lack of generalized hope, it was that to be against the war was so discordant, was so different from the mainstream, so contrary to common sense belief in America, that that alone made you a pariah. So in the beginning there was a Catch-22, since you didn't have a movement, people had to go out and do the hard work of talking to an anti-war audience that was six people, two of whom were hecklers. That was the early days. But some years later, not too many years later, it became a movement that was sweeping the country. What happened was the assumptions, the beliefs were countered and overcome. That was a different task than we face now, because it is different beliefs at work.

GW: That actually gets me to my next question, which asks you to take a historical look back. How would you say has U.S. activism evolved in the last 50 years? If there was a surge of activism in the late 60's and early 70's, why did it collapse since then?

MA: First of all, why did it get going? People are going to say different things. There were certainly many factors, but the one I want to point to is that people got angry. Why did they get angry? They got angry because they discovered that everything was a lie. If you go back and look at the songs and the music, or you interview people who really were there, and are objective about it - that's what happened. People discovered they'd been tricked, hoodwinked. They discovered that it was all a lie, that it was all hypocrisy.

There were revelations about racism, about the war, about poverty, about sexism. In every case people were finding that some injustice that they sort of knew was there, was much worse than thought. So, for example, you might know that you were being abused by your husband, but you didn't know the number of people who were in that same position, and you didn't know that it was so pervasive, that that it wasn't just a bad guy you got stuck with, but something bigger, more systemic. You knew that there was racism, of course, but you didn't quite get the scale of it, and you didn't realize the extent to which it was, again, systemic. The war was another massive revelation that touched the whole society. You thought that the United States was a positive international actor, caring, freedom loving, but then you found out that the United States was a horrible international actor, that the United States was doing this horrendous stuff and you got pissed and that's when the youth movement just exploded in anger. Couple it with a rejection of the lifestyle of the times - and it added up to what is called the Sixties.

Now, the difference between then and now is that it's absolutely impossible to replicate that any longer. The reason it's impossible to do it in the same way is because nothing surprises anyone anymore. We were surprised, indeed shocked, by the revelations of injustice, back then. Now, in contrast, no matter what you reveal, the response is, "OK, uh huh, yeah, sure they do that, I get it." Everybody now knows, at some level, what we had to work incredibly hard in '67, '68, '69, '70, to get people to even notice. And when they realized, "Oh my God, this is horrible," they went berserk. But now, there is no revelation, they know, already.

Nowadays, that is, everybody knows the situation is horrible, at some deep level. You can see it all over popular culture. You can hear it at every dinner table. So movement can't happen the same way. There is nothing dramatic to reveal. What happened in the Sixties was that it got big, got angry, people thought they were going to change the world but it didn't turn out to be that easy. So after a while people started to get worn out, frustrated, started to have doubts about what they were doing, at least about changing society. In fact, much was changed. The war ended, tremendous gains were made in civil rights, around gender, even around poverty… Huge advances, but at the same time, very little structural lasting movement apparatus emerged. Getting back up to that big scale of mobilization and organization proved to be very difficult. The number of people who were involved in the no-nukes movement, about ten years later, or in Nicaragua or El Salvador, in the labor movement, in gender and race movements, these numbers were very high, but the difference was that people didn't have the anger, the spirit, or the inclination to want it all and to want it now, that characterized the Sixties. So it became movements that were trying to win important things, but at the same time as the people in those movements were trying to live their life normally. In the Sixties one was trying to win important things quickly, yes, but at the same time presuming that life was not going to go along in the way it was before. It was going to be fundamentally altered.

To get back to that transformative mentality, which leads to real solidarity and militancy, requires, nowadays, since we are now feeling that everything is hypocritical, that people come to know that everything is not just bad but grotesquely criminal and especially unnecessary because there is an alternative. As long as people think that there is no alternative, why should they get angry? You don't get angry at cancer or at aging – maybe a little bit, but you don't form a social movement about those things. When you don't think there is any alternative to the world as we know it, except perhaps in some small area where you can make some modest gain, mostly at the expense of someone else in some other area, then you don't work incredibly hard to create a type of movement seeking to change the whole society, because you think there is no such thing as changing the whole society. So, it's that absence of vision and associated hope that is a very big part or the difficulty, I think.

