Shareholder glee

I don’t mind gas prices from war in Iraq
since I have three shares of Exxon stock.
so I am prepared for oil shortage shock.

Halliburton shares are now on my buy list
for their war profits prove hard to resist
engineered to build each new terrorist.

Iran’s atomic threats don’t bother me,
because I support George Bush diplomacy.
proved  so successful exporting democracy.

Now Mid East war fronts will surely expand
with two more years with Bush still in command
prepared to lead us through foreign quick sand.

Deficits and casualties will sure increase,
as we have our leader allergic to peace
using war threats as election strategies.

The myth of microloans

The committee that gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel peace prize has given it this year to Mohammed Yunus, the economist who put the word "microloan" on the map with the Grameen Bank in his native land of Bangladesh. That's progress of a sort. But in terms of hot air, any sentences linking "peace" with "Henry Kissinger" aren't immeasurably more vacuous than the notion that microloans can help -- to use the language of the Nobel Committee's citation -- "large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty."

            Throughout the late Eighties and Nineties, in the verbal currency of First-World do-gooders, "microloans" became one of those magically fungible words, embedded in a thousand foundation and NGO annual reports, like "sustainable." What could be more virtuous in terms of prudent philanthropy than giving very small loans to very poor women? Microloans breathe healthful uplift, as divorced from the sordid world of megaloans (though not, it turns out, mega-interest rates), as are microbrews from Budweiser.

YOU CAN HELP ENSURE A FAIR ELECTION ON NOVEMBER 7, 2006

There are several ways that YOU can help protect the vote in 2006:
VIDEO THE VOTE: Help document irregularities on election day, join the team. Video records will be immediately uploaded to the web. If you are interested in the video project, please contact Melissa Giraud at melissa@columbusvotes.org. See Video the Vote on YouTube

PARALLEL ELECTION VOLUNTEER: Learn how hand-counted paper ballots are the most accurate way to count votes by helping in a citizen-run Parallel Election. For more information, contact Rady Ananda at rady.j30@gmail.com or Marj Creech at 740.940.5038 or risenregan@earthlink.net. See Parallel Elections

Breaking the silence of the night  

"A time comes when silence is betrayal".
 -Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967 

It all begins somewhere, the questioning, the doubting, the feeling that something’s not right; like that day the captain set fire to the Vietnamese woman’s hooch, or the night we shot those women and children by mistake. It’s all got to start somewhere. For them it might have been the innocent civilians killed that day at the checkpoint just north of Baghdad or the dead children lying in the road in Kirkuk, or that night in Nasiriyah when they kicked in the front door of that house, screaming and cursing at the children as they threw their father to the floor, tying his hands behind his back and putting a hood over his head, but you remain silent, you say nothing. You’ve been taught to follow orders, to obey and not question, to go along with the program and do exactly what you’re told. You learned that in boot camp.

Like many Americans who served in Vietnam and those now serving in Iraq, and countless other human beings throughout history, I had been willing to give my life for my country with little knowledge or awareness of what that really meant.

A few corpses past 'whatever'

The judgment of history is closing in on us. A new study in a respected British medical journal has put the "excess death" toll in post-invasion Iraq at a soul-numbing 650,000, which, of course, can't be true.

No way. Can't be.

Those who have wedded themselves to this war, beginning with President Bush, prefer the figure 30,000 - a nice, safe number, apparently, which won't gum up the media. What's 30,000 dead? It's a few corpses past "whatever." It's Kankakee, Ill., Paducah, Ky., Hoboken, N.J. It is, in short - among the dwindling ranks of the gung-ho - a small price to pay for a war as important as this one.

So let's pause and absorb the number Bush and his apologizers are willing to concede: 30,000. Let it stand naked in the spotlight for a moment, out of the shadow of those six-figure estimates that make it seem trivial, and listen to the silent heartbeats:

"Ahmad Walid al-Bath, 33, a Jordanian taxi driver, became the first casualty of the war on March 20 (2003). He had stopped to make a phone call at a public telephone office when a missile hit it, killing him. He (left) a wife and a 10-month-old child. . . .

Grassroots matching grants: my five minutes as a donor

I've never been the kind of donor who gives matching grants. In fact I've never been a major donor at all, just someone who gives $25 here and $50 there to a bunch of causes I believe in, because that's what I can afford.. So I loved the Democratic National Committee email that invited me and other ordinary citizens to make modest online pledges, to be redeemed when new donors contributed. For a moment, I got to play Ford Foundation. And a woman in Knife River, Minnesota matched the $50 that I pledged on the DNC site. "I'm newly retired and uncertain about what I can actually afford to give," she emailed, "But the matching offer prompted me to respond despite that uncertainty. I agree with you that this regime must be stopped."

But it was more than the matching offer that's made this the DNC's single most successful fundraising email since 2004. And more even than the timing. Like most of us, I'm sure the Minnesota woman had gotten plenty of requests for contributions, including promises that some Senator, Congressperson, or anonymous wealthy donor would step in and amplify what she gave. But she

Election day still a long way off

Stunning coincidence. The verdict in the long-running trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq is now due two days before our congressional elections in November. Astounding. How ineffable.

            Sometimes you know the Republicans have just lost the rag completely. This week, Dick Cheney said to Rush Limbaugh regarding the Iraqi government, "If you look at the general, overall situation, they're doing remarkably well." The vice president also acknowledged there's some concern because the war wasn't over "instantaneously." We have now been in Iraq just one month shy of the entire time it took us to fight World War II. Seventy Americans dead so far in October. Electricity in Iraq this year hit its lowest levels since the war started.

            What infuriates me about this is the lying. WHY can't they level with us? Just on the general, overall situation.

Fall 2006

The new journal will be posted shortly! Don't forget to check out the columns and
dispatches sections for other articles included in the print edition!

Why is everyone

Peace Activists Arrested on Grounds of U.S. Capitol

Peace activists were arrested on the 26th on the west grounds of the United States Capitol. The event was organized by the Declaration of Peace, and the plan was to march around the Capitol and then proceed to protest in Senators' offices (plans are to go to House Members' offices tomorrow). A group of hundreds was stopped by Capitol Police when trying to cross Constitution Avenue from the Upper Senate Park. When the police finally relented and allowed the group to cross, only a few dozen made it across. The group was divided and some reportedly proceeded east to the Senate office buildings. The few dozen who made it initially to the west grounds of the Capitol attempted to walk up a number of paths toward the Capitol steps, and were blocked each time by a wall of police. A group of activists carrying a coffin and led by Max Obuszewski attempted to walk through a police line and were arrested and taken away in vans.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/images/do... 

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