Is the United States of America the world’s largest dealer of illegal drugs?  What about the world’s largest gun runner?  For years our government has used the CIA, NSA & other super-secret ‘intelligence’ agencies to cultivate drug harvest and distribution in SE Asia and Afghanistan.  We offer ‘aid’ and ‘trade’ to countries in the forms of weapons and ammunition.  The drugs come home to the US to poison and kill our own population.  The weapons we sell are used either against us directly by people to kill others, who then seek to kill Americans.  Did the founding fathers envision a country that would become the world’s largest debtor and blood merchant?

They are corrupted by the allure of illegal, untraceable, unaccountable money from the drug trade and the billions of tax revenue collected annually.  Each year, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars go into the industry of Defense contractors, Pentagon programs, Military spending, and the cultivation / transport / sales of illegal drugs - worldwide.  The result is death, poverty, famine, sickness and suffering for millions.

The justification?  American interests: code for empire, colonial expansion and stuffing the royal coffers.  Here’s a tip: when you here the term ‘American interests’, that means that Exxon or Monsanto or Pfizer or some other large company has conspired with the US Government to use our military to help them steal and pollute in another country.  It means that we’re fucking over some entire population at gunpoint and they are covering it with red, white & blue to keep us funding it. 

We, the taxpaying morons make all of this possible when we ignore it.  We get caught up by watching American Idol or iPod shopping on eBay or $5 footlongs at Subway.  We burn gas in our Hummers for 20 years when we could have been demanding alternative fuel vehicles. 

All the while, we suck down gas like jug wine.  We consume drugs both legal and illegal to numb our mind to the horrible truths that we do not want to know and that our government does not want us to know.  It’s no coincidence that we have seen a rise in fundamentalist religions.  Fundies have been after the reins of power since this country was formed.  They have sided with intolerance, racism, sexism and xenophobia in an effort to seize upon and foster the monumental stupidity of hatred and fear.  A hateful & frightened population is a stupid one and ripe pickings for empires whether they be god’s or Washington’s.  Fundies make money when the population is uneducated.  Smart people ask questions and are the natural enemy of hate mongers, fear peddlers and emperors.

The biggest hogs at the trough are the ‘defense contractors’.  The 50-year gluttony of war profiteer, perpetrated in the halls of the Pentagon, Congress and the White House have stolen America from the ideals of equality, justice and liberty.  We are nothing but cash generating cows sucking up fast food, plastic electronics, drugs and alcohol while we shit, quite literally, all over the planet.  We act like we live in the 1950’s where we can pollute anywhere, have 5-10 kids, buy a new car every 3 years, replace last year’s clothes/iPod/radio/whatever with a new one and throw the old one in any old waste can. 

We are Generation Dodo: too stupid to stop or even notice our own extinction. 

Do you really think that our economy will be fixed by some act of government alone?  Not with the war profiteers and oil barons still running unchecked.  Do you really think we have a future for our 6 kids and their children?  Not without any trees left.  Not with garbage incinerators burning up mercury, plastic & television sets.  Not with our water being polluted by mining companies when they blow mountains into the streams and fill the atmosphere with mercury and worse.

These parasites, these murderers and thieves and liars have the flaming gall to use words like patriotism, duty, honor and freedom.  They are the domestic enemies that our President, Congress and troops are sworn to protect.  And I will not listen to that ‘holy mantra’ of "it creates jobs".  Bullshit!  Hitler and Stalin created jobs.  That argument boils down to robber land barons threatening us with starvation if we don’t continue to kill ourselves for their profit.  There are plenty of ways to solve problems that don’t include pollution, murder, drug dealing and war profiteering.

Ronald Reagan said that ‘government is the problem’ because he wanted to scare white people by threatening them with the idea of blacks taking their money.  Well, our government is a problem because it has declared war on us.  They spy on us.  They help the growth, transport and sales of illegal drugs into our communities.  They foster a worship of guns that slaughters children, mothers, seniors, students, and everyone else.  These are the weapons of mass destruction, made possible by our own government and aimed directly at us.  The destruction of entire familes and communities for generations is done by robbing them of our health, our freedom, our wealth, our intellect and our lives. 

It is genocide.  Our government did not stop killing its own people once the Indians were decimated.  They take our tax dollars to fund the murder of others and kill us in return.  We subsidize slaughter and are in turn, slaughtered.

They fear us.  They fear our awakening.  They fear accountability for their own heinous deeds.  We can hold their feet to the fire.  We can call them out onto the carpet and we can shine a light of truth upon them. 

But, we can do none of that until we first admit that we are guilty too.  We have let it happen.  We have made it happen.  Ignorance is no excuse.  Our government’s actions have led to the sickness, mutilation, murder, rape and torture of people all over the world.  They are still an elected government and until they steal that right from us, we are the first to blame.

It is not enough that we elected Barack Obama, but we need to hound him to keep the promises he made.  We cannot allow Dick Cheney and his front man, Chimpo Bush to escape from prosecution.  They broke the law.  Period.  If our children’s children are to have any country worth living in, much less one that resembles a democracy - then, we must see that justice is done.

The law works for everyone or it works for no one.

So, look in the mirror and get used to the fact that you, your family, your neighbors, your parents, your fireman, your baker and everyone else you know - are guilty of peddling drugs, murdering civilians, allowing the rape of women, the sale and use of illegal drugs in every neighborhood in the country and the genocide of people ‘foreign and domestic’.  Look in the mirror and ask yourself:  Is this OK with me?  Do I want this done in my name?  Do I want this for my children?  Is this really what my life is all about?  Is this Patriotism?  No. 

Patriotism is what happens when we stop it.  Now, in this generation.  In this moment.  In this Presidency.  We must become an unstoppable force for what is good in people and for our own survival as a species.

Mother Earth has seen mass-extinction before.  It makes no difference to her.  If we kill ourselves, she will start all over again from scratch.  She’s got nothing but time.  So, it would be foolish to count on things working out if we just stop thinking about them so much or in such stark terms.

This Obama Presidency is a test for us all.  I know that it is for me.

