Rare National TV Commercial Promotes Church-State Separation

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a state/church watchdog and the nation’s largest freethought association, is placing its first national ad on the “CBS Evening News” tonight. This same ad debuted on “CBS Sunday Morning” yesterday. 

–FFRF News Release

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How to Reform Corporate America

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

The Necessity and Possibility of Corporate Reform: Part 2. Reform Strategies

by Gary Brumback/ OpEdNews.com/ March 25, 2012

Moving a mountain might be easier than moving government back to democracy and away from a corpocracy that has put government in the back seat and corporateAmerica in the driver’s seat. Corporate reform, with the exception of trying to reform the merchants of death (discussed at the end of this article), in contrast to government reform, may just be an easier way to slow America’s sliding into a state of ruiNation. The introductory article ended by suggesting steps watchdog groups could take in searching for the “scoundrels and saints” among corporateAmerica and its many allies.Watchdogs that only watch are nothing more than lapdogs. We Americans ought to have had enough of an over fed lazy fed lapdog that lets corporate America exploit and harm us.   Just as obviously, no more effective than lapdogs are proposals that stay stuck to paper. This final article I hope is on “Teflon.”Are there any instigators of corporate reform?A few basically isolated and relatively impotent NGOs. At the considerable risk of some omissions and commissions I poured through my list of 100 some NGOs and found a few that were actually confronting corporations and industries in various ways such as sending petitions to corporations to cease particular kinds of wrongdoing; holding protests at corporations’ headquarters (some ending in arrests); warning consumers of instances of corporate fraud; lock downs at banks; blockades of shipments; organizing actions to stop corporations’ selling of unhealthy products; and exposing the most harmful corporations to a “Hall of Shame.”

Activist Bankster USA www.banksterusa.org ; Beyond Talk www.beyondtalk.net ; Center for Corporate Policy www. corporatepolicy . org ; Center for Economic Justicewww.econjustice.net ;   The Center for Justice & Democracy www.centerjd.org ; Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund www.celdf.org ; Corporate Accountability Internationalwww.stopcorporateabuse.org ; Corporate Ethics International   www.corpethics.org ; The Democracy Center www.democracyctr.org ; Greenpeace USA www.greenpeaceusa.org ; Mobilization for Climate Justice www.actforclimatejustice.org ; National People’s Actionwww.showdowninamerica.org ;     The Peace Alliance www.thepeacealliance.org ; Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy. www.poclad.org ; Rising Tide North Americawww.risingtidenorthamerica.org ; United Students Against Sweatshops www.usasnet.org .

A few NGOs in supporting roles. As I was going through my bigger list I spotted some NGOs that are carrying out supporting roles like public education, activist skill training, helping to build grassroots movements, helping to organize oppositions to corporations, and helping to expand small and local business alternatives. Here are some of these groups:

A few scattered, disconnected and impotent movements. There are so many grassroots movements in America that a person cataloguing them once pleaded for help in recording the new ones sprouting. They usually start out and stay small-scale, limited to specific “back yard” issues that concern local communities or regions. The movement getting the most publicity today seems to be OWS and its offshoots that I lump together into Occupy America. As far as I can tell it’s still an inward, process-oriented movement (for a cogent critique of it, see the article in the March 21, 2012 issue of OpEdNews.com by Danny Schechter author of the new book “Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street” with hands-on experience in civil rights and community organizing.

Who ought to start instigating?

This is a pivotal question. If NGOs and various and sundry movements could be caught in a moment of unguarded candor I think they would admit that their impact on either government reforms and/or corporate reforms has been essentially negligible. Government is as corrupt as ever. Corrupt industries and their corporations are still as corrupt as ever. Here is my list of answers:

A large cadre of NGO strike forces. They don’t exist yet, just like my proposed U.S. Chamber of Democracy doesn’t exist yet. While I haven’t given up on the prospect of the latter, I am going to modify my overtures to the many remaining NGOs yet to be contacted and suggest to them either supporting an umbrella network like a USCD or a scaled-down alternative of dividing up the industries and their corporations and for each creating a cadre of NGO strike forces.

The Democracy Coalition. It doesn’t exist yet either. In my website,www.uschamberofdemocracy.com I identified 27 segments of the populace that have or should have grievances against the corpocracy. Most of them have yet to coalesce into their own movements but a few have. Labor, for example, is one of them, yet it remains to be seen just how far the unions reach out to other groups. I have gotten no replies to my overtures to the heads of the major unions.