But then there are also some important structural things. For example, in the Sixties the campuses blew up and to a considerable extent it was initially at elite campuses. If you look at campus activism more recently, however, the elite campuses were largely quiet. It was working class colleges that were most involved. Why? Well, the system realized that it was a big mistake to give people a whole lot of resources and confidence at elite schools and not to be very careful to be sure that they would be compliant. So a lot was done in terms of raising fees for elite schools and making people indebted, and they did a pretty good job at that, when you see the relative quiescence at elite campuses, it was sought and attained. The downside is that in places where people have more access, more freedom to move, they don't move, so it's harder to get a youth movement going. However, the upside is, once it gets going it will be led by poorer students, by working class students, and so therefore it will be more substantial and more important to the future of the country.

Basically, the difference between now and the Sixties is that back then we could form a militant revolutionary movement that saw itself as being very aggressive, that saw itself as planning a new society, that became the focal point of the lives of its participants, but it really wasn't any of those things, in the end, because it had no lasting structures, it had no coherent ideology or vision for doing those things. Now, we have a situation where we can't even have a really big and militant and angry movement unless it really is a movement that wants to change the whole society and really believes in doing that. If that's true, then it means that the task for the U.S. left now is not to keep crying out about the injustice of particular things – not that we shouldn't do that somewhat – but the reason why that isn't as high a priority as before is because everybody knows the hundreds of specific reasons that things are bad. Speaking and writing about that is trying to convince people of something they already know. at least broadly. Even the right knows! It's just that people think the suffering is inevitable; it's a necessary evil, in their view.

The real task, instead, is to show that there is a different way of operating, and that here are short-term gains we can win now and here is a long-term changed circumstance that illuminates our problems and that is the end point of these endeavors and is worth our time. If we can convey that, vision and strategy, then we are conveying information that can sustain anger, commitment, and passion all in a rich diverse and broad movement that could make people's lives better and that could win gains and move on to change society. But without being able to convincingly and inspriationally communicate vision and strategy - if we only tell people this hurts, that hurts, this is unjust, that is unjust, then I think we won't get far.

GW: What does this mean in terms of concrete organizing? What would be the role of electoral politics, for example? What kind of organizing are you talking about?

MA: Whether one is moved by a revolutionary vision of a new society and a lifelong commitment to attain it, or just by being upset about a particular situation, one still organizes around wars, poverty, ecological calamities, continuing sexism and racism. So the focuses remain. The difference is in what you do.

One thing that is different when you organize around these things strategically in light of a long term vision is that you talk about them and make demands about them in ways that challenge the whole system, in ways that move forward people's commitments and thinking toward a broad attachment. You connect these different short-term aims. You have movements around each contribute to movements around the others. You fight for the short-run gains in ways that would be different than if you fought for them when all you have your eye on is the particular thing you are fighting about. The difference is how you talk about your short term aim, the kinds of ideas that emerge in the discussion and that lead to further demands and to keeping fighting instead of going home. That's how you build an organization that isn't oriented only to achieving one thing and then dissipating, but that is dedicated to bringing about a new society and that in winning something simply becomes stronger and more adept and more able to win more, rather than going home. That is all a little vague and would take a lot of time to give specific examples. It is a different mindset and a different approach.

Some people think that when you're fighting for X you should only talk about X, you should never talk about Y or Z. Their logic is, if you only care about getting X you should talk only about that one issue so you don't upset anybody. But what if you care about sustaining X once you get it, and what if you care about getting Y, W, and Z as well? Then the logic begins to falter and what you need to do is fight for X in a way that talks about X leading beyond that one issue. So you talk about higher wages, say, as the one issue, but while you are fighting for higher wages you talk about it in a way that that leads to an understanding of what a truly just income would be and that would lead to the next demands, to make income more just.