- gadfly

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It’s time for our First Annual National Gadfly New Year’s Predictions.  I use a scientific formula based on several factor including (but not limited to):

• Whatever my daughter is watching on TV as I type
• Things overheard on public buses
• The advice of a recently exiled dictator from central Asia
• Betting against my gut instincts
• Playing mumblety-peg with 3 Gypsies
• Dice
• Coin-toss

Unlike many other well known annual prognostications, my formula is the only set of predictions that are board certified and 100% guaranteed by the Bank of Iceland, up to $100,000, payable in credit default swaps upon demand. 

• Larry Craig signs a lucrative endorsement contract with a company that manufactures bathroom stalls and air powered hand dryers.
• The Detroit Lions win an exhibition 12" softball game against the Detroit Tigers.
• The GOP schedule a press conference on global leadership and nobody attends.  Not even their own staff.
• The Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration move their offices into abandoned, toxic trailers purchased for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
• We actually find out where all the taxpayer money was spent on Defense during the Bush/Cheney fire sale on liberty.
• Dick Cheney shoots someone.  Unfortunately, it is not himself.
• The terms "free market" and "deregulation" are listed by Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary as synonyms for bovine waste.
• Bill Clinton agrees to appear in an exclusive interview with Charlie Gibson to refute any claims made about him during the primary races.
• Eliot Spitzer does nothing interesting at all, but is photographed with Demi Moore.
• Whoopi Goldberg punches Elizabeth Hasselhoff in the face.
• James Dobson is arrested in a child pornography sting operation by Interpol.
• Amelia Earhardt’s plane is found in Michael Jackson’s apartment.  Her lingerie is missing.

Please feel free to add your own prognostications to this site and the Bank of Iceland will cover you as well.

- gadfly

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(Image courtesy of thinkvegan.net)

Sexism is the ‘gateway ‘ism”, that makes all other ‘isms’ possible.  It precedes all other forms of discrimination, setting the example that there are some people that view others as inferior and they use brutality upon them.  What I mean by that is that because our family and society models are built around the model of inequality, injustice and brutality - we accept that behavior as normal.  So, too is racism, classism, speciesism and any other oppression by one group toward another.  The behaviors of sexism are the behaviors of bullying, injustice, intolerance and cruelty.

Sexism is everywhere, all the time.  Sexism is there from the moment we are born.  It is in every country regardless of technological or educational conditions.  It exists in boardrooms, bedrooms and one room farm houses.  It permeates every society and every conversation on the planet.  Laws, religion, music, politics, philosophy and commerce are so interwoven with sexism that I dare say that sexism is the foundation for human existence.

Don’t believe me?  Pick any aspect of human existence and prove that women don’t have a worse deal than men.  You may think you know of an exception to the rule, but I would wager that upon asking any woman who you think has the upper hand whether or not she is favored over men and she would show you how that is not so. 

Women are raped, beaten, cheated, denied education, denied healthcare, sold as slaves, killed for men’s ‘honor’, tortured, swindled, threatened and abused - all for the sole reason that they are women.  It’s not just women.  Transgender, gay, lesbian populations are all targeted ‘as women’ by men.  They suffer heightened abuse because their numbers are smaller.

It is so pervasive, so accepted as the ‘norm’ that it invisible to millions of people.  Mind you, the inequality and injustice are not invisible to the targets of sexism because they suffer the impact in their daily lives.  However, sexism often goes unacknowledged as the direct cause of their misfortunes. 

Religions call it God’s will.  Entire cultures call it tradition.  Laws identify women in terms of property and livestock.  Language itself is ingrained with sexism in overt (male & female voice) and covert ("mankind") reinforcing messages of gender based inequality.  What it is really is brute force, bullying.  Men are bigger and their domination of women begins with violence.  Violence whether applied or implied is the origin and when the ’sales pitches’ of religion, tradition and law are challenged by women, then violence is brought back out as a last resort. 

I tend to look at history through the lens of economics. When examining human behavior, I ask who and what were gained and lost?  So the endurance of sexism in society is because the patriarchal, military model of empire wants it to continue.  Men benefit from it and so it endures.  Sexism is a cycle of assumptions and behaviors that have been crafted and performed for 5000 years and probably even longer.

Sexism starts in the family.  The family unit is the breeding ground for societal behaviors.  Societal institutions are structured to reinforce the family as a unit.  Family and Society act to support and maintain each other.  The strengths and weaknesses of the family are borne out in larger numbers as the strengths and weaknesses of society-at-large.

In the family, the father exercises rights, privileges and status above women and children both. The family is the first empire.  Father outranks mother and children.  Boy child outranks girl child and eventually grows to outrank mother and finally father.  The cycle repeats.  This model gains support from legal definitions of property, entitlement and inheritance and these were written largely by men.  Religions (corporations run by men) also support this model as intended by god. 

I mentioned economics, so to examine the issue of sexism, please consider this following.  Mammals need 6 things for survival: food, water, shelter, space, warmth & sex.  5 of those needs are legally traded commodities.  Indeed, they are the basics of economies around the world.  In a relationship, men and women can legally engage in a conversation or transaction for food, shelter, water, warmth or space.  There are women who sell sex, but often that is illegal and these women are not the spouse of the man in the family unit.  The woman in a family unit is not allowed to legally negotiate the terms of her relationship with her husband.  The wife and her sex is viewed as a ‘right’ of the man via the institution and tradition of marriage. 

This is no trivial point.  It is the primary relationship between men and women and the omission of legal rights in this arena pave the way for the abuses of women that permeate our world.  Women are denied a voice or a say in the eyes of the law in the most intimate and personal relationship - the central relationship in any family.  This model of a woman’s voicelessness is repeated in the family dynamic.  Boys grow up expecting to be in a relationship where the woman will have no voice and girls grow up believing that there is no alternative. 

Commerce is a dialogue between two parties to a negotiated transaction.  It cannot exist if one party is unable to negotiate.  Given the pervasive role of sexism in society and families, I do not think it any coincidence that the women have no legal recourse in the most central, intimate and defining arena of their lives.  If sexism is to end, then relationships need to become negotiable and legal. 

Here is a chance for society to help break the cycle of sexism.  If relationships are made into legal and enforceable contracts, then women will have an alternative in their families.  The family as empire model will no longer be the only game in town.