You. Readers of OpEdNews.com ought to become instigators. You may already be one. If you are, can you do more? John Perkins ended his article on the vicious circle of military aggression in the March 21, 2012 issue of OpEdNews.com by exhorting readers to “Take at least one action for peace every single day.” I wrote him immediately that he should do more given his visibility (I had written in 2006 a published review of his book “Confessions of an economic hit man” that had given him instant publicity).

You could champion the idea of the USCD and The Democracy Coalition. You could write particular NGOs and tell them to be less dependent for their existence on the continued existence of the corpocracy. If you donate money to any of them tell them you are not getting your money’s worth. And as you read the rest of this article think of additional ways you could get more involved.

The scoundrels themselves? Don’t laugh. It’s not out of the question. I will return to it shortly.

How not to start instigating: Three stories of mice at the table with hungry cats  (Continued)

Read entire Part II here

Read Part I here

Gary Brumback, Ph. D, wrote The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch. His website is uschamberofdemocracy.com

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Wall Street & High Gas Prices

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

My letter to the Editor in today’s Monterey County Herald:

So who’s to blame for the spike in gas prices? Their names should sound familiar. Among the major culprits are the same financial behemoths that caused the world economic meltdown four years ago. Speculation in the oil futures market by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, et al. has driven up the cost we pay at the pump.  According to Senator Bernie Sanders, Wall Street speculators controlled 30 percent of the oil futures market ten years ago, now they control over 80 percent. The Consumer Federation of America estimated the average household will spend an extra $600 a year due to speculation. You can thank both major political parties for the bank deregulation that made this possible and keeps it going.

Arlen Grossman

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The Split in the GOP

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

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War = Murder

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War

by Chris Hedges/ TruthDig/ March 19, 2012

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales, a U.S. Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in Afghanistan. We do not usually kill them outside the structure of a military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded scores of civilians after the ignition of an improvised explosive device against his convoy, it would not have made the news. Units do not stick around to count their “collateral damage.” But the Afghans know. They hate us for the murderous rampages. They hate us for our hypocrisy.

The scale of our state-sponsored murder is masked from public view. Reporters who travel with military units and become psychologically part of the team spin out what the public and their military handlers want, mythic tales of heroism and valor. War is seen only through the lens of the occupiers. It is defended as a national virtue. This myth allows us to make sense of mayhem and death. It justifies what is usually nothing more than gross human cruelty, brutality and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view the impotence and ordinariness of our leaders. But in turning history into myth we transform random events into a sequence of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march to nobility. But it is a lie. And it is a lie that combat veterans carry within them. It is why so many commit suicide.

“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote of his experience in World War II. “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.”

When Ernie Pyle, the famous World War II correspondent, was killed on the Pacific island of Ie Shima in 1945, a rough draft of a column was found on his body. He was preparing it for release upon the end of the war in Europe. He had done much to promote the myth of the warrior and the nobility of soldiering, but by the end he seemed to have tired of it all:

But there are many of the living who have burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.

There is a constant search in all wars to find new perversities, new forms of death when the initial flush fades, a rear-guard and finally futile effort to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why during the war in El Salvador the death squads and soldiers would cut off the genitals of those they killed and stuff them in the mouths of the corpses. This is why we reporters in Bosnia would find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated. This is why U.S. Marines have urinated on dead Taliban fighters. Those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. It happened in every war I covered.

“Force,” Simone Weil wrote, “is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.”

War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and finally physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us as human beings. In war, we deform ourselves, our essence. We give up individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for contagion of the crowd, the rush of patriotism, the belief that we must stand together as a nation in moments of extremity. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, can in the culture of war be self-destructive. The essence of war is death. Taste enough of war and you come to believe that the Stoics were right: We will, in the end, all consume ourselves in a vast conflagration.

A World War II study determined that, after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the remaining 2 percent was a predisposition toward having “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” notes: “It is not too far from the mark to observe that there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 percent of all men insane, and the other 2 percent were crazy when they go there.”  (Continued)

Read the entire article here

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The War Profiteers

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Arlen Grossman
Posted in economy, inequality, military, Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, war | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Is Good War an Oxymoron?