The second thing you do is you tie these things together and develop real solidarity. Let's say we had a national movement around a shorter workweek with no change in income for those at the low end. In other words, those with low incomes now work less but get the same income as before, despite working many fewer hours. And at the high end people work less too, but they get propostionately less income. So it's a redistribution of income from the top. If we are fighting for this campaign, which I think would be a fantastic campaign to fight for, not only because it redistributes income and prevents unemployment, but because it creates a situation in which it is easier to win more gains because people have more time – itself also a very, very important gain. But then I think you fight for it in a way that says what is actually really just is that people should be remunerated for how long they work, for how hard they work, and for the onerousness of their work. Not only should the poor be getting an increase, but they should be getting more than the people who have very cushy jobs. Do you still have strikes? Sure. Do still have rallies? Sure. You do all those things, however, with a criterion that in doing them you should attract more people, not less. With a criterion that you should make life in the movement better not worse for those who are in it. And also with a criterion that you should raise social costs to win the demands you are trying to win.

So then you ask, what is the role of electoral politics? Honestly, I have no idea. I don't think anybody does. The idea that there is a principled reason why it has no place on the left makes no sense to me. The idea that there is a principled reason why it should have a primary place also makes no sense to me. The question is whether electoral politics can be used now or in the future as part of a broad array of approaches that the left employs to win more and more gains, to win more and more power, to win more and more people, while becoming ever more capable of still more victories.

Some might think that we can use electoral politics in a way that will raise consciousness, that will give us access to resources and power strengthening our prospects, and that will lead to great changes in the long-run. Others might think, no, it's a dead end because the dynamics of electoral politics and the implications of seeking to win elections for our agendas and thinking are to diminish our abilities, to diminish our capacity to win changes, to distort our consciousness, to weaken our prospects.

The really big question isn't which view do you believe, but what do you do if two such views exist? I think the answer is, it doesn't make any sense to fight this out. The people who think electoral politics is a bad idea should be ecstatic if someone shows it to instead be a good idea. They should not think it's a bad idea and want to be right that it is a bad idea. They should think it's a bad idea want to be wrong because every good idea for change is beneficial for their agenda.

The people who think it's a good idea should hope that they are right but not feel that they cannot acknowledge being wrong. If they are wrong, they should feel grateful for finding it out, so that they can put their efforts to better means.

The minute we have these mindsets, actually, I think it is a single mindset that places success over ego, where the goal is to win and not to be right about a particular choice, then the idea of exploring more than one choice makes sense. Those who think it is important to use some approach should try it, even as others doubt it will help or even fear it will hurt. We can respect each other. The same thing goes for almost all tactical choices, but not all. Some tactical choices are so detrimental, so harmful, that a political organization would have to say not only that it is a bad idea, but that we cannot be involved in that and that no one involved in our organization should be involved in that. But that's not true for most decisions. I don't think these questions have to be resolved in advance for everyone, they just need to be resolved for some. We do not have to have unanimity, which is impossible and is not a good idea in any case because diversity is vastly better.

Suppose it was the case that we had a big movement in the United States. Suppose we have a 20,000 person revolutionary organization mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people. We aren't about to win tomorrow, but we are getting bigger. Suppose in the organization 80% think electoral politics is stupid and a distraction. Should they annihilate the 20% and have nobody do it? No, that's not the right answer. The 20% will not be good at something else if they really believe in electoral politics. You shouldn't have to duke it out. You discuss and debate, of course. But we are trying to create a new and better society and unless we are Stalinists, we don't think that there should be one approach to every issue in a whole society. So we shouldn't have one approach to every issue inside the movement either.

GW: You talked about the objectives of such an organization, but I would like to get a little bit more specific. For example, you said such an organization would have to be oriented around multiple issues embody a vision for new society. However, I'm wondering if there's any issue that stands out that would serve as a vehicle for elaborating that kind of vision. Is there any issue that is particularly pressing right now?

