Revolution Needed, So Our Corporate Overlords Are Fanning The Flames For Second Civil War

 One of President Obama's many rewards for enriching banksters at the taxpayers' expense was this summer "cottage" on Martha's Vineyard.

Why do we need a revolution, you say? 

In rough order of priority:

o Global climate crisis driven by capitalism is spiraling out of control and the window to walk us back from catastrophe is rapidly closing.

o Global pandemic has killed millions and appears headed to kill millions more with a system of medical apartheid and for-profit medicine in the U.S. and other non-socialist countries.

o Eviction crisis on top of already galloping homelessness not only creates trauma for millions but is a big factor in the spread of COVID.

o Military spending and weapons systems surging -- including building nuclear weapons, illegal under international law because they could easily end human life if used.

o Incarceration for profit in the U.S. and to impoverish and disenfranchise Black, indigenous, and people of color is growing worse and was already at crisis levels. Racist policing continues at crisis levels but is now more visible due to cell phone videos.

o Student debt continues to depress the prospects of entire generations.

o Minimum wage is now about 1/3 of what an actual living wage should be in 2021, especially because of rapid, ongoing inflation of the cost of housing.

o Child care and public education continue to be underfunded in the face of immense unmet needs.

How are our corporate overlords fanning the flames for a second Civil War?

Charlottesville, Virginia "Unite the Right" rally August, 2017 

In roughly chronological order:

o Propaganda rather than useful information sharing is the norm across the spectrum of corporate-owned "news" outlets, from Fox News to CNN. The steady erosion of reliability in sourcing information is the work of corporate media and corporate social media that censors on behalf of the ruling class.

Carlos Piccata, who says he is a combat vet, to the Shasta, CA county commission: “It’s not going to be peaceful much longer. We’re building, we’re organizing. You won’t stop us when the time comes. This is a warning for what’s coming. There’s a million people just like me.” pic.twitter.com/EF8fjqGb1z

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 14, 2021

o White supremacy is in a desperate fight to remain in control, and numerous militias and other types of organizations have responded to perceived and real threats including the removal of Confederate statues and flags. Also, attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, including killing them by running them down with cars (a practice that a few states have legalized) and targeting them for assassination.

o Law enforcement complicit in white supremacist movement, and armed to the teeth with cast off military equipment shared by the Pentagon.

o Widespread misinformation about public health protocols including vaccines, masking, and distancing and robust media coverage of refuseniks.

o Absence of national leadership on ending the pandemic leaving states, towns, and school boards to fend for themselves in the face of angry mobs. We are entering the third school year in a row pitting neighbors against neighbors and parents against school administration.

What can we in the U.S. do to bring on revolution rather than a second civil war?

In no particular order:

o Don't fall for divisive tactics. For example, consider the possiblity that "Divided We Fall May Be COVID's Underlying Purpose."

o Look and listen beneath the surface of false dichotomies.

o Don't demonize each other just because we disagree. People with ideas that seem wrong and dangerous may have PTSD from traumas. They may be experiencing hunger, bankruptcy, or lack of medical care. They may only have access to really poor information or outright disinformation. Don't write human beings off even if you loathe their ideas. 

o Free your mind and the rest will follow. Do your own thinking, take in new information, and be willing to rethink your beliefs. Put another way, don't mistake narratives for truth. Even this one.

What I Really Care About: The War On The Poor

"They got money for wars but can't feed the poor." Tupac Shakur, 1993 (photo source: Huffington Post)

When I started this blog what I really cared about were the USA's many, many wars against the poor both within and without our wealthy nation.

Children were and are being burned up in their beds at night by drones, flying killer robots controlled by soldiers in air conditioned trailers somewhere thousands of miles away. Also by conventional bombs dropped from airplanes with humans in them. Civilian casualties are pretty much ignored once they've been assigned marginal status as "collateral damage" in the U.S. wars for empire. This goes on with a ka-ching of the cash registers whether the person in the White House had a D or an R after their name.

The children killed and maimed are nearly always brown, and the soldiers and their commanders are usually white.