What would the lives of women be like, if they could legally negotiate the terms of their marriage like any other business contract?  What would dating be like if men who promised women things to entice them into sex or intimacy - were legally bound to fulfill on those promises?  What would marriage be like if it were to become a renewable contract, based on performance by both parties?

Sexism begins in the family and it when it ends there, it will finally die out. 

At this point, you may ask: "What about negotiation in marriage today?"  It’s a black market.  Why do black markets exist?  Who do they benefit?  If the idea of real commerce is acceptable, why not allow it to be contracted?  The answer is that black markets exist because the governing body seeks to deny an equal, legal voice to a transaction.  When the transaction includes a societal ill (like weapons, drugs, etc.) it can be a good thing.  When the transaction is the sexist oppression of womens’ voices as equals - it is a bad thing.

Prostitution only benefits men.  Period.  Look at the law in design and practice.  Prostitutes are punished, ‘johns’ are not.  Prostitutes are abused by police in ghastly numbers.  Transgender prostitutes (often forced into the job by society’s outright rejection of them as human beings) are abused more than anyone.  Murder, disease, abuse from pimps and blame from society for its own failings are the all too common rewards for prostitutes.  They are denied healthcare, education, workers’ rights and dignity for their participation in the ‘black market’ economy of the sex trade.

I think that until women have a legal, enforceable voice in their core relationships, sexism will not be defeated.  The larger, societal ills of institutional brutality, oppression and inequality will not diminish until sexism is no longer the all-pervasive example.  Patriarchal, military empires expressed in government, religion and consumer capitalism will be the death of us all.

We need to choose between sexism and survival.  There are too many people, too many guns, too much poison, too much disease and too little room for brutality to be our core value.

- gadfly

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My new friend:

I recently posted about a community whose rights are routinely ignored, stripped and abused.  I took a risk in writing it because I know very little about the community.  I spoke about what I do know; about my belief that the law works for everyone or it works for no one.  I have no friends, no family, no coworkers in this group of people.  Yet, as a human being, a father and a citizen I have reached a point where I can no longer sit by while others are bullied simply because they are different and fewer in numbers.  So, I spoke out from my heart that how we the large groups treat the smaller, how the strong treat the weak yields a foul harvest for all of us. 

Empathy is not my strong suit (you can ask my wife, if you require any proof) but I somehow managed to think about how I would feel if my relative were in a group of people being beaten, ridiculed and vilified.  I thought about how I might feel.  I looked at my life and chose not to shrug my shoulders or leave them to speak for themselves.

We have reached a dangerous time in our country.  The majority has begun to vote on the rights of minorities, such as Prop 8 in CA.  This is nothing less than the absolute reversal of the over-arching gift of our Constitution: the idea that all people are created equal.  This really means that nobody is better than anyone else and that nobody living in a society given by a law "of the people and for the people".  I believe so strongly in this and it gave me a place to stand for this group of people that is neither patronizing or reinforcing the patriarchal model of inequality.  It took me a long time to get here.

I received a comment from someone in the community I spoke about.  Apparently, my piece was liked enough by this individual to recommend it to others in their community.  I began chatting back & forth via comments, twitter, email & IM with this person.  We could hardly be more different with no shared background.  However, we see eye-to-eye on virtually every issue we’ve discussed.  Politics, human rights, society, family, economics or whatever.  In the act of speaking out in defense of the good in all people, I met someone that I am fast, good friends with.  I listened to how this individual has dealt with the people and challenges of life.  As a result, I am in awe and I am honored by the friendship returned to me. 

I did not expect such an amazing friend, but I am so happy to have one.  None of this would have happened if I kept my mouth shut or settled for preconceived notions about a group of people.  This year, I have chosen to act in support of my convictions.  I got politically active, volunteering for Obama all year, starting a blog, contributing to others’ blogs and speaking out in my neighborhood, work and family.  I have begun to see what that decision makes available to me in my life.  It is humbling.  This new friendship is a flawless expression of the person that I am today. 

I think that maybe I was not ready for this friendship until this point in my life.  It’s sort of like that old saying that "when the student is ready, the teacher appears".  Which I take to mean that until I was capable of noticing the limits of my understanding, I was not able to bridge such a wide gap in culture.  The hilarity is that I now realize how narrow the differences between us really are.

My old friend:

A couple of days ago I had a vastly different conversation with another friend of mine.  This friend and I go back 27 years.  We met in the US Army Special Forces.  He and I went through all of that for years together.  That bond endures to this day.  He and his wife attended my wedding.  We visit each other’s families.  We pick up the phone for each other and it is as if no time has passed.  I am proud of our unflinching commitment to each other and I consider myself very fortunate to have this man’s friendship.  He is a good family man, raising a large family. 

Politically, philosophically & spiritually however, we could not be more different.  He’s a devout Christian, GOP, Right-winger who I could not disagree with any more if someone paid me.  We have had chuckles and arguments over the years.  I think he’s gotten worse and I’m sure he thinks the same of me.  I listen to the wing-nut talking points he states with complete enthusiasm and I can’t believe he’s serious, but he really is.  We don’t just differ - we completely disagree.  We are diametrically opposed.  The gap between his philosophy and mine is stunning.

Normally, I just spend a couple of days shaking my head after he and I get into it on politics, economics, race, god or whatever.  This time though, our conversation comes on the heels of meeting my new friend. 

My new self:

This situation really captured my attention.  On one hand, I have meet someone that I am instantly allied with in all issues of importance to me - to the person I have become.  On the other hand, I have an unquestionable devotion to someone that disagrees with many of my core principles - a relationship built when I was 21.  This really got my attention and I’ve been processing it for days.  How can I be friends with both people?  This was quite a dilemma for me.

Then, I asked myself "What if there is no dilemma?  How narrow is my definition of my Self that it cannot hold two such different relationships?"  That’s when I began to realize the real gift that my new friendship had offered me.  I had just stepped out across a gap of mis-understanding and found that there is no real gap between us.  Had I forgotten that lesson so quickly?

And what of my philosophy that we are all in this together?  This is exactly what "together" looks like.  Different people being related and defined by how we listen for the greatness in each other.  And how we listen to ourselves when we have the chance, allowing the strength of our convictions to overcome the limits of our misunderstanding.