MA: In a particular moment in time one thing or another will be pressing. Suppose the nuclear power plant outside of New York City melts down tomorrow. That would be pressing and would be on everyone's mind in the country. Everybody would be paying attention to it. So any rational movement would pay very very close attention to it. But that's different than saying the movement should focus around one issue. Also, we don't know what that's going to be.

GW: But what do you think is a pressing issue right now?

MA: I don't think that there is one. There is what is happening in Wisconsin. It wasn't war, and it wasn't climate, it was some economic and political changes that would affect collective bargaining and it was powerful enough to yield one of the most important activist upsurges that we have seen in a long time. So someone could say, well, that is the issue. But others could say the war is the issue. After all, people are dying and we are blowing people up and certainly that motivates lots of people. Or climate change is the issue; after all, the future is at stake.

It is a dumb debate, I think. My feeling is, suppose you want to win on budgets, or on war, or on climate change, what does it mean? It means you want to win some gains now, and eventually you want to win a society that doesn't generate pursuit of profits, or war making, or a use of energy and an allocation of goods and resources that destroy the environment.

Suppose you want to organize around the economy and to change income distribution, or around foreign policy and to end war, or around nuclear power and to win green policies. In any of these things what you are trying to do is big. You are  trying to win something major that elites in power care a lot about. So you have to ask, why would they give in? On any issue that galvanizes lots of people over a longer period of time, you're going to be fighting about something that matters to elites, such as in the case of these issues. Otherwise they would give in right away. So why would they give in on something they don't want to give in on?

The answer is because the movement raises costs and creates a specter or threat, due to which they say to themselves, "If we don't give in, then this threat is going to grow and it's going to be more damaging to us than giving in is." That's the calculus that they use. If they give in to a budget movement, or antiwar movement, or global warming movement, it's because they feel that to not give in is going to hurt them more. And what hurts them enough to be more is a threat that the whole system will change.

When you get to the level of wars and the treatment of the whole ecology and income distribution, then elites have to feel that to persist with what we're seeking to end risks too much. What will convey that message to them?

If we turn out 100,000 people against a war in Washington, it's a cost but it's a relatively small cost because all they have to have to clean up the park. Even if we do it month after month, so? The demonstrations are only a real cost if there is the threat that the movement will get bigger and bigger. It is only threatening if it seems likely to change the mindset of the population and even more, if it threatens to address not just the war, but all of foreign-policy and beyond foreign-policy, domestic policy. If it threatens any of these things, in a growing way, it is raising the costs. But if it's just going to stand pat after 100,000 people or even 250,000 people, then it's no cost at all. The minute that it is not growing, the movement is no longer a cost, no longer a threat, because elites can just wait it out. The movement threat resides in growing numbers. The movement threat resides in growing relevance. And the movement threat resides in the growing diversity of demands.

Do the demands move from a particular focus toward changing the system? If they do, that's scary for elites. Same with the movement growing. In the Sixties the reason the antiwar movement was such a big threat was that a) it was growing and b) it included a spectrum from: against the war gently, to against the war moderately, to against the war militantly, to against foreign policy, to against the whole damn system. What you saw at each level was a growth of the broader level leading to growth of the more committed level as well. There was a continuing process, which in time said to the government, "You want to defend the war in Vietnam in order to enlarge your power and wealth and to maintain the system the way it is. What happens when the day comes when you realize the pursuit of this war, while it is in your interest in the sense of holding back change in Indochina, is not in your interest in the sense that it is polarizing and organizing the U.S. population in such a way that pretty soon they will be challenging your wealth and power across the board."

If you go back and look at the point at which elites started changing sides on the war, such as senators and business leaders, you see that they said not that it's immoral and our people are dying. No. They said, "Our streets are in turmoil and we are losing the next generation, society's fabric is being torn asunder." In other words, they were saying, "I got into this war in order to increase my wealth and power, but now it seems that if we continue to pursue the war it will risk my wealth and power even more than giving in to the demands to end it, so now I'm against the war."