In the years since I started my blog, cell phones and body cameras have elevated the traditional policing practice of beating and even murdering black and brown bodied people who are unarmed and pose no threat. Also the traditional practice of not holding police officers accountable for their racist violence. So that is also a grave injustice that holds my attention.

Meanwhile, through my activist community, I've learned a lot more than I knew about the apartheid state of Israel and their occupation of Palestine. I grew up on Zionist propaganda in the corporate media and had lots of Jewish friends whose families subscribed to what filmmaker Eric Axelman calls "Israelism."

Now comes Rep. Ilhan Omar pointing out that lobbyists like AIPAC exert enormous influence on Congress by means of funneling money to our so-called representatives.

She has been vilified for stating this obvious truth. As organizer Philip Savage observed, "Progressive Democrats say Listen to women of color, but as soon as Ilhan Omar said something true they turned on her."

So I wrote to my new white man in Congress, Rep. Jared Golden, asking him not to join the "leadership" of the Democratic party in censuring Omar. What I got back was a boilerplate response that indicates Golden is completely ignorant of facts on the ground in Palestine, and suggests that he is already in AIPAC's hip pocket. (Because AIPAC's minions work fast and are extremely good at the wrong thing that they do.)

March 8, 2019

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for contacting me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It is my honor to serve as your representative in Congress, and I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

Israelis and Palestinians have suffered from heartbreaking violence for far too long. I believe that a negotiated two-state solution would bring security for both Israelis and Palestinians, and that it is the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state.

The United States has had some success in brokering peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors. In 1978, we led the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. In 1994, we led the Wadi Araba Treaty between Israel and Jordan. I believe that the United States should build on this strong record and work to establish peace negotiations once again.

I respect the diversity of views that Americans hold on this conflict. As we grapple with this complex and painful issue, we must remain open to legitimate policy debates and reject all forms of bigotry.

Thank you again for reaching out to me on this important issue. I hope you will continue to inform me of the issues that matter to you.

Sincerely,

Jared F. Golden
Member of Congress

Golden was supposed to be our saver because he replaced Bruce Poliquin, a Wall St. lackey who was tremendously out of touch with his constituents in the poor half of Maine.

As a candidate, Golden was glorified as a veteran. That worried me, but some of my best friends are veterans who learned firsthand that war is hell and came home to honestly address their moral injuries.

He has now made his first voting blunder by opposing background checks on gun sales. This is entirely in touch with the 2nd district of Maine, full of hunters, doomsday preppers, and adults who grew up pretending to shoot people for fun.

So, the NRA -- a lobby so powerful it rivals AIPAC -- may or may not have already gotten to Golden. Time will tell.

In the meantime I will write back to Golden and strongly urge that he educate himself about the situation in Palestine, Israel, and the role of the U.S. in perpetuating problems there. For starters, recognize that the two-state solution is virtually impossible since the U.S. has permitted and supported the Balkanization of Palestine for the last several decades.

Source: International Middle East Media Center
"New Israeli government plans to annex 1/3 of West Bank by ‘legalizing’ illegal settlements" May 15, 2015

I know that I have already lost the interest of the scores of new readers I attracted by covering the mascot controversy in Skowhegan. But the two issues are actually not that different. 

Beneath the surface, both involve a dominant culture of white settlers stealing land and water resources, and herding the indigenous people into tightly confined spaces with limited civil rights. Also plenty of propaganda to characterize those targeted for genocide as undesirable, in many cases even less than human.

My next campaign will not involve demeaning stereotypes like mascots or even stopping the theft of Palestine from the Palestinians, an ongoing concern that would require my retirement to pursue in a meaningful way.

Design by Russell Wray

My next campaign will be close to home: the conversion of Bath Iron Works, which is owned by mega wealthy weapons manufacturer General Dynamics, to peaceful production. Pressuring a corporation is a whole lot different and more difficult than pressuring a small public entity like a school board to do the right thing. But it can be done, it has been done, and it will be done.

Someday I believe we will stop building weapons and start building sustainable energy solutions like solar and tidal power components.

Conversion will make us all safer. Because weapons don't make anyone safer. and because climate change is the biggest security threat facing human life on the planet today.

If you want to join me, consider taking the Natural Guard pledge and/or signing our petition about conversion of BIW.

