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The Last Hero
ddjango
I was a very young boy when Dwight Eisenhower ran for president. I wore an "I Like Ike" button. I liked Ike 'cuz he had a great button. My dad voted for Adlai. Ike was my hero 'til everybody started talking about how much golf he was playing while the Russkies were kicking our ass all over the planet . . .
I was thirteen when John Kennedy came up to bat. He was just about everybody's hero, 'specially if you were an Irish Catholic Bostonian like I was. It was several decades before I found out the truth about his presidency and I finally threw him in the old hero hamper . . .
It will always disturb me that Ronald Reagan is a hero for so many Americans, except as a deification of American selfishness. To credit the man with "bringing down" the Soviet Union and all but destroying international communism is disingenuous at best. The USSR collapsed of its own weight of corruption and imperial overstretch, complete with its own Vietnam-like Afghanistan quagmire, just as the US and its empire are imploding now, the result of the ideology and policies of the Reagan years.
To the citizens of the UK, you are about to go into lockdown: Birth of fascism in real time
By chycho.
In 2007 I came across a chilling bit of news from the UK that sent shivers down my spine.
The news was about Samina Malik, a 23-year-old cashier and poet, who was “arrested and jailed for her violent prose and visiting terror web sites.” Malik’s defenders argued that she was charged with a thought crime, while prosecutors emphasized that:
“Samina Malik was not prosecuted for writing poetry. Ms. Malik was convicted of collecting information, without reasonable excuse, of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.”
Never Forget The Lessons Of Yesterday For The Sake Of Tomorrow
Vincent Guarisco
"You can walk away from these stories today, but if you choose to follow them they will become a profound part of you and will deeply affect your life." ~~Anthony Guarisco, Founder and director, International Alliance of Atomic Veterans (IAAV, with AAV here in the US), to photo-journalist James Lerager. (Note: Anthony was the first of many Atomic Veterans Lerager interviewed)
In a world full of mind-wrenching turmoil, I am a gentle dreamer searching for some soulful serenity. But in reality, my dreams are not always so pleasant when I revisit the arc of history when our pentagon warmongers worked day and night to demonize our own Stars and Stripes when they unleashed nuclear hell-on-earth to establish the most powerful military presence on earth. Indeed, the Hibakusha people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know this lesson well. Just as surely as all 300,000 Atomic Veterans (including my father) know they are the government's best-kept-secret when they were quickly deemed "expendable" by Uncle Sam's nuclear weapons testing programs.
ICONS AND GEO-POLITICS or MUST RUSSIA BAIL OUT UKRAINE? 'A Very European Story'
Gaither Stewart
Symbols and objects held sacred by a whole people form a more powerful protective barrier than the highest of walls. Even the Great Wall of China was more a scarecrow than a real barrier to Mongol invaders. In that figurative sense I have imagined here the Russian icon as a historical defense of Russia against circling invaders, against mercenary armies and menacing space shields.
(Rome) Even though Russian icons have little meaning in the USA, religious icons lie at the roots of pictorial art in Slavic East Europe. For the seven hundred years from the 11th century until the time of Peter the Great, the icon practically was the only indigenous pictorial art of the vast territories of the Eastern Slavs, which later, in fact, coincided with the former USSR. Though a mysterious object, the icon, that is, the sacred image, or the sacred representation that the museum visitor easily passes up for more conventional art, is nonetheless both pure art … and at the same time sacred art.
EVIL are these means and avowed ends
By Carolyn Bennett
In a sense there are only Means and means must be judged against firm and impartial standards of morality and legality. If an End though a means is envisioned as an end, it too must stand and be judged impartially as moral or immoral, just or unjust, legal or illegal, humane or inhumane. Ends contrived by men never justify means. Given this—
The world watches Israel as it enters another corrupt phase in a sixty-year era of corruption—means upon means. Thomas Paine said “A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men” (and women). In its fraudulent cause Israel has caused deaths and displacements of hundreds of thousands of people who never harmed or threatened Jews.
Ronald Reagan: Betrayer of Main Street America!
William Hughes
“When it came to corporate greed, the Great Communicator [Ronald Reagan] was also the Great Enabler.” - William Kleinknecht
The book is a scathing, and well deserved, indictment of that “empty suit” Ronald Reagan, and his ultra-grasping political creed, “Reaganism,” which directly led to the “Financial Meltdown of 2008.” The disastrous economic legacy of “hyper capitalism,” that this “free market” zealot sold the country, (1981-89), along with his mean-spirited “gutting of the public sector,” is fully documented by the author William Kleinknecht. Reagan is that same pious faker, who believed in “flying saucers” and let an astrologer set “his presidential schedule,” and “repeatedly misrepresented the past as a laissez-faire utopia.” The tome is entitled: “The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America.” It’s appropriate that the author had experience as a “crime reporter.” What he has written about, in a real sense, are enormous wrongs against the people--against the public good--that threaten the very existence of the Republic.
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Economic Crisis
Stephen Lendman
The more they do, the worse it gets, and world headlines confirm it. Recent ones include:
-- The New York Times, February 17: "After Manhattan's Office Boom, a Hard Fall;"
-- Washington Post, February 17: "Obama signs $787 billion stimulus bill; Dow Jones industrial average drops nearly 300 points;"
Dow theorist, Richard Russell, called it "one of the damnedest closes I've ever seen," within one point of the November 20 low, and added: "I thought President Obama outlawed torture in the US. Wall Street is not listening."
The next day both the Dow and Transportation averages hit new bear market lows. For Dow theorists like Russell and others, it's confirmation of lower ones to come.
Obama’s Policy on Civil Liberties: Bush Lite?
Ivan Eland
Barack Obama entered the presidency as one of the most rhetorically pro-civil liberties politicians in recent memory. And shortly after taking office, he drew applause from friends of liberty for promulgating executive orders closing Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, ending CIA torture, suspending kangaroo proceedings at military tribunals, and pledging more openness than the secretive Bush administration. Unfortunately, instead of prosecuting Bush administration officials, including George W. Bush, for violating criminal statutes against torture, illegal wiretapping of Americans, and other misdeeds—thus avoiding the bad precedent of giving a president a free pass on illegal acts—Obama appears ready to vindicate the prior administration’s anti-terrorism program by adopting Bush Lite.
The Battle for Bil'in
eileen fleming
[Bil'in, Feb. 23, 2009] For four years, the beleaguered agricultural village of Bil'in in the West Bank has resisted the route of Israel's Wall; which in Bil'in is composed of miles of electrified-barbed wire fencing that denies the landowners access to their legally owned land.
The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that The Fence must be moved and the stolen land restored to the Bil'in villagers; but civil and military authorities have not complied and last week, night time raids by Israel escalated.
Foes of Mountaintop Removal Have no Ally in the White House The Myth of Clean Coal
Joshua Frank
Barack Obama seems to be following a dirty legacy when it comes to his official energy policy, a policy that has left Appalachia with fewer mountaintops every year.
The price of oil per barrel fluctuated dramatically in the past year, and the U.S.'s dependency on foreign crude has become less stable as tensions in the Middle East have escalated. Over his long campaign, Obama laid out his strategy on how to deal with the crisis, which has been exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the potential confrontation with Iran, not to mention the oil speculator's dubious role in the money game. But sadly Obama has been echoing old solutions to our new 21st century environmental troubles. Mainly, where is our energy going to come from if oil supplies dwindle or prices skyrocket again? And how will this all affect the dire reality of climate change?
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