The weak slat under the bed of democracy

When I was an adolescent, Canandaigua, my small hometown in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, got its first radio station, WCGR. You can hear it to this day, at 1550 on the AM dial.

Back then, beaming out a signal of 250 mighty watts, WCGR (announcers said it stood for "Watch Canandaigua Grow Rapidly"), broadcast music, news and farm reports to a radius extending about as far as you could throw a rock.

Nonetheless, I thought it was a wondrous and glamorous place – show business! -- and often climbed the stairs to their dusty studio, up above a Main Street storefront. The twin sons of the station’s owner were schoolmates and my father bought on the air advertising time for his drugstore, so no one paid much attention to my hanging out.

One day, I came across some promotional 45 rpm records. They were interviews with celebrities – with spaces left for any given announcer at any given station to ask the pertinent questions, which were conveniently provided by the record company. In an instant, you could make it appear as if your local DJ was actually interviewing Nat King Cole or Bobby Vinton or Carol Channing.

Jonesborough justice

Of the eleven major peace rallies organized around the country by United for Peace and Justice last Saturday the smallest and most unusual took place in Jonesborough, Tennessee.  Jonesborough is a town of about 4,000 people in the northeast corner of Tennessee, within a couple of dozen miles of both Virginia and North Carolina.  The people of Jonesborough can imagine the number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq by imagining their entire local population dead.

Rallying for peace and justice in Jonesborough is something of an act of reclamation, and it's about time it happened.  Jonesborough is the oldest town in Tennessee and was a center of the abolition movement.  But, as if to offer a perfect illustration of the wisdom of the nation's founding fathers' distaste for political parties, the people of eastern Tennessee have largely stood by the Republican Party as it has mutated into the party of racism and militarism.  Our rally of about 400 peace activists on Saturday was greeted by about 50 pro-war activists revving their Harleys, honking their horns, and screaming their vicious messages of hate with the utmost vein-popping fury.

The pro-war undertow of the Blackwater scandal

The Blackwater scandal has gotten plenty of media coverage, and it deserves a lot more. Taxpayer subsidies for private mercenaries are antithetical to democracy, and Blackwater’s actions in Iraq have often been murderous. But the scandal is unfolding in a U.S. media context that routinely turns criticisms of the war into demands for a better war.

     Many politicians are aiding this alchemy. Rhetoric from a House committee early this month audibly yearned for a better war at a highly publicized hearing that featured Erik Prince, the odious CEO of Blackwater USA.

     A congressman from New Hampshire, Paul Hodes, insisted on the importance of knowing “whether failures to hold Blackwater personnel accountable for misconduct undermine our efforts in Iraq.” Another Democrat on the panel, Carolyn Maloney of New York, told Blackwater’s top exec that “your actions may be undermining our mission in Iraq and really hurting the relationship and trust between the Iraqi people and the American military.”

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Shouting at the devil: “Fuck you, capitalism!”

“America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.”

–Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine

Does my profanity offend? If so, accept my sincere apologies for having the audacity to use a vulgar expletive in reference to the malignant force that is raping the Earth and murdering its sentient inhabitants. Then take my ‘deeply sincere’ pleas for forgiveness, and with the aid of an unlubricated rod of significant diameter, ram them firmly up the collective asses of the plutocratic bags of shit who comprise the ruling elite in the United States.

Capitalism, capitalism. How do I loath thee? Let me count the ways….

Kucinich tops other Dem Presidential leaders in key CA straw poll

SAN MATEO, CA - Despite millions of campaign dollars being spent by the poll-leading Democratic Presidential candidates to woo California voters, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich scored a stunning second-place finish in a bell-weather Presidential straw poll here today.

In a caucus-like setting open to all Democratic voters in the state, Kucinich came in significantly ahead of top-spenders Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and only slightly behind former U.S. Senator John Edwards.

Official results released by the San Mateo County Democratic Party this evening showed that Edwards received 29% of the total votes cast, Kucinich received just under 24%, and Obama and Clinton came in third and fourth, with 22.5% and 16.8% respectively. The other Democratic candidates were all in the low single digits.

Address by Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson on October 27, 2007

Salt Lake City, Utah -- Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of Congress, including Utah’s entire congressional delegation, and to much of the mainstream media: “You have failed us miserably and we won’t take it any more.”

“While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss.”

“You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law.”

Ann Wright’s conscience: former colonel and diplomat against Iraq war

Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel and State Dept. diplomat, recently spoke at Sacramento City College , wearing a black t-shirt with white letters that spelled out “We shall not be silent” in Arabic and English. With blue eyes a mix of compassion and determination, she told a tale of taking a 180-degree turn from being a high-level insider on Uncle Sam’s payroll to an outsider urging an end to the Bush White House’s policies in Iraq and America .

 “I resigned my position with the U.S. foreign service on March 19, 2003, after the invasion of Iraq ,” Wright said. “I thought that going to war in an oil-rich Muslim country was a recipe for trouble for us.” Two other U.S. diplomats resigned with her.

For the past five and a half years, she has been calling publicly in the U.S. and abroad for an end to the Iraq conflict. Wright joined Cindy Sheehan, the Vallejo mother whose serviceman son Casey died in Iraq , in antiwar protests outside the president’s summer home in Crawford , TX , two summers ago.

Torture claim is filed against Rumsfeld in France

PARIS: A group of U.S. and European human rights organizations is pursuing a legal complaint against Donald Rumsfeld in a Paris court that accuses the former defense secretary of being responsible for torture.

The group, which includes the International Federation for Human Rights, the French League for Human Rights and the Nork York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, filed the complaint late Thursday and unsuccessfully sought to confront Rumsfeld as he left a breakfast meeting in central Paris on Friday.

Jeanne Sulzer, a lawyer for the group, said the complaint was filed with a state prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, who has the power to pursue the case because of Rumsfeld's presence in France.

Similar legal complaints against Rumsfeld have been filed in countries like Sweden and Argentina. German prosecutors dismissed a case in April, saying it was up to the United States to investigate the issue.

Depleted uranium and depleted democracy

Remarks at October 27, 2007, rally in Jonesborough, Tenn., preceding march to Aerojet Ordnance, manufacturers of Depleted Uranium weapons.

There are those who think Congress should keep shelling out our grandchildren's money to continue our occupation of Iraq, and there are those who think Congress should pass a bill opposing the occupation. And they are both wrong. Any decent bill on any issue, much less this one, will be vetoed. The way to stop funding the occupation of Iraq is for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to announce on Monday that they will not bring to the floor any more bills to fund the occupation.

Some House members would try to start a discharge petition to get around Pelosi, but they would fail. Some Senators would demand a war funding bill, but they would not get past a filibuster. The legal funding of the occupation of Iraq would be over.

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