Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Curbing carbon's just the tip of our great green leap

The epic fight over carbon emissions is barely the tip of how we survive.

Mother Earth demands that fossil/nukes be transcended. This green-powered leap defines our technological, economic and ecological survival.

But climate chaos and financial ruin do not stand alone. Green gadgetry aside, we don't get to 2030 unless we confront:

The power of the corporations;

Social justice and ballot-based democracy;

Ending waste and war;

Growing food that's truly organic;

Empowering women while harmonizing population growth.

1) Blunting carbon emissions alone will never solve our climate crisis. Nor will it be done without taming the most powerful institution humans have ever created: the global corporation.

Right now no mere government, or gathering of them, can seriously challenge the networked clout of globalized industry and finance.

Corporations claim human rights…and the military clout to enforce them…but no human responsibilities. Their sole mandate is to make money. Human and ecological considerations are ultimately nil.

The school-to-prison pipeline

I hope the Dignity in Schools Campaign overflows its banks, spilling awareness into every corner of the country.

"Millions of children and youth are denied educational opportunities in the United States," begins the National Resolution for Ending School Pushout, which some 200 organizations in 43 states have so far signed. "This injustice results from systemic inequality and a lack of public commitment to doing what is necessary to keep all young people in school."

Can we sit with this statement a moment, please? Can we sit with it without blame, denial or quick opinions, and simply let it wash at the edges of our sense of national greatness? Our military, political and cultural thrust reaches every corner of the globe. We're the world's only superpower. And we're feeding our own children — a shocking percentage of them, at any rate — into a sort of Darwinian meat grinder of low expectations, zero tolerance and fend-for-yourself hopelessness.

Obama's rejection speech

That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions.

Some highlights:

"There are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I."

Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize … and then making a false case for war:

"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences."

Mr. President, war is not peace

Eloquence in Oslo cannot change the realities of war.

As President Obama neared the close of his Nobel address, he called for “the continued expansion of our moral imagination.” Yet his speech was tightly circumscribed by the policies that his oratory labored to justify.

Lofty rationales easily tell us that warfare is striving for the noble goal of peace. But the rationales scarcely intersect with actual war. The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it.

A few months ago, when I visited an Afghan office for women’s empowerment, staffers took me to a pilot project in one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods. There, women were learning small-scale business skills while also gaining personal strength and mutual support.

Two-dozen women, who ranged in age from early 20s to late 50s, talked with enthusiasm about the workshops. They were desperate to change their lives. When it was time to leave, I had a question: What should I tell people in the United States, if they ask what Afghan women want most of all?

Now WE must earn Obama's Nobel

The Nobel Prize given to Barack Obama must now be earned by a grassroots movement dedicated to peace. The award was given to an American president now ignobly intent on waging war.

So the task of actually earning this honor falls to us.

Thousands of anti-war activists took to the streets in at least 100 US cities within hours after Obama officially escalated the war on Afghanistan on December 1.

With them came a least one new global internet campaign (The Peace, Justice & Environment Network, http://pjep.org/resources/detail.php?rid=2275) devoted to reversing this ghastly attack as well as to saving the environment and winning social justice.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has introduced legislation to deny the funding for this war.

All around the world a sane citizenry has made it clear that war is not peace.

Tit for tat

How to make progressive lemonade

Peace movement objects to Peace Prize

Washington, DC - On December 9th, representatives of several dozen U.S. antiwar groups posted an open letter to the Nobel Committee expressing regret that President Obama, so close upon his receipt of this honor, has opted to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan with the deployment of 30,000 additional troops.

The letter calls attention to statements made by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., upon receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1964, when he urged people to reject retaliatory violence. "President Obama has insisted that his troop escalation is a necessary response to dangerous instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan," the document states, "but we reject the notion that military action will advance the region's stability, or our own national security."

The signatories pledged "to mobilize our constituencies in the spirit of Dr. King's nonviolent and committed example. His prophetic words will guide us as we assemble in the halls of Congress, in local offices of elected representatives, and in the streets of our cities and towns, protesting every proposal that will continue funding war."

Kucinich circulating privileged resolutions to end wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Washington D.C. (December 9, 2009) – Following a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released the following statement:

"Today, I will begin circulating two privileged resolutions which will trigger debate and votes on a timely withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States makes it Congress' responsibility to determine whether or not we go to war or stay at war. Consistent with Article 1, Section 8, the privileged resolutions will invoke the War Powers Resolution of 1973. I ask for your support of these resolutions, which will be introduced in the House in January.

"Yesterday, with the US Secretary of Defense at his side, the President of Afghanistan declared that his country's security forces will need financial and training assistance from the United States for the next 15-20 years.

"We cannot afford these wars. We cannot afford the loss of lives. We cannot afford the cost to taxpayers. We cannot afford to fail to exercise our constitutional right to end the wars.

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