So, I will cherish my new friend for all the time we have yet to share and I will just see if I can live long enough to see my other friend come to his senses.  I could not have asked for any better gift this holiday season.

- gadfly

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(Image courtesy of indiesocial.com)

I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today.  A woman had just finished shopping at Macy’s and had several red shopping bags.  She was trying to put everything into one bag.  The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform.  I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street. 

Then, she yells to me that: "It’s OK!  They’re empty."  Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff.  The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up.  I told her that I didn’t want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms…dammit!).

I got on the next train and thought to myself, "We’re too stupid to save ourselves.  We are going to stick our heads in the sand, believing one delusion after another until we’re choking in pollution, ravaged by disease and slaughtering each other by the thousands"

I think about that.  Are we stupid?  Are we naturally stupid or are we kept that way?  Is our stupidity manufactured? 

We will always stand at the point where knowledge meets ignorance.  The known and the unknown.  The past and the future.  Some people look to the past for comfort and reassurance.  Others of us look to the future. 

There is a competition between fact and dis-information.  Some people actually lie to us and as a result we’re kept stupid. 

- Robert Niles describes newspapers choosing to keep us dumb, ostensibly for balance.  In reality it is a subjugation of press by corporate interests.  It is easier to silence from within than without.  The great lesson learned by the Military-Industrial Complex during the VietNam war is that the Press is the enemy.  In the time since then, they have purchased and silenced all TV, Radio & Print critics of the miltary.  Reporters and their employers are told to report what the military wants reported or be denied any access to the news.  The deficit has ballooned as a result.  Pay attention!  Net-neutrality is about killing the alternative - the blogosphere. 

- Big Religion as an organized crime syndicate works tirelessly to suppress scientific fact.  The religious mobs that grow fat from the multitude of the faithful have spent decades denying, hiding and vilifying evolution.  From Galileo and even before, when someone actually looks at the universe in a way that threatens the gravy train for Big Religion, they bring the hammer down.  Back room deals, overt denial, calling it the devil’s work, ‘just a theory’, heresy, poppycock, blasphemy and inciting people on a daily basis to attack evolution in any way possible.  When that began to fail, they began the Intelligent Design strategy in a strategy designed to overwhelm us with choices and thereby make all knowledge look suspect.  The result?  Stupid people and rich religions. 

Other countries teach evolution directly to children in grade school.  The result?  Their economies grow, their people prosper and they are more secure.  The US (and any other country under the thumb of the Relgion Mafia) are doomed to rising poverty, rising crime, deteriorating health, loss of jobs, weakening economies and strong-arm military police states. 

The lies told by the Religion Mob to foster hatred, intolerance, death, suffering  and disease are non-stop.  Every day, we are assaulted with this crap about ‘the sanctity of marriage’ so that we can demonize the LGBT community.  Cenk Uygur went off on this topic and I am with him every step of the way on this.  People, WAKE THE FUCK UP!  This exactly what Hitler did.  Not "like" - it EXACTLY. 

People rush in to defend religion saying that it is unfair to lump all religions into one such statement.  Well, I’m-a-lumpin’.  I think the only difference between a religion that doesn’t persecute and one that does - is opportunity.  Give any religion time enough to be infiltrated by people motivated by wealth and they’ll morph into the deadly kind.  Give a religion - any religion access to an army and watch the bloodshed.  The minute any religion tells you that some god commands that women or gays or other faiths are inferior to the true (male) believer, then you just heard the first bullet of intolerance and brutality. 

This is because all religions are managed and populated by people.  Power corrupts.  Also, religions are about faith.  Religious leaders use the faithful’s habit, willingness or desire to believe the words of the leaders as a pronouncement of their faith.  If the preacher is to be believed about god, then the preacher must also be believed about the evils of gays, role of women, story of god instead of evolution.  Power corrupts.  History and current society are filled with examples of corrupt corporations running corrupt governments and gaining support in controlling the masses with the blessing of corrupt religions.  It’s not like it happens ’some times’.  It happens every minute of every single day.  People are dying as a result of it. 

- Pollution awareness has been high since the 70’s and still we make more and more crap every day.  Again, I recommend that you watch the brilliant "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard.  There are billions of humans on this planet.  More every day.  We are eating the planet and covering it with crap.  It is a catastrophe.  We should be hearing about it on the news, day & night.  But we are not.  Bring it up as a conversation and see what the majority of responses are.  Chances are very good that you will hear resignation and cynicism or denial.  That is no coincidence.  That ignorance exists because somebody is happy making money just the way things are.  They have paid for the liars to tell the lies we are told.

- Every day, people all over the world are getting screwed by corporations either robbing them of resources, polluting the water table, poisoning the crops, supporting corrupt government, and supplying military/militia with the weapons used to itimidate or slaughter any tries to oppose them.  These corporations have stolen the message medium to keep us from hearing the truth of their deeds and our world.  If we keep letting that happen, then we won’t hear about it until it is too late. 

We cannot farm poverty, pollution, blight, murder and thievery in most of the world without our foul deeds eventually getting even with us.  But, that is not even the point.  The point is that it is not right that we farm out misery in millions of other humans.  Who pays the price for this?  The poor.  Folks, if you have not been paying attention - there are more and more poor every day.  The worldwide numbers of people living below the poverty line are growing in actual numbers and percentages.  Take a good hard look at these next words:

You stand a much greater chance of ending up living in poverty than becoming the next billionaire.  It’s not even a close second. 

Right now, our only apparent US world strategy is to:

a) Fuck over the poor and defenseless for as long as we want.  Demonize, marginalize or sell them weapons to slaughter each other.  Whether they be impoverished countries, women, gays, transgendered or people who don’t look like "us". 

b) Build a colossal military police state, so that if anybody tries to do anything about it, we can kill them all. 

c) Fill the heads of American taxpayers with lies, overload us with dis-information, call anyone that disagrees ‘unpatriotic’ and keep the money machine (us) stupid enough to keep paying.

That may be the real ‘heartbeat of America.’

If two numbers were lower, we might be able to go on in bloody ignorance.  If the human population were lower and the number of nuclear weapons were lower, we might be able to do what we did in the 1950’s: stick our heads in the sand, pocket the money and leave this shit for some other generation to clean up.  We used to have the ‘luxury’ of being able spin delusions of grandeur, cover up murder with lies, ruin the land and slaughter ourselves.  We have swarmed across the planet like a plague of locusts. 