So to come back to your point, suppose there is that meltdown or the war on Libya expands and gets much, much, bigger, or states across the country are doing what the governor of Wisconsin did, and it becomes a focal point. Or even there is a big ecological calamity. What I am saying is to win any one of them, it is incredibly advantageous that all of them are being sought. For example, that's why Seattle worried elites a lot. Honestly, it wasn't all that big. But the threat was that it was not just about globalization. It carried the threat of the labor movement, the green movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, everyone working together. So many in the elite sectors felt, "Our policies are creating the mess that we are trying to avoid." That was the threat. So sure, if there is a focus that attracts everybody's attention, okay, by all means, addressed sensibly, that can help us, but to get caught up in one focus, to make the mistake of thinking that everything should be geared to that one focus and we should set aside everything else, misses the point of how you win even short-term, much less long-term gains.

This is the first of a series of interviews on the state of the U.S. left. You can find this and more at zcommunications.

Rural American Progressive

In Unity is Strength

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Fundamentalism Kills

Tuesday 26 July 2011

by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik.

This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.

We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the publication of the King James Bible. The concept of "the chosen people" was quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.

Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the "chosen people." They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—that this call for a new world is based on reason, factual evidence and science or divine will. But schemes for universal human advancement, no matter what language is used to justify them, are always mythic. They are designed to satisfy a yearning for meaning and purpose. They give the proponents of these myths the status of soothsayers and prophets. And, when acted upon, they fill the Earth with mass graves, bombed cities, widespread misery and penal colonies. The extent of this fundamentalism is evident in the strident utterances of the Christian right as well as those of the so-called New Atheists.

"What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?" Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," asks in a passage that I suspect Breivik would have enjoyed. "If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."

"We are at war with Islam," Harris goes on. "It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been 'hijacked' by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet."

Harris assures us that "the Koran mandates such hatred," that "the problem is with Islam itself." He writes that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform.

Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or social or linguistic differences. They are a remarkably uncurious, self-satisfied group. Anything outside their own narrow bourgeois life, petty concerns and physical comforts bores them. They are provincials. They do not investigate or seek to understand the endemic flaws in human nature. The only thing that matters is the coming salvation of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity they deem worthy of salvation. They peddle a route to assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical extermination of other human beings to get there.

All fundamentalists worship the same gods—themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority. Fundamentalists express the frustrations of a myopic and morally stunted middle class. They cling, under their religious or scientific veneer, to the worst values of the petite bourgeois. They are suburban mutations, products of an American landscape that has been perverted by a destruction of community and a long and successful war against complex thought. The self-absorbed worldview of these fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit, at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.

Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Ulysses" acidly condemned all schemes to purify the world and serve human progress through violence. He said that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Dedalus in the same passage responded to the schoolmaster Deasy's claim that "the ways of the Creator are not our ways," and that "all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God." A soccer goal is jubilantly scored by boys in the yard outside the school window as Deasy expounds on divine will. God, Dedalus tells Deasy as the players yell in glee over the goal, is no more than the screams from the schoolyard —"a shout in the street." Joyce, like Samuel Beckett, excoriated the Western belief in historical teleology—the notion that history has a purpose or is moving toward a goal. The absurdity of this belief, they wrote, always feeds fanatics and undermines the possibility of human community. These writers warned us about all those—religious and secular—who call for salvation through history.

There are tens of millions of Americans who in their desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation. They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers, liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must be eliminated.

This fundamentalist ideology, because it is contradictory and filled with myth, is immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic. This is part of its appeal. It obliterates doubt, nuance, intellectual and scientific rigor and moral conscience. All has been predicted or decided. Life is reduced to following a simple black-and-white road map. The contradictions in these belief systems—for example the championing of the "rights of the unborn" while calling for wider use of the death penalty or the damning of Muslim terrorists while promoting pre-emptive war, which delivers more death and misery in the Middle East than any jihadist organization—inoculate followers from rational discourse. Life becomes a crusade.