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

The Shifting Strategies of Empire

by David Swanson/ March24, 2012

Remarks at the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference:

President Obama this week declared the war on Iraq to be an honorable success that has given us a brighter future. Are you fired up? Ready to go?

Eric Holder this month explained that it’s legal for a president to kill anyone anywhere, or to imprison them, or to spy on them. I started to get upset about this, but then I remembered that Holder is a Democrat. That made me feel much better.

Leon Panetta told Congress this month that a president can launch a war without Congress and without the United Nations and without any legal restrictions, that a NATO decision to go to war makes a war legal, that a decision by an ad hoc coalition to go to war makes a war legal, and that in fact there’s no way for a war launched by a U.S. president not to be legal. At first this sounded like a dangerous doctrine, until I remembered that the president is not a Republican, and no Republican is going to be president for at least several months. So, there’s nothing to worry about.

Hillary Clinton this week said that we couldn’t end the war on Afghanistan without first protecting women’s rights. Already we’ve set up a government that endorses wife-beating. Perhaps when it mandates invasive ultrasounds we’ll be able to leave with honor.

In the past three years, largely in the absence of a peace movement, we’ve seen military spending rise. We’ve seen drone wars burst onto the scene in a major way. We’ve seen murder become the new torture. We’ve seen wars launched without even bothering to lie to Congress, and in fact with the intentional avoidance of any Congressional authorization. We’ve seen Special Forces active in over 100 countries. We’ve seen a massive escalation of the war on Afghanistan. We’ve seen bases imposed on more countries. We’ve seen an intense effort to surround China, and the people of Okinawa be damned, the people of Jeju Island be damned. We’re sending the Marines into Australia. We’re ruining Vicenza, Italy. We’re weaponizing space.

And we’re being told that the wars must continue so that our troops, dying more from suicide than anything else, will not have been killing themselves in vain. We’re told that more wars are needed as generous humanitarian philanthropy. We must bomb more nations because we care. We must have good wars instead of bad wars. We must send a brutal cop to lead the oppression of the nonviolent people of Bahrain, but send weapons to help the people of Syria because we love them — or — as John McCain recently put it, overthrowing the Syrian government would be a blow to Iran, which also needs to be overthrown.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of calling the war department the defense department. I’ve had enough of war criminals going on book tour instead of trial. I’ve had enough of asking the wars to follow the rules of wars, like asking rapists to wear condoms. I’ve had enough of calling by the name “service” anything a member of the so-called service does other than resistance and conscientious objection. I’ve had enough of being told I should be outraged by urination on corpses. I’m outraged by the murder that produces the corpses. I’ve had enough of being told the environmental crisis is separate from the single biggest destroyer of our natural environment which must be patriotically supported. I’ve had enough of efforts to protect civil liberties, jobs, education, healthcare, retirement, the rule of law, and basic human decency without taking on the monstrosity that means death to all of the above, namely the military industrial complex. It’s a trillion-dollar banker bailout every year that we never get back.

Belief in humanitarian war keeps the dollars flowing into the beast that produces all the actual wars, the non-humanitarian wars, the murderous wars. We don’t distinguish between good and bad rape, just and unjust slavery. When our great-great grandparents outgrew dueling as a means of settling individual disputes, they didn’t ban aggressive dueling and keep defensive dueling around. When a movement to abolish war grew up at the turn of the last century, and then World War I convinced virtually everybody that the time to abolish war had come, a lawyer in Chicago named Samuel Oliver Levinson (Yale class of 1888) got his friends together and created an international movement for Outlawry, a movement to outlaw war. By 1928, the wealthy armed nations of the world, and some of the poorer nations too, had signed a treaty banning all war. Recognition of gains made through war ceased. Some wars were prevented. World War II was followed by trials for the brand new crime of war. And the rich nations have not made war on each other since. They just make war on poor countries.