Also consider an act of civil disobedience the next time a warship is "christened" in Bath, probably this spring. This kind of political advocacy is way more fun that attending school board meetings but the two have this in common: you meet the nicest people.

Stay tuned...

We Fight Each Other With The Pieces Of Our Broken Hearts (I Will Survive)

Photo: Ben McCanna, Portland Press Herald

Austerity in the form of homelessness is a particularly ugly manifestation of capitalism and especially neoliberal economic policies. 

The U.S. is a wealthy nation that lacks universal health care, affordable housing, tuition free education through college, child care, public transportation to get to said job in most areas, and a guaranteed minimum income -- all things other wealthy nations offer in exchange for taxes. It's no surprise that, without these social safety nets, a lot of people end up homeless. Some of them are addicts, and some suffer from mental illness -- and neither of those health conditions is adequately addressed by federal, state or local governments.

Many homeless men and women are veterans of U.S, imperial wars, who joined out of economic distress in an attempt to get a college education afterwards. Or maybe just a pickup truck.

So when NIMBY motivated residents in, say, Los Angeles, pitch a fit about locating temporary emergency homeless shelters in their neighborhood, they look callous and uncaring.

But the reality is that a homeless shelter can turn a neighborhood into something a homeless veteran described as worse than anything she had ever seen in the many other countries she had visited. As explained by social workers, it's the predators who move in to exploit vulnerable people who do the most to erode living conditions in the blocks around a homeless shelter or soup kitchen.

Photo: Ben McCanna, Portland Press Herald

No one who has heroin addicts congregating in their apartment's laundry room to shoot up can be blamed for objecting.

Those of us fortunate enough to own our (mortgaged) homes watch with dismay as the value of our property falls away when a homeless shelter is introduced to the area. 

These structural problems with the U.S. economy are not accidental.

When homeless people and working class homeowners are pitted against each other, the wealthy can sit back and watch the show.

I'm reminded at times like these of the Occupy Oakland revision of Gloria Gaynor's old disco hit: I Will Survive...Capitalism. The line "we fight each other with the pieces of our broken hearts" has stayed with me since I first heard it during the heady days of 2011's Occupy Wall St. movement.





While the demagogue with bad hair initiates trade wars with friend and foe alike, austerity like nothing we've seen in decades is waiting in the wings. Military spending gallops along, and state lawmakers fall all over themselves offering tax giveaways to weapons manufacturers.

Image: Suzanna Lasker

Will we make common cause and support each other, or fight it out while the wealthy continue to hoard housing, health care and higher education for their families?

My husband asked me recently what form of education I thought could possibly equip children to face the world of climate collapse and food shortages looming on their horizon. He's a grandparent but not an educator, and he's asking me because I'm a teacher struggling with the unmet needs of my high poverty school.

Learn to be flexible problem solvers and, above all, learn to cooperate and collaborate with other people.

Those are the main skills I can think of passing on for survival in the cruel new world we're passing on to the children. Who know what tomorrow will bring? Our love and intelligence are the only things we can really count on.

For-Profit Health Care As The Engine Of Poverty In The USA

Birthing simulator in use at a U.S. Air Force hospital. What's wrong with this picture?

It's been a couple of years since I wrote the satirical novella Your Health Is Important To Us, and I've been thinking on the need to add a new chapter.

I wanted to express how for-profit health "care" has been the engine of poverty for my generation and those that followed.

Mine was the last cohort who could cling to middle class comfort by means of jobs that buffered the effects of exploitative health insurance. Many of us have lost or are losing our grip, and many younger than us never had any health care or full benefits employment to hold onto.

That sense was what I was trying to express in my novella, which owes much to the tragicomedy of life under Zionism, The Secret Life of Saeed the pessoptimist by Emile Habiby. And to Voltaire's Candide, which inspired Habiby. And to The Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hašek, about a little man ground down by inexorable historical and cultural forces. Today's little man would be, I feel certain, a woman. Thus I created the anti-heroine Candida Albicans Smedley.

An actual heroine of the health care battles is Dr. Margaret Flowers. She has been on the front lines of the fight for universal health care in the richest nation on the planet, and I've blogged about her efforts to lead us in this direction a few times before.