All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses. They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as clearly and starkly defined. The world is divided into those who embrace or reject their belief systems. Those who support these belief systems are good and forces for human progress. Those who oppose these belief systems are stupid, at best, and usually evil. Fundamentalists have no interest in real debate, real dialogue, real intellectual thought. Fundamentalism, at its core, is about self-worship. It is about feeling holier, smarter and more powerful than everyone else. And this comes directly out of the sickness of our advertising age and its exaltation of the cult of the self. It is a product of our deep and unreflective cultural narcissism.

Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect life. Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life.

There is no linear movement in history. Morality and ethics are static. Human nature does not change. Barbarism is part of the human condition and we can all succumb to its basest dimensions. This is the tragedy of history. Human will is morally ambiguous. The freedom to act as often results in the construction of new prisons and systems of repression as it does the safeguarding of universal human rights. The competing forces of love and of power define us, what Sigmund Freud termed Eros and Thanatos. Societies have, throughout history, ignored calls for altruism and mutuality in times of social upheaval and turmoil. They have wasted their freedom in the self-destructive urges that currently envelope us. These urges are very human and very dangerous. They are fired by utopian visions of inevitable human progress. When this progress stalls or is reversed, when the dreams of advancement and financial stability are thwarted, when a people confronts its own inevitable downward spiral, dark forces of vengeance and retribution are unleashed. Fundamentalists serve an evil that is unseen and unexamined. And the longer this evil is ignored the more dangerous and deadly it becomes. Those who seek through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.

Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is "The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress."

FBI rules changes provoke Senate inquiry

The FBI plans to issue new rules broadening the discretion of its 14,000 field agents over matters of individual privacy, and, while the legality of such a move hasn't been called into question, it has raised questions and concerns on the part of civil libertarians and some lawmakers alike.

The new rules are to be made public when the Bureau releases an update of its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which outlines policies on how agents are to conduct investigations. The current version was published in 2008.

The law enforcement agency sees the changes as minor, but the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees. "The FBI claims that this update to the guidelines is a mere tweak," wrote the ACLU's Amanda Simon on the organization's blog. "Somehow that sounds like an incredible understatement."

Simon said that the current guidelines are already bad: "[T]here is a dangerously low threshold for beginning an investigation or conducting surveillance about individuals or groups who are not suspected of any criminal activity," she wrote. "The guidelines in place now also allow the FBI to collect, analyze and map racial and ethnic data about local communities, which also opens up a whole other can of worms - namely, the possibility that the FBI is engaging in unconstitutional racial profiling."

Some are troubled that the rules changes come in the context of a recent Chicago FBI raid of anti-war groups and their supporters that received that condemnation of many, including the local Sun-Times.

Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, respectively chair and ranking member of the Senate's judiciary committee, agreed that the matter was worth more consideration. They sent a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller requesting that "that the FBI provide a briefing to Committee staff to discuss the proposed changes and provide an opportunity to review the final version of [the new FBI rules manual] before it is implemented" and "that once [the manual] is finalized, a public version be released and made available on the FBI's website."

The New York Times, which broke the news, was also extremely critical. "The Obama administration has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans' basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism," the editorial read. "Now the Obama team seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did."

The proposed new guidelines, as reported by the Times, would contain several changes that give agents greater discretion in investigations.

Included in the changes:

Agents will be able to freely conduct searches of people and organizations in law enforcement and commercial databases. They currently have the right to do this, but now they won't need to make a record.

There are secret rules on the books governing how agents must operate when they infiltrate religious or other organizations, but now they will be able to attend five meetings of such a group before they must follow these rules.

In the lowest level investigations, or assessments, officials will be able to use lie-detector tests on informants as well as suspected perpetrators.

Agents will be able to search the trash of anyone involved in an assessment, which requires no documentation of suspected wrongdoing.

Agents will not need special oversight to investigate some public officials, "low-profile" bloggers and scholars employed by foreign institutions.

