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Playing field is tilted against voters

Thrill to the vibrant gymnastics grace of Gabby Douglas, the fierce tennis power of Serena Williams, the skill of Kayla Harrison in winning the first gold for an American woman in judo. Led by Missy Franklin and Rebecca Soni and others, the U.S. women’s swimming team as of Monday had harvested eight gold medals, three silver and three bronze. The U.S. women’s beach volleyball team, the basketball team and the soccer team are still in the hunt. American women are leading the way this Olympics.

It’s worth remembering why. Rules matter. Opportunity is vital. A level playing field, clear goals, fair referees all count. This success comes from the amazing talent and extraordinary hard work and discipline of these gifted athletes, supported by family and skilled coaching.

Extreme economic inequality harms the U.S.

Introduction

Some state and local officials are blaming their governments’ budget problems on the compensation and benefits of public employees. They say they can no longer afford to pay what they allege is excessive remuneration for public workers.

Many federal officials say there is no money to provide health-care coverage for the public, extend unemployment compensation, increase social security benefits, provide more funds for education, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, or strengthen the social safety net for the record number of Americans in poverty.

But money can be found to address those issues. A problem is that vastly increased portions of the nation’s income and wealth have been taken by the rich, who also have enjoyed drastic reductions in their tax rates.

Although money is available to alleviate the nation’s problems, it is being hoarded by the wealthy instead of used for paying fair compensation to private-sector workers and adequate taxes to support public services.

Numerous other social ills also result from extreme economic inequality, with disastrous consequences to the U.S.

Colonels in mirrored sunglasses

Here are the facts, ma'am:In the 2008 election, no fewer than:
  • 767,023 provisional ballots were cast and not counted;
  • 1,451,116 ballots were "spoiled," not counted;
  • 488,136 absentee ballots were mailed in, but not counted.
Add it up: in the last presidential election, no fewer than 2,706,275 ballots were cast—and never counted. I have not included a quarter million (251,936) provisional ballots counted only in part (that is, for some offices).

That's the official number I've calculated from the records of the US Election Assistance Commission.

Approximately three million votes flushed away are ugly enough. But it gets worse.

In addition to the roughly three million ballots cast and not counted, no fewer than:
  • 2,383,587 would-be voters had their registrations rejected;
  • 491,952 voters already registered were wrongly purged from the rolls; and
  • 320,000 properly registered voters were simply turned away from the polls when they tried to vote, mostly for not having IDs acceptable to a poll worker.

Iran and everything else

Occasionally individuals complain that I fail to address one subject or another. One Berkeley denizen got in my face and announced: “You leftists ought to become aware of the ecological crisis.” In fact, I had written a number of things about the ecological crisis, including one called “Eco-Apocalypse.” His lack of familiarity with my work did not get in the way of his presumption.

Years ago when I spoke before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in New York , the moderator announced that she could not understand why I had “remained silent” about the attempt to defund UNESCO. Whatever else I might have been struggling with, she was convinced I should have joined with her in trying to save UNESCO (which itself really was a worthy cause).

People give me marching orders all the time. Among the most furiously insistent are those fixed on 9/11. Why haven’t I said anything about 9/11? Why am I “a 9/11 denier.” In fact, I have written about 9/11 and even spoke at two 9/11 conferences (Santa Cruz and New York), raising questions of my own.

The devil STILL has us death dancing at Fukushima

Our lives still hang by a Devil’s thread at Fukushima.

The molten cores at Units 1, 2 & 3 have threatened all life on Earth. The flood of liquid radiation has poisoned the Pacific. Fukushima’s cesium and other airborne emissions have already dwarfed Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and all nuclear explosions including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Children throughout Japan carry radioactive burdens in their thyroids and throughout their bodies. Hot spots in Tokyo demand evacuation. Radioactive tuna has been caught off San Diego. Fallout carried across the Pacific may have caused spikes in cancer and infant mortality rates here in the United States.