Ignorance is not bliss when it poisons us all.  It is a choice.

One Pissed Off Liberal went off today and I could not agree more.  Read it and get good & pissed.  Then start fighting back against stupidity.  Learn.  Speak.  Act.  Repeat.

- gadfly

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Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world ‘warts & all’ for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

Note: The term ‘reality’ is subjective because of differing perspectives from one person to another.  Our individual experiences with language, sensory perception and associative cognition all conspire to individuate and isolate us from each other.  The differences can range from miniscule to incomprehensible. 

Then, there are shared agreements of ‘reality’ that occur nonetheless.  We can look at a mass grave and all agree that there are dead people there.

Given all of this, it’s a wonder we communicate at all.

On to Arundhati Roy.  I first learned of her this year.  John Cusack quoted her in this article about his film "War, Inc." 

As Arundhati Roy says, we need to lay siege to empire with everything we’ve got. You know? Deprive it of oxygen, shame it, mock it, tell our own stories. This corporatist revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they’re selling … their ideas, their wars, their notion of inevitability.

Something in her calling out the Empire and naming the strategy to defeat it in terms of laying siege, strongly resonated within me.  I looked her up on teh Google.  I found writings, videos and many, many opinions about her. 

Arundhati Roy is a person standing up in the face of military empire armed only with unbending commitment for the good of us all.  She screams for the world to hear without screaming and is heard through the chaos.  She fights armies with words and is undeterred.  She opposes tyranny and calls the liar a liar.  She has used the gift of human existence - her mind to take the world in and relate to it for what it is. 

Her position in the world societies is often assumed to be the weakest and most frail.  Our world governments, economies, mythology and family models are all built around empires and bullies.  The strong dominate the weak.  Bullies get their way.  Brutality, murder and threats of them both are woven into every new and old relationship.  Call it tradition, God’s will or Natural Law - it all amounts to taking by force. 

She is a woman without a gun openly declaring herself as the enemy of Empire.  All empires.  She calls us to come together in both the present and the future, where we are and where we will be.  She stands in the face of guns, religious intolerance and brainwashing, centuries upon centuries of patriarchal society, ignorance, hatred, greed and fear.  LIke the fierce determination of the students standing up to Chinese Army tanks in Tiananmen Square, she is standing up for Humanity; hers and ours.

Her voice stands out in the crowd because she is calling us to acknowledge the world as it is and to reason together for the good of us all.  She is neither selling nor buying.

I highly recommend that you take in as much of her writing and speaking as you can.  Here are a few that I can point you to for starters.  She has written several books, including the Booker Prize winning The God of Small Things.  There are much better literary reviewers than myself, so I will embarrass myself with such an attempt.  I will suggest that you read The God of Small Things.  I have and found it wonderful, intimate and poignant.

I will discuss as example today, two of her public statements about the world we live in.  They are about separate incidents and different countries but they point to a shared struggle between dogma and sanity.  Between irrational insanity leading to the ruin of us all and reasoned choice as a way to find our way together.

Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)
Presented in New York City at The Riverside Church May 13, 2003 [text or video]

This talk was given here in the United States.  Ms. Roy speaking as "a slave who presumes to criticize her King". 

In this work, Aruhdhati Roy calls out the Imperial structure, intentions and horrific results of the United States.  She points to common threads of empires in our time: millions of people crushed by poverty, bloodshed and suffering.  Their plight made invisible by the lies of corporate owned governments or simply erased by the global epidemic of wars. 

She rightly identifies the connection between the responsibiities of the citizen for its government and how the bloodshed caused by corrupt leaders is shared by we who elect them and stand by pretending to be helpless.

So here it is - the World’s Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America’s Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency?

In the three years of George Bush the Lesser’s term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush’s initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars.

So who’s paying for the war? America’s poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers.

She also states rather clearly, the all too common formula used to gain wealth for the empire and nothing for anyone else:

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but….our endowment from God." (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)

So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb).

The context of this occasion was the war in Iraq but it includes demonstrations of Empire across the globe.  In so doing, she outlines the war we are all in: the battle between humankind’s survival vs. the destructive, insatiable hunger of Empire.

9 Is Not 11
(And November Isn’t September) (blogged at TomDispatch)

She posted this two days ago, regarding the ramifications of choosing the context for understanding the recent massacre in Mumbai. 

Speaking this time from her home nation and through the means of the blogosphere, she points to the very real choice faced by India and the world in how best to interpret and act upon the violence. 

She points to an alarming disintegration of thorough, independent journalism.  The media seems to have become a drum for the right-wing proponents of military police states.  Independent thought, educated discourse are being assaulted as unpatriotic in an effort to railroad power into the hands of those that helped cause the conditions that led to the massacre in the first place.

Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least, there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

 

Instead, we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed. (Is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?) We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation.

She covers in lucid detail, the consequences of choosing between understanding the conditions that caused the massacre or ignoring them for the same dogmatic blindness that is one of the causes. 

She also sums up quickly, the very real world we find ourselves living in and the grim near-future.

We have a hostile nuclear-weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor; we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalize, will end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world.

If 10 men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

She points to the need to face the hard truths of how India and the many nations involved arrived in the current economic and political crisis.

To conclude this post, I wish to acknowledge Arundhati Roy for her single greatest contribution and her most powerful weapon in the ’siege upon Empire’ - the invitation to join her.  So many tools in the service of Empire sell us the message of our selves as helpless.  By standing forcefully in the way of Empire, Ms. Roy is an invitation to us all to free ourselves from the shackles of Empire and the rituals of greed. 

The place we are called to is a shared reality in which we are all stakeholders in the continued life or humans and everything else on Earth.  She does not believe that we will arrive in a stable society by embracing dogma.  Not only is she asking for help, she is stating that we are actively helping ourselves by thinking or we are passively assisting the Empire.

In reply to her call, I declare that I have heard her call and my answer is ‘yes, I stand with you to oppose empire’.  I invite my readers to make the same choice for the good of us all. 