On the other hand, the FBI is tightening up regulations of some activities, including policies on who has authority to approve covert participation in religious ceremonies.

Address : http://peoplesworld.org/fbi-rules-changes-provoke-senate-inquiry/

Investigate FCC Commissioner Baker's clear conflict of interest.

Republican FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is leaving the FCC to
become a lobbyist for Comcast/NBC Universal -- just four months after
she voted to approve the controversial merger of the two media behemoths.

We need to stop the revolving door of public servants leaving their
government role and cashing in by joining companies they were supposed
to be regulating.

I just signed a petition telling congress to launch an investigation of
the FCC Commissioner's seemingly blatant conflict of interest. You can
too, through the link below:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/fcc_baker/?r_by=20926-2728311-eyIYEyx&rc=mailto1

--
http://heartlandheretic.com

Evangelical Liberty University received half a billion dollars in federal aid money

One conservative college got more government cash than NPR last year

By Alex Pareene

Liberty University, Wikipedia

Jerry Falwell

Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid last year. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government.

That massive sum was thanks to the growth of Liberty's online program, which enrolled 52,000 students last year. The school is the No. 1 recipient of Pell grant money in the state of Virginia. While it may seem like the federal government is basically subsidizing this formerly financially challenged ultra-conservative religious private school, LU's executive director of financial aid sees it differently:

For Ritz — a financial aid veteran who got his start at a small Bible college — Liberty's use of federal financial aid does not run counter to the university's conservative values. Liberty does not receive the federal money directly, Ritz said, but through students, who use it to pay for tuition, room and board and other expenses.

"These funds are authorized by Congress and Congress is elected by voters. . . I've always been in the position where I believe I'm a steward of those federal funds. I'm a steward of tax-payer money."

And I'm sure ACORN, Planned Parenthood and NPR feel the same way.

Liberty University -- where the biology department teaches Young Earth Creationism -- is, astoundingly, an accredited school of higher learning.

The school was broke and in debt until God killed Falwell for the insurance money.

[Via Dispatched From the Culture Wars]

• Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/05/liberty_university_federal_money

Playing at children’s games

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

— G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Rural American Progressive
In Unity is Strength

Walker must go! For a general strike in Wisconsin!

The World Socialist Web Site urges all of its readers and supporters in Wisconsin to download, distribute, and post this article as widely as possible, and to develop a campaign in the working class. A pdf version for printing is available here. The article can be shared on Facebook and Twitter.

3 March 2011

The budget presented by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Tuesday has caused profound shock and outrage among workers throughout the state. It has now become clear to hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers and their families that they are confronted with a ruthless attempt to drastically lower their living standards, eviscerate crucial social services and benefits, and strip away their democratic rights.

Walker is demanding cuts of at least $1.5 billion from the state's budget to close a deficit that has been created, to a great extent, by his recent massive reduction of tax rates for large corporations.

These cuts include:

$1.25 billion in cuts to school aid and local government, including a reduction of more than $900 million in education funding statewide, which translates into a cut of approximately $500 per pupil.

$500 million in cuts from Medicaid, which finances critical state health programs for more than one million Wisconsin resid ents. The impact on low-income and uninsured adults and families with children will be devastating.

$250 million will be cut from funding for the University of Wisconsin. Moreover, as part of a scheme that will serve the interests of top corporations, the Madison branch of the University of Wisconsin will be carved off from the state system. This will gut the wages and workplace rights of 17,000 UW workers and lead to a sharp increase in college tuition costs over the next two years.

The Walker budget document is a declaration of war. His inclusion of further demands for the elimination of collective bargaining follows logically from his budget proposals. The cuts that he is calling for make a mockery of "bargaining," because his budget proposals require, by their very nature, the complete surrender by workers to his unilateral demands.

The oft-repeated position of union officials--that they are prepared to accept Walker's budget cuts if only he steps back from his demand for an end to collective bargaining--is not only cowardly, it represents a dangerous evasion of the political reality that exists in Wisconsin.