And they lose. And they destroy themselves in the process. And the nobility and courage and sacrifice and solidarity that used to be found, or at least sought, in war, is now found in nonviolent activism, in the Arab Spring, in Wisconsin, in Occupy. In Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., this past fall, the police gave us a deadline to leave. We threw a dance party instead. And the police came back with a new offer. We could stay and they’d give us a permit for the next four months. In those moments it is possible to see people come to believe they have the power to end war. We’re back in DC starting March 30th. This May we need to be in Chicago when NATO is there. Our grandparents in the 1920s rejected the League of Nations and other alliances as the sort of entanglement that had led to World War I. NATO is just such an entanglement, a solution to war that facilitates war. We need to go to Chicago in the name of S.O. Levinson, the Chicago activist who decided that war could not be ended with the threat of war, that war could only be ended by ending war. In 1927 a Republican Secretary of State was cursing peace activists. In 1928 he was doing exactly what they told him to do, organizing the nations of the world, including Persia, to formally renounce war. That happened because a small group of people made a moral case against mass murder and persuaded the rest of the country that war was good for absolutely nothing.

DavidSwanson.org

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Video: The Real Mitt Romney

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Arlen Grossman
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The Difference Between NEWS and Not-News

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

NEWS:  HEADLINES YOU’LL SEE IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA

Not-News-– Headlines You Probably Won’t

by Arlen Grossman

NEWS: REPUBLICANS ATTACK OBAMA HEALTH CARE PLAN AS SOCIALISM

Not-News: 50,000 Americans Without Health Insurance, 18,000 Americans Die From Lack of It

NEWS: U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE DROPS BELOW 9 PERCENT

Not-News: Real Unemployment Rate, Including Discouraged and Underemployed Workers, Over 22 Percent

NEWS: TRADE DEAL BETWEEN SOUTH KOREA, U.S. TAKES EFFECT 

Not-News: Due Largely to Free Trade,  50,000 U.S. Factories and 5 Million Manufacturing Jobs Lost in Last Ten Years.

NEWS: GATES, BUFFETT AGAIN TOP LIST OF RICHEST AMERICANS

Not-News: 37 Percent of Families With Young Children Living in Poverty

NEWS: BANKS DROPPING FREE CHECKING, INCREASING FEES

Not-News: Assets of Six Largest Banks Total $9.4 Trillion Dollars, Equal to 65% of  U.S. GDP

NEWS: IRAN MAY BE BUILDING FIRST NUCLEAR WEAPON, CANDIDATES TALK OF DIRE THREAT TO WORLD PEACE 

Not-News: U.S. and Russia Each Have At Least 8,000 Nuclear Weapons, Seven Other Nations Have Hundreds More

NEWS: U.S. HAS NO DESIRE TO BE WORLD’S POLICEMAN, OBAMA DECLARES

Not-News: U.S. Military Empire: About One Thousand Military Bases in Over One Hundred Countries

NEWS: CONGRESS SUPPORTS NEW WEAPONS SYSTEMS FOR PENTAGON

Not-News: Average U.S. Household’s Share of the National Debt Is $128,830

NEWS: RECORD SPENDING ON POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS PREDICTED FOR 2012

Not-News:  D.C. Lobbyists Spending Over $3 Billion Annually to Politicians Who Do Their Bidding

NEWS: REPUBLICANS DRAW LINE IN SAND, NO TAX CUTS FOR WEALTHY 

Not-News:  Student Debt Rises to $1 Trillion – More Than Total US Credit Card Debt.

NEWS: AMERICANS RUSH TO MEET TAX FILING DEADLINE 

Not-News: Thirty Big Corporations Spent More Money Lobbying the Federal Government Than They Paid in Taxes

NEWS: BANKS AGREE TO $26 BILLION COURT SETTLEMENT TO HELP HOMEOWNERS HURT IN MORTGAGE CRISIS 

Not-News: Audit Reveals Federal Reserve Secretly Gave American and Foreign Banks $16 Trillion Of Interest-Free Bailout Money

NEWS: PRICE OF GAS COULD RISE TO $5 PER GALLON BY SUMMER 

Not-News: Oil Futures Speculation, Mostly by Wall Street Traders, Estimated to Add About 40 Percent to Gas Prices

NEWS: ARRESTS FOR POT EXPECTED TO TOP 800,000 THIS YEAR

Not-News: Wall Street CEOs Arrested For 2008 Financial Meltdown: Zero

PUBLISHED IN OPEDNEWS.COM 03/24/2012
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BPR Quote of the Day: Great Moment in History?

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

“I think what happened yesterday is going to go down as the single most important event in government history in our lifetimes, and that is when Paul Ryan came out with his budget plan.”

 Fox News TV anchor Bill Hemmer on Fox News Radio’s Kilmeade & Friends, March 21

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