Dr. Flowers was arrested in the Senate protesting the absence of voices for single payer in the hearings that led to the Affordable [sic] Care Act aka Obamacare. (Full disclosure: Subsequently, Dr. Flowers and I and my husband were arrested at the Obama White House protesting the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Iraq.) She has skin in the game of bringing health care to the masses, retiring from her career as a pediatrician to pursue social justice.

I usually keep up with Flowers' work by reading Popular Resistance, the website she helped found before "resistance" was a word co-opted by the Democratic Party branch of corporate government.


You know, the branch that brought us the insurance company giveaway called the Affordable Care Act.

This morning I read her critique of half measures like the ACA in her article for Counterpunch, "Improved Medicare For All Is The Answer." It shouldn't take someone with a medical degree to figure out what's wrong with the ACA, or to conclude that abolishing it without a replacement would be even more cruel and impoverishing to millions. Some of Dr. Flowers' clear thinking:

Most people who purchase health insurance have no idea which plan is best for them because nobody can anticipate what their healthcare needs will be in the future. A study of the Massachusetts health exchange plans done by the Center for American Progress showed that some plans were best for patients with cancer and other plans were best for people with heart disease or diabetes, but that isn’t something that can be advertised up front. Even if it were, people can’t predict if they will be diagnosed with cancer, heart disease or diabetes in the future. HR 676: The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act solves this problem by creating a single public plan designed to cover whatever our healthcare needs will be.

Dr. Flowers doesn't need me to explain that the goal of HR 676, i.e. covering "whatever our healthcare needs will be" is not the goal of federal health care policy.

That goal is the same whether we're talking about health policy, foreign policy or evironmental policy: protect profits for the corporations that put politicians in office.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2014/jun/mirror-mirror

Because of the exorbinant costs of health procedures and pharmaceutical drugs, health care is an important driver of growing poverty and wealth inequality. It's a racist issue because it falls most heavily on people of color whose health outcomes and longevity are worse than the white majority. It's a class issue because, as depicted in Your Health Is Important To Us, health care is a constant drag on the economically depressed. 

A normal health crisis such as an automobile accident, a heart attack, cancer or, increasingly often, opioid addiction, can easily cause bankruptcy and the loss of one's home. And if you die early from lack of health care? "Americans are dying younger, saving corporations billions."

Be scared, be very scared, says our corporate government. Time and tide wait for no woman -- mostly everyone needs some form of health care in the end.

Medically induced poverty will be the great equalizer of the 21st century USA, sparing only the very, very wealthy. Unless there's a revolution soon, and Dr. Flowers' ideas prevail. Here's a final quote from her article:

I refer to a saying used by my now-deceased mentor Dr. Quentin Young: “You can’t cross an abyss in two jumps.” The only way we can get to a universal single payer healthcare system in the United States is by creating a universal single payer healthcare system in the United States. Anything less than that will fail because it will not achieve the savings on administration and prices needed to cover everyone and it will not compete with the powerful private insurance industry.

With Suicide And Overdose Deaths On The Rise, Is America Great Again?

My extended family absorbed two pieces of bad news yesterday. One father of three shot himself in the heart after struggling with the PTSD that follows veterans home from battle; his twelve year old daughter heard the gun shot but could not open the locked bathroom door. His pain may have ended, but hers is unimaginable.

But my country will continue to spend hundred of millions each year to convince its children that the military is a great job opportunity!

Closer to home, a young father died of an overdose. He had just earned his GED. He left behind a pregnant wife and a couple of small children. Maine now loses a person every day to opioid abuse. That's a statistical average. Some days we lose more than one.

These are the wages of poverty among generations that have known nothing but expensive, distant wars.

The wages of stop loss and head injuries and repeated redeployments that render U.S. soldiers unfit for continuing to live.

The wages of high poverty and low health care and a society that treats addicts like criminals rather than people suffering from a deadly illness.


It's no wonder people fall for the words of a demagogue with bad hair promising to make their country great again.