The term "collective bargaining" means nothing at all if unions are prepared to accept the dictates of state governments, which are acting in the interests of the capitalist bosses of the banks and industry. Collective bargaining did not emerge in the form of a permission slip granted by generous corporations to the workers. It w as wrested from the capitalist class in the course of decades of bitter conflict for social and democratic rights, in which countless thousands of workers' lives were lost. In the final analysis, collective bargaining existed only to the extent that workers were prepared to exercise the weapon of the strike to overcome the intransigence of the capitalist class and its political hirelings in local, state and federal government.

Walker's budget signifies in practice, if not yet in law, the collapse of collective bargaining. His administration is ramming a brutal and socially destructive budget down the throats of Wisconsin working people and their families.

How should the working class in Wisconsin respond to this political reality?

In recent days, there has been a growing realization among working people throughout Wisconsin that protests in the state capital are insufficient and that they must escalate their struggle.

Sentiment is building for a ge neral strike by the working class. Wisconsin workers, in ever greater numbers, are coming to realize that nothing short of a massive mobilization of their collective strength will be sufficient to beat back the attack of the Walker administration.

This sentiment is justified and corresponds to the political reality that exists in Wisconsin and, increasingly, throughout the United States. The collapse of collective bargaining--that is, the attempt of the state to impose, with the implicit threat of force, intolerable and unacceptable demands upon workers--has a profound objective significance. The ruling class is telling working people: "We do not negotiate. We demand. You must accept our terms."

This signifies, in effect, the end of compromise between the classes. The growing recognition of this political reality among workers lies behind the rising sentiment for a general strike.

It is necessary for workers who have come to this conclusion to build the momentum for a general strike. Talk about a general strike must turn toward its actual preparation.

In every work place, meetings should be called to discuss, debate and vote on a resolution for a general strike. Wherever substantial support exists for a general strike, rank-and-file committees, independent of union officials, should be formed to prepare for this action.

This movement should base the call for a general strike on the following demands:

* Total rejection of all economic concessions by the Wisconsin workers. Instead, social spending should be increased to meet the pressing problems created by three years of recession caused by the criminal speculative activities of the banks.

* Unequivocal rejection of any and all restrictions on the legal right of workers to negotiate and, when they so decide, strike to defend and improve their standard of living.

* For a substantial increase in taxes on corporate profits and the very rich to cover the budget deficit and the costs of new and essential social spending.

* For the immediate resignation of Governor Walker and his reactionary administration. Walker has deliberately made himself the political spearhead of the corporate attack on the working class and the use of dictatorial methods. The demand for his removal from office arises from the recognition that the struggle of Wisconsin workers against this budget is, in essence, a political struggle.

The call for Walker's removal does not imply a vote of confidence in the Democratic Party. Beyond the borders of Wisconsin there are Democratic Party governors and mayors who are calling for budget cuts no less draconian than those sought by Walker. The Obama administration is collaborating with the state governors and the Congress in Washington in the implementation of budget cuts that will wreak havoc on the lives of workers throughout the country.

However, inspired by the example set by Wi sconsin workers, the fight against the attacks on workers' rights will expand from state to state and across the country as a whole, in opposition to all the political representatives of the capitalist class.

Thus, the demand for Walker's removal raises the most important issue of all--the necessity for workers to create their own, independent, socialist alternative to the corporate-controlled Republican and Democratic parties.

The Socialist Equality Party supports and encourages the movement for a general strike against the Walker administration and its reactionary budget. The growing sentiment among workers that such action is necessary testifies to the intensity of social conflict in the United States. However, we urge workers to recognize that they are fighting not just one governor, but the capitalist class as a whole and the profit system upon which its rule is based.

David North

For more information on joining the Socialist Equality Party, click here. Attend the SEP/WSWS/ISSE regional conferences, The Fight for Socialism Today: www.fightforsocialism.org.

Rural American Progressive
In Unity is Strength