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GETTING PERSONAL On Turning Points, Change, Action and the Universal
Gaither Stewart
(Rome) One of my favourite writers, Paul Bowles, lived much of his life in Morocco. His major theme is the clash between civilized man and an alien environment. His Westerner is inevitably defeated by primitive man. In the jungle or in the desert the Westerner is not only lost but also a victim of the primitive environment. Natural man is superior and defeats the neurotic product of technological society. The Westerner searches for primitive society, loves it, needs it, but in the end is defeated by it.
Years ago in Tangier, Bowles told me that he wanted to show how badly prepared the average Westerner is when he comes into contact with cultures he doesn’t know—or thinks he knows. The more he tries to penetrate it, the worse it gets, Bowles believed primitive man has retained things that western man has lost and can operate in natural surroundings. “Americans are less prepared than Europeans in such circumstances,” Bowles believed, “because they think everyone must do it the American way. Therefore it is hard for them to establish real contact with others. It is a paradox that self-subsistent primitive man is more adapted for communal life than is dependent western man, whose attempts at communal life are disasters. Primitives have a communal life. No one owns anything. Everything belongs to all. This couldn’t work in advanced societies. As soon as personal property appears, you have to invent another system.”
Using a License to Practice Law to Facilitate Torture Should Result in Disbarment
Kevin B. Zeese
Statement Made Upon the Filing of Complaints Seeking Disbarment of Bush-Cheney’s Cadre of Torture Lawyers.
My name is Kevin Zeese, I am an attorney licensed to practice law in Washington, DC and before the U.S. Supreme Court. I serve as the executive director of VotersForPeace.US and on the board of Velvet Revolution. Today, we filed complaints with the District of Columbia Bar and with four other states seeking the disbarment of 12 Bush-Cheney torture lawyers. These lawyers misused their license to practice law to provide legal cover for the war crime of torture. This misuse of their license requires the bar association to disbar them or the bar will become complicit in torture.
GOP misleads on health care bureaucracy
Mary Shaw
Health care reform was among the topics that President Obama discussed in his March 16 weekly address. He said:
"Our nation itself will not succeed in the 21st century if we continue to be held down by the weight of rapidly rising health care costs and a broken health care system. That’s why I met with representatives of insurance and drug companies, doctors and hospitals, and labor unions who are pledging to do their part to reduce health care costs. These are some of the groups who have been among the fiercest critics of past comprehensive health care reform plans. But today they too are recognizing that we must act. Our businesses will not be able to compete; our families will not be able to save or spend; our budgets will remain unsustainable unless we get health care costs under control."
Hopefully Obama's community organizing skills will enable him to bring about a compromise which, while probably not the single-payer solution that I wish for, will still be much better than the current situation.
Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice
James Petras
“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine
Stephen Lendman
After two years of "underground" work, it was launched with a "successful press conference" and announcement that:
"The Russell Tribunal on Palestine seeks to reaffirm the primacy of international law as the (way to settle) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Its work will focus on "the enunciation of law by authoritative bodies. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its opinion on the (Separation Wall in Occupied Palestine, addressed relevant) "International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law, as well as dozens of international resolutions concerning Palestine."
This Tribunal will "address the failure of application of law even though it has been so clearly identified." It begins where the ICJ "stopped: highlighting the responsibilities arising from the enunciation of law, including those of the international community, which cannot continue to shirk its obligations."
Nakba Day…"They Killed Anyone They Saw"
Khalid Amayreh
OCCUPIED WEST BANK -- Mohammed al-Saghir Abu Sharar was 37 when the Hagana and other Jewish terrorist gangs attacked al-Dawayema, a village located 18 kilometers northwest of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in 1948.
"When they came they started killing the civilian population en mass, men, women and children," recalls Mohammed, now nearly 100-year-old. "They killed anyone they saw. They broke the heads of children and cut open the bellies of women with bayonets. They even raped some women before murdering them."
Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part V
Stephen Lendman
This is the fifth of several articles on Ellen Brown's superb 2007 book titled "Web of Debt," now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free." This article focuses on taking back our money power.
Recapturing What's Ours and Turning Scarcity to Abundance
In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale (1898 - 1993) first published his most famous book - "The Power of Positive Thinking." It sold about five million copies and was a New York Times bestseller for 186 consecutive weeks delivering messages like: "Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory." FDR struck the same theme in saying: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
In 1900, Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz was first published, conveying "the notion that a life of scarcity could be transformed in an instant into one of universal abundance...." In real life, the secret is by taking back our money power from the private bankers who stole it in 1913, in the middle of the night, two days before Christmas, and kept it ever since.
Constitutional Rubbish
Joel S. Hirschhorn
Americans need a civics lesson. And so do politicians. Of all the wrong and delusional thinking about the US Constitution the one that is most thoroughly incorrect and routinely used for political propaganda purposes is that there are three coequal branches of the federal government.
You hear presidents, members of Congress and media pundits say it all the time. They are wrong. Nowhere in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers is there any statement or declaration that the three branches are coequal. Why has this myth persisted for so long? Why do so many prominent and supposedly educated people keep invoking this outright lie?
Why I oppose the Inquirer boycott
Mary Shaw
There's a new controversy here in Philadelphia. It seems that our once-great newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer (aka the "Inky"), has hired John Yoo as a regular columnist. Yoo is, of course, one of the architects of the Bush administration's pro-torture policy and a supporter of warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and the unitary executive theory. In other words, Yoo is an anti-law kind of lawyer.
In his Attytood blog on Monday, Will Bunch of the Inky's sister paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, expressed his displeasure with the move:
The trouble with health "insurance"
Mary Shaw
Washington is abuzz with news from the Senate Finance Committee's recent Health Care Roundtable Discussions and President Obama's announcement on Monday that he supports proposed voluntary action by the insurance industry and its allies to cut health care cost inflation by 1.5% per year.
However, as the National Coalition on Health Care points out, health care costs are actually rising at a rate of more than 6%.
One step forward, 4 or 5 steps back. Not a solution.
The problem is Washington's apparent acceptance of the health insurance industry as a necessary player in its health care reform efforts.
Insurance companies are in business to make profits for their shareholders. And they are profiting from the suffering of others, often by denying payment for necessary medical treatment. That itself is incompatible with the core definition of health care.
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