-gadfly

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Every morning on my walk to the bus, I pass the windows of a shop called Bazar.  They sell imports, womens’ clothing, shoes, etc.  I often look at the dresses on display with an eye for something my wife would like me to surprise her with.  They often have some posters for bands or performances that I assume the owner fancies. 

However, in addition to their normal offerings for eye-candy, they offered something to reflect Barack Obama’s election.  Entitled "an historic night"; it was several large swaths of white paper hanging in the windows.  The hangings, read from left to right were one-line capsules of events, ideas, statements and thoughts from the beginning of the campaign up to election night. 

It was and (is still) a moving experience to see the journey, laid out like a string of moments all in a row.  I had forgotten how some of the moments, victories and losses related to each of the ones that preceded or followed.  Some of them, I had forgotten altogether. 

What strikes me, is that this is a shop window and not a media outlet.  It is wonderful and hope-inspiring that everyday people are showing up in their lives to claim pride in a vision of America that calls us all forward.  I looked on the website, it’s not there.  They have taken the display down.  It was a passing moment in and of itself, much as the campaign it celebrates.  I am simply not content to let the moment or the statement pass out of existence without at least a few more people taking it into their own lives and memories.

I asked Doug at Bazar for the list so that I could extend his window dressing from the corner of Paulina and Roscoe in Chicago out to the rest of the world.  He was kind enough to oblige and I thank him for the chance to share this.  If you like this, then shoot Doug an email and let them know that their windows can be seen from where you are standing.

Enjoy,

- gadfly

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Hi everybody! 

Did you know that today is International Anti-Corruption Day?  I sure as hell did not (but I do now).  Just in case you forgot, corruption occurs when people pay money in a secret deal, in order to break the law…so they can make a lot more money.

Why don’t we look at how the world celebrated this wonderful new holiday.  Maybe we can even see some real corruption in action.  Wow!  This is so much fun.

First, let’s look at where International Anti-Corruption Day came from.  It was started at the United Nations Convention against Corruption in 2003.

In its resolution 55/61 of 4 December 2000, the General Assembly recognized that an effective international legal instrument against corruption, independent of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (resolution 55/25, annex I) was desirable and decided to establish an ad hoc committee for the  negotiation of such an instrument in Vienna at the headquarters of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The text of the United Nations Convention against Corruption was negotiated during seven sessions of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Negotiation of the Convention against Corruption, held between 21 January 2002 and 1 October 2003.

Um…that was boring.  If you’re like me, you just want to skip to the important stuff; like ‘what do they want?’ or ‘what is this holiday for?’ maybe even ‘does this mean I can miss school?’  The short answers to those questions are: transparency / accountability; awareness and no. 

Put another way, the United Nations took a look at the real cost to all of our countries that came about as a direct result of corruption.  What they found was pretty bad news.  Murder, crime, poverty, fear, starvation, illness, lack of education, violence, hatred, infant mortality, joblessness were all happening to people across the globe in every country, every town and in every walk of life.  Basically most of the people on the planet get screwed royally by corruption. 

So who is guilty of corruption?  Well, you might be surprised to know that almost anybody can be corrupt.  Bankers, Policemen, Soldiers, Politicians, Corporate executives and even Judges.  Anybody in a position of power that is supposed to follow a law meant to protect the public is at risk.  You probably already know someone who has become corrupt.  Keep that in mind and it will make you lose sleep.

OK…enough of this.  I want to see what teh Google had to say about International Anti-Corruption Day, dammit.

• LA Times: Mexico should pay attention to International Anti-Corruption Day -

  Why should Mexico be particularly interested? Because, as we reported today, more than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence so far this year — that’s more than double the toll for that time period in 2007. Although a lot of the violence is being put down to infighting in the drug gangs, corruption within Mexico’s police force and legal branch is also a major obstacle to bringing down the powerful drug networks.

  President Felipe Calderon’s government is currently undergoing a probe called Operation Cleanup, which has resulted in a number of ugly discoveries within its ranks. As Tracy Wilkinson reports in the dispatch linked to above: "Mexican law enforcement has also suffered its worst corruption scandal in a decade, with dozens of senior officials and agents accused of accepting money to pass secrets to traffickers."

• Market Watch: PriceWaterhouseCoopers has decided that there is more money to be made in fighting corruption than in turning a blind eye.  Bravo.

• NBC Chicago:

  

  The irony is not lost on the hometown news, but the real story is this awesome picture.

•  Transparency International: They just won my undying admiration and a place on my blogroll with this BRIBE PAYER INDEX!  "The 2008 BPI ranks 22 of the world’s wealthiest and economically dominant countries by the likelihood of their firms to bribe abroad."  

  

  Scores range from 0 to 10. The higher the score for the country, the lower the likelihood of companies from this country to engage in bribery when doing business abroad.

  First place in the 2008 BPI is shared by Belgium and Canada with a score of 8.8, signifying that Belgian and Canadian firms are the least likely to engage in bribery when doing business abroad. Netherlands and Switzerland occupy third place in the index, each with a score of 8.7. At the other end of the scale is Russia, coming in last with a score of 5.9, just trailing China (6.5), Mexico (6.6) and India (6.8).

  “The BPI provides evidence that a number of companies from major exporting countries still use bribery to win business abroad, despite awareness of its damaging impact on corporate reputations and ordinary communities,” said Transparency International Chair, Huguette Labelle. “The inequity and injustice that corruption causes make it vital for governments to redouble their efforts to enforce existing laws and regulations on foreign bribery and for companies to adopt effective anti-bribery programmes. In this spirit, all major exporting countries should commit to the provisions of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.”

   

  Industrial bribing

  The 2008 Bribe Payers Survey, which serves as the basis for the 2008 BPI, provides a closer looks at how corruption affects the private sector. Two new sector rankings highlight the likelihood of firms in 19 specific sectors to engage in bribery and exert undue influence.

  Bribery of Public Officials by Sectors

  The first ranking shows how likely companies in each sector are to bribe public officials. According to senior business executives, companies in public works contracts/ construction, and real estate and property development, are the worst offenders. Fisheries and the banking and finance sector were identified as the cleanest sectors in this regard.

  

  Possible scores range from 0 to 10. 0 represents the view that ‘bribes are almost always paid’ and 10 that ‘bribes are never paid’ by a sector.

