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LIVING RICH AND CRYING POOR
by Mary Pitt
As a member of the "Depression Generation". I have loved my country as one loves a husband; for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Now there are those who tell us that our nation is as severely ill as it was at that time.
I recall, one summer evening, following my father outside as he searched the scorching sky for signs of a rain cloud. "What happened to all the rain, Daddy?". I asked this man who presisted in stirring the dusty soil, planting seeds, and praying for a crop. I shall never forget his reply:
Michael Jackson is dead, it is too late to develop a conscience
Roland Michel Tremblay
We Are the World, but do we have a conscience? I’m sure you believe we do. Sometimes though it could be opened to debate as we can easily point out many human beings, Black or White, who do not appear to have any conscience at all. Mostly politicians, religious leaders, management and all sorts of Smooth Criminals. They send us Off the Wall. Maybe none of them require a conscience to reach ultimate power and wealth. As Michael Jackson stated, They Don’t Care About Us. Is it too late to develop a conscience?
THE SEVEN STAGES OF LOVE / FEW GET BEYOND STAGE SIX
Allen L Roland
Relationship is a means to an end versus an end in itself. The true purpose of relationship is the full flowering of each partner but only those who conquer fear reach the seventh stage of love:
Most people are afraid of love because they are afraid of their deepest joy, delight and inner freedom.
In relationship, we must reach a place where being honest and being true to yourself is more important than the survival of the relationship ! Let me illustrate this using Stendhal's and Roland's seven stages of a love relationship :
Israel, Let Me Count The Ways
Mark Glenn
Today, while driving through town, I wound up behind a minivan that had a big sticker on the back. The sticker had an Israeli flag in the middle of it, and under it the quotation from the book of Genesis that reads "I will bless those who bless thee."
I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has been to us.
Obama’s war
Bill Van Auken
With Obama approaching the end of his sixth month in the White House, there is growing evidence that his administration is in only the first stages of what is shaping up to be a major and sustained escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.
Elected in large part because of the hostility of American working people to the militarist policies of the Bush administration, Obama and the Pentagon are waging an intensified and brutal counter-insurgency campaign that has the potential of dwarfing the carnage in Iraq and dragging on for another decade.
July, little more than half over, has already become the deadliest month for US-led forces since the war began nearly eight years ago. A total of 46 occupation troops have been killed, 24 of them Americans. This death toll—approximately three a day—is equivalent to what took place during the heaviest fighting in Iraq. For Afghan government forces, the toll is far higher, with the regime in Kabul reporting that between six and ten members of the country’s national police are being killed daily.
War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields
Michel Chossudovsky
The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.
This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.
British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.
The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007).
The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).
The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.
Arrested Pug Owner Fired Over Anti-Semitic Allegation
John Del Signore
A Greenpoint woman's altercation with a police officer over carrying her sick dog through the subway has put her out of a job. To recap: Chrissie Brodigan, a VP for Online Media at Plum TV, says that after she argued with Officer Joel Witriol while trying to carry her pug out of the subway, he arrested her, grabbed her breasts, and punched her in the back while saying, "If you're going to act like a woman I'm going to treat you like a woman." Other witnesses corroborated Brodigan's account, but one witness and an unidentified source told the Post that Brodigan yelled at Witriol, the city's first Hasidic officer, "You f---ing Jew, you're not even human. Jewish people think they own everything."
Brodigan initially said that although she yelled at Witriol, she "did not recall" saying anything anti-Semitic. (The following day she e-mailed us to firmly deny saying anything anti-Semitic or about Witriol's Jewish identity. Other witnesses backed her up.) But it seems that her initial Reaganesque denial is what cost her her job; she tells us today:
| I was terminated for "equivocating" in the press. My boss [Chris Glowacki] is threatening to not offer an agreeable severance package, including health insurance, which is crucial because i have cystic fibrosis and he is aware. He's angry that this is out in the press. I think he made a judgment based on perceived bigotry. |
Musicians ask Obama to ban music torture
Mary Shaw
A few years ago, British attorney Clive Stafford Smith spoke at an Amnesty International conference that I attended. Smith represents some Guantanamo prisoners, and he shared their horrible stories with us.
One chilling example is the story of his client Binyam Mohem, a Londoner who has since been released from Guantanamo:
"They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb.... There was loud music, [Eminem's] 'Slim Shady' and Dr. Dre for 20 days.... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night.... Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."
That's our tax dollars at work, people.
Dangerous Untreated West Bank Wastewater
by Stephen Lendman
B'Tselem is the Jerusalem-based independent Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (OPT) with a well-deserved reputation for accuracy and integrity. It was founded in 1989 to "document and educate the Israeli public, policymakers (and concerned people everywhere) about human rights violations in the OPT, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public (and elsewhere, especially among Jews), and create a human rights culture in Israel" to convince government officials to respect human rights and comply with international law.
It conducts wide-ranging, carefully researched, and thoroughly cross-checked reports, most recently its June one titled, "Foul Play: Neglect of wastewater treatment in the West Bank." This article discusses its findings as further evidence of how Israel violates international humanitarian law as an occupying power. Because no global authority holds it accountable, over 2.8 million West Bank Palestinians suffer along with another 1.5 million under siege in Gaza for over two years and counting.
Clinton Outlines Continuation of Bush Policies Under Obama at CFR
by Jeremy R. Hammond
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which has been widely touted as a sharp break from that of his predecessor’s. Judging from commentary in the media, Obama has ushered in a new age of diplomacy and international engagement. Clinton herself suggested as much.
But setting aside the platitudes that comprised most of Clinton’s speech and looking closely at her remarks that actually spoke meaningfully towards U.S. policy under the Obama, a different picture emerges, one not of a change of course from Bush but rather of near perfect continuity between the two administrations.
Obama’s foreign policy parallels Bush’s. The train may have switched tracks, but it’s still headed in the same direction.
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