Instead, our country is now invading Syria and threatening Iran and Qatar and China and Russia and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and...We're massing troops on the border of too many countries and we're the biggest weapons dealer the world has ever known. Our own people are gunned down in the streets by police, and struck down at home by drugs meant to ease their pain. Or they take a gun in hand and end the pain once and for all.

My love goes out to everyone suffering under the rule of the wealthy. Whatever mistakes we make, we deserve to live and to see our children grow up, to hold our grandchildren on our laps and whisper how important they are.

I share this piece by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht in the spirit of healing our deadly devotion to wealth and the violence it requires to maintain it. (Thanks to Bruce Gagnon for sharing it to his blog yesterday with the title "Forgive Us, We Were Fools.")

To those born later

By Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

I.
Truly I live in dark times!
Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrible news.

What kind of times are these, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
When the man over there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It’s true that I still earn my daily bread
But, believe me, that’s only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I'm lost.)

They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving
And my glass of water belongs to someone dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfill your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do.
Truly, I live in dark times.

II.
I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger reigned.
I came among men in a time of revolt
And I rebelled with them.
So passed my time
Given to me on earth.

I ate my food between battles
I lay down to sleep among murderers
I practiced love carelessly
And I had little patience for nature’s beauty.
So passed my time
Given to me on earth.

All roads led into the mire in my time.
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers.
There was little I could do. But those in power
Sat safer without me: that was my hope.
So passed my time
Given to me on earth.

Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance
Clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it.
So passed my time
Given to me on earth.

III.
You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Bring to mind
When you speak of our failings
Bring to mind also the dark times
That you have escaped.
Changing countries more often than our shoes,
We went through the class wars, despairing
When there was only injustice, no outrage.
And yet we realized:
Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. O,
We who wanted to prepare the ground for friendship
Could not ourselves be friendly.
But you, when the time comes at last
When man is helper to man
Think of us
With forbearance.         

                                                          

[1940] 

We are all Mother Courage now, scrambling to make a living off the war machine while trying (and failing) to keep it from consuming our children.

Racist School Closings Are The Fruit Of Pentagon Greed

Infographic by Katie Falkenberg, CODEPINK Denver

Do school closings disproportionately affect children in African American communities?

Activists who filed three civil rights complaints with the federal government think so. 

Lyndsey Layton reporting on May 13, 2014 for the Washington Post wrote:

...complaints, sent to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and the Justice Department, charge that students of color from Newark, Chicago and New Orleans have been disproportionately affected by school closures and charter-school expansions. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in the use of federal funds by schools and other institutions [emphasis mine].

In Newark, 13 public schools have closed since 2009. In Chicago, 111 schools have closed since 2001. In New Orleans, all the traditional public schools except five have shut down since 2003. The District of Columbia has closed 39 traditional public schools since 2008. Those shuttered schools have been replaced by public charter schools, which are funded by taxpayers but are privately operated.

Since the federal government continues to squander more than half of its annual allowance from taxpayers on the Pentagon budget, subsidies to states and municipalities continue to decline. Rich communities make up the shortfall in their local school budget with local property tax revenues. Poor communities cannot do the same. 

The fact that U.S. schools and neighborhoods continue to be segregated along color lines, while the income gap between people of color and whites is growing not shrinking, is another problem. So is the fact that charter schools are essentially union busting with a pretty face.

We need to close these failing schools which are disempowering students forced to attend them, say neoliberal Obama administration officials and city bosses like Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago. That's the essence of the No Child Left Behind Act which is often credited to George W. Bush but passed Congress with major bipartisan support.

But that claim is an enormous lie, around $600.7 billion worth of falsehood if the Fiscal Year 2015 National "Defense" Authorization Act passes the Senate as handily as it passed the House.

In order to enact Title VI we need to defund the Pentagon and its parasites, and use the money to adequately fund schools in EVERY neighborhood.

Our continued failure to do so in the U.S. contains within it the seeds of our demise as a society.

Other wealthy countries have zoomed ahead of us for years in adequately feeding, housing and educating their youth. They can afford to do so because they do not overspend their tax revenues on "defense" contracts for super wealthy weapons manufacturers and surveillance corporations.