And yet, 16 months later, the worst may be yet to come. No matter where we are on this planet, our lives are still threatened every day by a Unit 4 fuel pool left hanging 100 feet in the air. At any moment, an earthquake we all know is coming could send that pool crashing to the ground.

Beyond the two-state solution

Fast forward to 2048. The world is greatly changed, and in this year China invades France, occupying Paris and a good portion of the nation. The French are massacred, evicted, raped, chased, and terrorized. Towns are destroyed. Every town and village has its name changed to a Chinese name, and its prior existence erased from any history books produced from then forward.

Portions of France not yet under Chinese control shelter refugees by the millions. French citizens captured in their homes are held as "prisoners of war" and freed to become refugees in distant parts of France. China changes the name of its occupied areas from France to Chance. The remaining parts of the country are just referred to by their local (Chinese) names, as if they were part of no nation at all and yet somehow Chinese in the end.

Sanctions: Diplomacy’s weapon of mass murder

In 1945, the United States of America dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagaski immediately killing 120,000 civilians. The final death toll of the horrendous bombings has been conservatively estimated at well over 200,000 men, women, and children. To this day, the world continues to be shocked and horrified by the visual images that captured the death and destruction caused by the bombs. The negative impact prompted America to devise a different weapon of mass murder – sanctions.

Unlike the shock and horror which accompanied the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, there were no images of the 500,000 Iraqi children whose lives were cut short by sanctions to jolt the world into reality. Not only has America taken pride in the mass killing of innocent children, but encouraged by silence and the surrender to its weapon of choice, it has turned diplomacy’s weapon of mass murder on another country – Iran.

Whatever happened to the solar panels?

Has it really been a third of a century since President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof? Has it really been over a quarter century since President Ronald Reagan yanked them down?

Yes and you betcha.

"On June 20th, 33 years ago, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof. Seven years after that, Ronald Reagan took them down," writes Brian Merchant in motherboard.com. "It was the end of 70s, a decade wracked with stagnant economic growth and a pair of debilitating oil price spikes—the second, caused by the Iranian revolution, actually occurred in 1979. The nation had seen firsthand the danger of rely ing too heavily on oil, and ordinary folks were sick of being besieged by high gas prices. So Jimmy Carter made what seemed to be a reasonable move: He started organizing a framework by which to wean us off the black stuff."

Today, as America limps through a recession that will never recover without the stimulus and savings promised by renewable energy, perhaps it is time to revisit the the "Carter Initiative" on a grander scale.

Community in the Crosshairs

We wrecked Iraq, we pulled out, we redeployed in Anaheim.

This ain’t working, guys — I mean, firing rubber bullets into anguished crowds, siccing attack dogs on moms and children. I mean, inventing enemies, going to war, unleashing state-of-the-art firepower in all directions and eventually losing, but not before we've inflicted maximum suffering on the innocent and magnified the original problem tenfold.

We lose every war we fight.

Another way to say that is: We exacerbate every problem we militarize. Indeed, militarization is as much a part of the problem — as much a threat to civilization — as, for instance, terrorism or drugs. And the recent, ongoing community uproar in Anaheim, Calif., over two police slayings of Latino males in one weekend — and the subsequent police reaction to that outrage — illustrates the terrifying ineffectiveness of a militarized, "us vs. them" approach to conflict.

"They just released the dog and I had my baby," a woman tells the TV news reporter, bursting into tears. "The dog scratched me with his teeth."

Defender of Democracy -- In Memoriam: Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

With the passing of Gore Vidal, we should honor his memory by reading his most historically significant work: his introduction to U.S. Congressman John Conyers' report on the 2004 election entitled, "What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Election.'

While other liberal and progressive writers turned away from Bush's open theft of the 2004 election, Vidal was on record prior to election asserting that Bush would lose the election in terms of actual vote count. But, Vidal wrote, Bush would likely win the election through a creative propaganda campaign and election rigging. Vidal had been clear-eyed in what was happening in our country, telling the Times of London in September 2009 that "We'll have a dictatorship soon in the United States."

Vidal acted courageously in lending his name to that Congressional report that concluded, "With regards to our factual findings, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio."

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