• In the blogosphere: Islamabad MetBlogs, International Trade Law News,  Radio Free NJ all posted something about the holiday.

So, this holiday is a pretty good one kids.  We could call it Rod Blagoyevich Day in honor of the big fish that was caught today. But that would be silly and premature because there are a lot of even bigger fish still out there in corruption-land that we need to catch.

What do you say we meet back here next year and celebrate this day by calling it Dick Cheney Day?

-gadfly

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Here’s another affirmation that the GOP is buried in the mindset of Nixon and Stalin.  Wikileaks and the ACLU (MN) have recently covered the super secret security briefing from the RNC that indicates the usage of the US Military against law abiding US citizens.  Another ‘dragnet’ surveillance conducted by paranoid tyrants in the party of hate and lobbyists (aka GOP). 

In a nutshell, the party that loves (using) the military (to seize power and make fortunes) - the GOP, used military spy satellites to spy on US citizens.  This should come as no surprise, given the Bush/Cheney dictatorship’s penchant for spying on us all. 
 

The GOP (Bibles & Bullets Party) is not going to let a simple law prevent them from watching us all to see if we are getting organized enough to realize how badly they’ve already screwed us all.  They are scared to death of what I like to call "the real America".  You know…people going to work every day, paying taxes, raising families and struggling to still make the word a better place.  Isn’t it nice to know that somewhere in our nation’s military observation systems, your house is on a giant screen, being watched by the party of small government?

From the ACLU: 

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), is one of the organizations that is mentioned in the report that is particular cause for concern. NGA provides mapping tools and imagery intelligence that are obtained from the United State’s military spy satellites which are controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office. In other words during the RNC, these top spying tools could have been utilized to gather intelligence on the homes of activists and media workers who were a part of the demonstrations. That information could have then been relayed to local officials.

A second agency that was involved in the planning is the Pentagon’s Northern Command, NORTHCOM. Having NORTHCOMM at the table, assisting in the planning is troubling because it could mean that the military was involved in the crowd control strategies and dealing with potential civil unrest. According to a report in Army Times, it said that an active military unit has been deployed by NORTHCOM in the United States. This deployment marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment within U.S. Borders.

Furthermore it appears that the FBI may have been using a station faking technology that would allow them to locate an individual through their cell phone. The ACLU is concerned with how this technology is used and if there was proper judicial oversight. In the USA Patriot ACT, this process for obtaining a track was made easier, and could allow for little to no judicial oversight. This tracking via cell phones could have been used during the RNC without the knowledge of even the phone companies.

"These behaviors are a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority, and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law," said Teresa Nelson, ACLU of Minnesota. The ACLU-MN will continue to investigate and will use their findings in future lawsuits against law enforcement officials.

Contact the ACLU or your elected representatives (here and here) and tell them that you do not want to be spied on.  Ask them why this is allowed to happen?  Ask what you can do to help them.  Talk about this on your blog. 

I’m sorry, but it’s time to call a spade a spade: the GOP is the party of totalitarian military and corporate corruption.  They wave flags, fear and God in our faces 24/7 while spewing the message of hating our neighbors, telling us that we cannot trust ‘certain elements of society’.  Methinks that their Freudian slip is showing.  It is their own mistrust of the American people that they promote in their sermons of hatred and fear.  They cannot stop themselves but you can.

The ‘party of Lincoln’ is now the ‘party of Jefferson Davis’ and like Davis, our current President is completely beholden to his wealthy masters.  Today’s GOP has sided with the descendant ideology of the slaveholders.  Like their ancestors, they will fail. 

-gadfly

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• Tax-dodges by the super wealthy Americans, set up in off-shore accounts to completely avoid paying taxes.
• Attempts to suppress the freedom of speech for Wikileaks

From Wikileaks:

Alex Widmer, the Chief Executive Officer of Bank Julius Baer has died unexpectedly at age 52.

The Swiss headquarted bank is the largest "private banking" group with over USD 300 billion in assets hidden or invested on behalf of extremely wealthy individuals and some institutions.

According to multiple independent press reports (Reuters, 20minutes), the cause of death was suicide. The reasons are not yet publicly known.

In February, the bank attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue Wikileaks in the United States over whistleblower revelations pertaining to the bank’s Cayman Islands operations.

Dozens of revelations followed, from the exposure of Baer’s internal tax avoidance plan to the Cayman Islands trust for the Caryle group revealed on Dec 1.

According to Reuters the bank has lost some 60% of its share price during 2008, although this puts it ahead of many in the current financial crisis.

Why he died is a mystery.  I can think of three possible reasons:

1. Mr. Widmer’s wife had died in 2005 and perhaps his own death was in some way a measure of his grief for her passing. 
2. It is also possible that Mr. Widmer’s suicide was due to knowledge of the facts in the tax evasion business of Bank Julius Baer. Perhaps he was burdened with the knowledge of the scandals involved with the owners of secret accounts. Although, Swiss Banks have been holding money for tyrants, murderers, drug dealers and thieves (besides the CIA) for centuries. I am not sure why that would start bothering someone just now. 
3. I feel for the teenage children of Mr. Widmer and hope that their father’s death was not in fact a murder painted to look like a suicide. With the hundreds of millions of tax cheat money already disclosed and the possibility of even more as yet undiscovered, there is certainly enough criminal exposure to warrant an attack on Mr. Widmer.  I will admit that I am paranoid after reading watching The Bourne Ultimatum last week, but there really is no honor among thieves. Especially when it comes to saving their hundreds of billions in hidden assets.

-gadfly

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I started this blog almost two months ago.  I have never blogged before, so it’s all new to me.  In the spirit of giving back to the community and paying homage to those who have helped me; I chose to write a summary of things and thoughts that have helped me to date.  So, here are the greatest hits so far:

First, I had to choose something to blog about.  I wanted to blog on progressive issues with a critical eye, paying special attention to calls for accountability in public and private institutions.  There are two blog paths: a)free blog sites that have their own very simple & limited software or b) paid hosting with whatever software I choose.  I chose the latter because I am a control freak and I want absolute control over my content, my site admin and my site design.  Even if you are in the former categor, there should be some useful info here for you, too.