Fiscal Year 2012 data Source: Arms Control Center.org

Bring our war dollars home to provide every child in the U.S. with A+ access to education right in their neighborhood schools. Because segregated access to education isn't just illegal -- it's disgusting.

Turn Over That Rock And See What Crawls Out: #NSA & #AuditPentagon

Two events in truth revelation are dominating the news this week. The news Glenn Greenwald has promised from the Edward Snowden leaks will reveal who (could it be you?) the NSA has been spying upon. That one will happen, because it is citizen journalists like Laura Poitras and Greenwald who have been making NSA revelations happen all along.

The other attempt to turn over a rock and see what's crawling around under it will be a long haul: the call to audit the Pentagon. Never mind that it's supposed to be happening already since all government agencies that exist on the taxpayers' dime are supposed to account for their use of those funds. Never mind that hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, well over half the budget Congress decides how to spend each year. 

The Burgess-Lee amendment to the whopping $600.7 billion FY15 Pentagon budget bill called for an audit; the amendment passed in the House, but it still must face the U.S. Senate, that billionaire's club of fat cats who take massive campaign donations from Pentagon contractors.

President Obama said in his annual speech at the West Point graduation ceremony for the empire's future warlords, "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being."

Word to Obama: the exceptionalism is all in the minds of your neoliberal speech writers. Every empire on this planet faltered and declined, mostly due to hubris, and largely due to overspending on wars. There is nothing exceptional about losing the consent of the governed, or about experiencing the karmic backlash from your own bad decisions.

Meanwhile, here's a longitudinal study that turned up some truth: boosting public school funding by 20% (pocket change to the Pentagon) appears to make a dramatic difference in outcomes for students from low income communities. Libby Nelson at Vox.com reported:

Additional money spent educating a child from a poor family made that child more likely to graduate high school, less likely to fall into poverty as an adult and more likely to complete an additional year of education, public policy researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California-Berkeley found.

The fact that the wealthiest country in the world spends so meagerly on children and education is what makes the U.S. truly exceptional. And not in a good way. 

Our child development index does not even place in the top ten. Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, the U.K. and Netherlands do, while spending a mere fraction of their national revenue funding a military. How's that for some truth?

Cannon Fodder Knows No Gender In 21st Century Wars

Clay Bennett in Chattanooga Times Free Press

Big post-inaugural announcement by the war machine firmly in control of the purse strings in Congress, the signing pen in the White House, and the leashed judicial "check" function: women will be officially sent into combat. USA Today helped by reporting that the president is all for the idea.

"Today, by moving to open more military positions -- including ground combat units -- to women, our armed forces have taken another historic step toward harnessing the talents and skills of all our citizens," Obama said in a statement Thursday.

Not surprising, since turning mothers into cannon fodder is what passes for equality in the milItarized 21st century reality funded by you and me.

Recruiting ads aimed at women play on their sense of duty toward their families i.e. Be a good daughter and earn money by enlisting. This is in keeping with studies showing that women lie to protect other people, and embezzle to help other people. Also in keeping with twin facts: austerity wears a woman's face, and the poverty draft in the U.S. is in full swing.

Supporters of the plan are willfully ignorant of the fact that the biggest danger faced by women in every branch of the military rape and other violent assault by their "fellow" soldiers. This is well-documented in the film The Invisible War which is up for an Academy Award and is a must-see for anyone paying attention to rape culture.

The president is not paying attention to this culture in the slightest as he uses the bully pulpit to spew b.s. about female cannon fodder:

"Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love."

Right, I'm sure that his daughters will be first in line to sign up when they graduate high school.

Mother Jones reported yesterday that the U.S. "defense" secretary (always a male) sat straight faced while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (always a male) claimed sending women into combat was a policy actually designed to reduce the incidence of rape.

Having studied the issue of rampant sexual misconduct in the ranks, Gen. Martin Dempsey... noted that he has concluded that the phenomenon exists partly because women have been subordinated to men in military culture: "It's because we've had separate classes of military personnel." 

No more second class citizens, no more rape --- see how easy that was?