 I chose Mojohost as my webhosting company, run by Brad Mitchell.  They set me up instantly.  I got my domain name and my ftp server login right away.  I didn’t know what kind of software to use for my blog and one of the Mojohost techs was very helpful.  He explained them all in terms what was important to me.  I chose WordPress because it was OSS and extremely configurable.  I like OSS a lot.  It is generally very secure because so many people have access to the code and are therefore able to test it.  Cost is also a factor for me, as I do not have deep pockets. 

I began with WordPress v. 2.6.3 and have upgraded it several times.  I’m currently using 2.7 rc1.  I used Filezilla for my ftp operations.  For anyone new to ftp, it is no different than moving files around on your own computer.  There is one exception and that is that on ftp, the file system permissions of files and directories is much more important than on your own computer.

My strategy was to spend my first couple of weeks looking around the Internet & blogosphere for ideas to steal.  I wanted to have the look of the blog down before too long.  So, I put up the site and over a week or two, I messed around with enough site themes, perfomance plugins, etc. to begin writing.  My primary goal overall was to avoid simple mistakes - continuity, spelling, common requested items. 

Then, I reached out to network.  I found a bloggers’ meet-up here in Chicago.  I went to that meeting and invited Kirsten Miller, Web Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. I attended a seminar on blogging, run by Barb Iverson and Keidra Chaney.  This was also helpful.  I got the chance to mingle with other bloggers, but to get strategy and configuration questions answered with my laptop opened to the admin portal of my blog.

Every day, I looked around the web for blogging tips.  I began to find tools that can help.  Firebug, a plugin for Firefox is extremely helpful.  It allows me to look at any website, especially my own - to see what is working and what is not and on what CSS sheet the code resides.

I joined social networking sites!  Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg and more.  I use plugins in WP to help me direct and report traffic to my site.  People started visiting my site.  One person, another blogger named Hannah Kelly was extremely gracious and turned me on to several sites to help me get exposure.  One site, Allvoices.com is very intriguing.  It’s an internet reporting portal.  I joined it this week.  They are like a cross between Twitter the AP.  They actually pay reporters good money for original work.  Check them out and see for yourself, if you have any desires of being a new media reporter.

So, my basic mantra through all of this is experiment, control and ejnoy.  Right now, I’m in no danger of running out of things to fill any of these buckets. 

-gadfly

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Last week’s brutal attacks of unarmed civilians in Mumbai got me to thinking about the nature of attacks on civilians.  For many years, I accepted the given definition of ‘terrorists’ as people that are so filled with evil that they want to frighten and kill us all.  There are always sociopaths out there to fit into this mold.  I think that for the sheer numbers of civilians killed in targeted violence, sociopaths are not the only explanation.  The large role of religious / dogmatic programming in targeted violence against civilians eliminates sociopathology as a cause because the sociopath has no conscience or care for his/her impact on society.  For the most part, the religious killer is convinced that his/her morality is calling for the murder of civilians.

Civilian massacres can occur with low fatalities or very high.  The setting can be away from scrutiny or in the most public of places.

In my lifetime, the targeting of civilians has existed in many forms.

• In VietNam, civilians were slaughtered en masse and at will.
• The Middle-East conflicts involving Israel and its neighbors are a constant stream of civilian deaths at the hands of armies and bombs.
• Conflicts in Africa and South America between dictatorships, rebel groups and criminal enterprise (both private and corporate)

However, the killing of civilians as a military operation really took off in WWII.  Germany and Russia killed nearly 20 million of their own civilian populations as a deliberate strategy.  The Allies bombed civilians in Europe to halt the industry that supported the Third Reich war machine.  The American bombings of civilians at Nagasaki and Hiroshima has been viewed as a strike against the military industry as in Europe and as retribution for Pearl Harbor or even a demonstration of US military might toward Russia and the world.

The killing of civilians goes back into history since the dawn of mankind.  So, why are we seeing so much of it now?  I don’t know the statistics of civilian deaths for military/economic/political causes to compare this century to any of the previous.  Maybe there only seem like more now because we are more rapidly informed by TV, radio, Internet & print news sources.  It sure would be interesting to see those numbers, but for this conversation they do not really matter.

Let’s look at why civilians are killed today and maybe take one step closer to ending it.

They are trying to get our attention.

Civilians are targeted because they are consumers back home while they turn a blind eye to their armies abroad, enabling thievery, murder, rape and resource robbery.  It is the money taxed from the civilian population that pays for the soldiers and weapons sent overseas.  It is the money spent by the consumers that creates corporations powerful enough to influence and hire the military overseas in pursuit of resources and labor from other nations.

We are ignorant of the real actions of our military and corporations or the real conditions of poverty, environmental destruction, pollution, disease – in other words, the consequences of our action that create misery in others.  In this regard, we are not unlike the ignorance of wealthy in our own country who are isolated and buffered in their neighborhoods and homes.  They do not see the poor, nor understand why they live in squalor and crime.  Ignorance is a privilege and it does not excuse their actions or ours.

They are trying to get a government’s attention.

In some instances, attacks on civilians is directed at the government.  The killers are seeking to make things difficult for the government to operate.  If the attackers can remain free indefinitely and continue killing civilians, then the violence becomes a bargaining chip.  The idea is that violence becomes a bargaining chip for the ‘negotiations’ between the existing government and its challenger.

So, if a rebel campaign or terrorist campaign is a violent format for negotiating power between formal, existing governments and their challengers; then what are they trying to say?  What are they ‘bargaining’ for?

• They could be protesting the their country’s being robbed of natural resources by another country.  How exactly should a person take it when a corporation comes in from another country, bribes itself into a monopoly and takes every natural resource away?  How should someone feel when their drinking water is filled with toxins as a result of making toys for ‘dollar stores’?
• They could be exacting revenge for atrocities committed at the urging of the CIA.  Wars started simply to fuel the arms trade.  Maybe the killers don’t take kindly to their country being turned into a proving ground for munitions and corruption.
• Maybe they’re saying to their government and ours that they would like their own people to get wealthy from the resources within their country.
• Maybe they’re just too conditioned to daily violence or consumed with anger that they cannot break from the path of murder.

Nothing justifies the killing of civilians.  Unless we genuinely understand why it occurs, we will likely make no inroads to stopping it.

-gadfly

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