I have become somewhat obsessed with the play "Mother Courage" by Bertholt Brecht. It's an historical play set in a grim Europe theater of perpetual war. The title character makes a living off provisioning the army while trying to save each of her three children from it; in the end, the recruiters get one son, the war profiteers get another, and PTSD due to witnessing atrocities gets her daughter. Only the mother survives, sort of.

Turning the daughter into cannon fodder would only makes sense in a culture so sickened by violence that it calls for arming teachers and sending them to school ready to gun down intruders.

In the 21st Century, we are all Mother Courage -- living by the sword, and dying by the sword.

But women are rising up against the glorification of violence. The 21st century will see women striking, dancing, and overturning the structures that allow violent patriarchy to dominate the airwaves and colonize young minds.

Feminist values are on the side of life, not of dealing death.

Authentic feminist courage was on display yesterday in the blood soaked halls of the U.S. Senate as 19 year old college student and CODEPINK intern Lachelle Roddy called out to warmonger John Kerry:

 “We’re killing thousands of people in the Middle East who are not a threat to us. When is it going to be enough? When are enough people going to be killed? I’m tired of my friends in the Middle East not knowing if they’re going to live to see the next day!”

Here's what greeted her as she emerged from jail (yup, she was arrested for speaking out of turn -- because we are such a free country):

My sentiments, exactly.

With $662 billion for military, indefinite detention for all

Source: Guardian Bradley Manning hearing -- live updates

Honor Bradley Manning today on his 24th birthday -- his second in custody -- by calling the White House message line to register your outrage at the passage of the worst annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) ever. Number to vent your spleen: 202-456-1111. Why not also call Congress while you're at it? 877-429-0678.

No one in either place cares what you think, but it may possibly relieve some of the intense anger you feel in response to habeas corpus being legislated away under the false pretense of making you safer. It's icing on the cake to have it signed into law by a faux constitutional law professor the 1% hope to scare you into voting for come November. Hey, Obama didn't invent indefinite detention. It's been in place since the outset of the war on terror.

NDAA  also approved expenditures of $662 billion for military, including wars, next year. Polls indicate most Americans don't want war against Afghanistan, didn't want the U.S. doing business as NATO to attack Libya, and don't want more than about 6% of their taxes being spent on the military in any case. Current spending on military constitutes 57% of the pie. What's wrong with this picture?

source: Waterville Morning Sentinel

Of course the outrage over continuing to make defense contractors obscenely wealthy while cutting funds for heating assistance, medical care, and food for the nearly 50% of U.S. residents now living below the official poverty line got muted by the civil liberties issue tacked on to NAAA.

Indefinite detention for all at the whim of the military, or perhaps with some power retained by the president selected by leading campaign contributors, alarmed the few who were paying attention. The Democrat party loyalists pretended to believe Obama would veto it. Now they will probably pretend that his hands were tied and he couldn't veto it. Just like they pretend Democrats oppose gutting social programs even as they agree to do so.  These people are like abuse victims who make excuses for the abuser and return to him again and again and again. Some of them grow quite nasty lately as they can feel the 99% slip away from even a whisper of belief in the false dichotomy Punch and Judy show that national  electoral politics have become.

So let's not pretend that our voting or our phone calls do anything significant to resist the shredding of the constitution, or the bankrupting of the U.S. taxpayer on behalf of Lockheed Martin, et al.

The whole system would grind to a half in an instant if the 99% simply stopped cooperating to uphold it.

Whether they realize it or not, is another matter.

So here's what I'm going to do after making those futile calls. I'm going to get with others that are as concerned as I am, I'm going to listen to their ideas, and I'm going to do my homework on the effective use of nonviolent methods (Gene Sharp documentary Dec. 18 free at SPACE gallery in Portland 7pm).

I'm going to keep working as a citizen journalist to the extent of my abilities. I'm going to watch and share the "Collateral Murder" video from Iraq, the one Bradley is accused of leaking, plus more revelations from Iraq as the ghastly first phase of its subjugation draws to a close.

Citizen journalism is what we depend on now for news. If not for a tweet, how would I know and rejoice that yesterday someone in the courtroom called out "Bradley Manning is a hero!".

If I'm indefinitely detained for speaking out? So be it. We are all Bradley Manning. (Contribute to Manning's defense fund here.)