Obama Warns about Threat to Our Democracy

I have been writing about the Supreme Court decision since it was decided last January. Five activist justices ruled that corporations with their unrivaled wealth can spend all they like to defeat or elect candidates of their choosing. As our president says- this a a threat to democracy itself.
    CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE!        MONEY IS NOT SPEECH!

Thousands of Americans Rally for Religious Freedom

2,000 attended a candlelight vigil for religious freedom 9/10   DNAinfo

9/11 Rally against Racism and Islamic Bigotry      photo: Shirley Warren

A Rally for Tolerance                                       Photo: Shirley Warren

                 
Two thousand came out September 10 for an interfaith candlelight vigil in support of the Muslim community center project in New York City. The next day, on 9/11 thousands more marched peacefully in an Emergency Mobilization against Racism and Anti-Islamic Bigotry. Where was the news coverage? When a fraction of that number of Tea Partiers show up for an anti-mosque rally, the mainstream media is all over it.

The New York Times did quote one young man who attended both  rallies for religious freedom. He spoke of his friends who have been wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and said he found it offensive that, on one hand we ask young people to fight in Muslim countries for their freedom, "but peaceful Muslims can't build a community center in New York City in their own country."


Contrast this with the "No Mosque" and "USA" chants from a rally a few blocks away on 9/11. When Muslims were mentioned there, there were shouts of "kill them all". Geert Wilders, who has likened the Koran to "Mein Kampf" and wants it banned in the Netherlands, was one of the speakers at that rally.

So although there is a rising tide of anti-Islamic speech and actions around our country (the stabbing of a Muslim taxi driver, the destruction and desecration of mosques, the hate speech) there is also a rising up of ordinary Americans who are standing in solidarity with Muslims and speaking out against racism and religious intolerance. Leaders of three dozen mainstream US religious denominations recently said, "We stand by the principle that to attack any religion in the US is to do violence to the religious freedom of all Americans."

Feisal Abdul Kauf, the coordinator of the Muslim community center project, was Bush's "go to guy" to represent moderate Islam after 9/11. He has a 37 year history of countering radical ideology. In a recent Op Ed in the New York Times he spoke of wanting to cultivate understanding among all religions and cultures. The center would have separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians and Jews. He said he saw it as a "center for unification and healing." And just for the record, the mosque will not be "looming up from the ashes of Ground Zero" but will be two city blocks away and will not even be able to be seen from the World Trade Center property.


Voices of reason, compassion and tolerance are needed now more than ever. Voices like Pastor Steve Stone, who when he heard a mosque was being built next to his Heartsong Church rushed out to erect a banner- and this is what it said:

                                                   screengrab from MSNBC's "Countdown"

That is the America I know.





 

Stand for Religous Freedom and against Intolerance!

PLEDGE:
We are proud to live in the United States, a country founded on constitutional principles of tolerance and religious freedom.

We affirm America's commitment to these principles.

We condemn bigotry and intolerance by any and all, especially those who murder others in the false name of their religion.

We condemn the act of burning the Koran, a sacred text for millions of Americans and others around the world, as we would condemn the burning of all sacred texts.

We pledge to remember Americans and others from around the world, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths, who were murdered on September 11, 2001, American service men and women of all faiths who have lost their lives in the wars since then, and innocent civilians, of all faiths, who have died in those wars, and to honor their sacrifice by reaffirming our commitment to the principles of tolerance and religious freedom.

We encourage all to light a candle on the evenings of September 10 and 11 in memoriam and in reaffirmation of these principles. 

SIGN THE PLEDGE AT:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/632/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4685
 

Rich's Op Ed in NY Times

Op-Ed Columnist

Freedom’s Just Another Word

Barry Blitt

by Frank Rich
Published: Sept 4, 2010

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.

This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own.

That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction — one heretofore shared only by the BP oil spill — was hardly justified by his tepid pronouncements of progress (“credible elections that drew a strong turnout”) or his tidy homilies about the war’s impact. “Our unity at home was tested,” he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to 50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.

Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq’s “example of freedom,” as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was supposed to help relieve.

For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans and some 100,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were wounded, and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation’s most valuable human capital, went into exile. The war’s official cost to U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion.

Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded: “The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.”

Bacevich also wrote that “common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.” Americans’ common future demands it too. The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.

We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.

Our attitude toward the war’s human cost was no less cavalier. We were all too content to let a volunteer army fight our battles out of sight and out of mind, on a fictional pretext yoked to a military strategy premised on a cakewalk. For too long we looked the other way as the coffins arrived in Dover off camera in the shroud of night, as the maimed endured inhumane treatment in military hospitals at home, and as the Iraqi refugees who aided Operation Iraqi Freedom at their own peril were denied the freedom to seek a safe haven in our country.

Both President Obama and Glenn Beck, in his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington last weekend, were fulsome in their praise of the troops, as well they should have been. But the disconnect between the civilian public, including the war’s die-hard advocates on the right, and those doing the fighting remains as large today as ever. As one Iraq war vet e-mailed to me after hearing Beck’s patriotic sermons: “What does gathering in D.C. do for the troops?” He was appalled at the self-regard of those who thought their jingoistic rally would help returning troops abandoned by the military’s “criminally poor mental health care” or save any soldier who was “two seconds away from getting his leg blown off by an I.E.D.”

The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds. Many pundits, quite a few of them liberals, stoked the war fever as well. Some eventually acknowledged getting it wrong, though in most cases they stopped short of apologizing for their failures of judgment and their abdication of journalistic skepticism about the government’s case for war.

Even now those think-tank types who kept seeing light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel are ubiquitous on television and op-ed pages making similar stay-the-course prognostications about Afghanistan. Their embarrassing track records may have temporarily vanished into the great American memory hole, but actions do have consequences, and there must be an accounting. America does have a soul, and, as Franzen so powerfully dramatizes in “Freedom,” when that soul is violated, we are paralyzed until we set it right.
And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama’s speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq’s leaders “move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative and accountable.” He might as well have been talking about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.

Stewart Nails Fox!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Parent Company Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Terrific "Target Ain't People" Video!

This action was in response to Target donating $150,000 to a far right, gay-bashing candidate. Sign the petition to boycott Target. This is the beginning of corporations swamping our political landscape to defeat or elect candidates of their choosing. Sign the Fight Washington Corruption pledge to restore democracy to the people! Here are 10 great reasons why you should! (Thanks to MoveOn.org!)

10 Outrageous Reasons to Fight Corruption in Washington

What Happens When Corporate Influence Goes Unchecked:

1. Exxon Mobil made billions in profits, and yet paid not one dime in federal income taxes in 2009.
2. The 2005 energy bill had a little-known provision, commonly called the Halliburton Loophole, which exempted natural gas drilling from the Clean Water Act. The result? Water so contaminated that you can light it on fire.
3. Massey Energy was cited more than 2400 times for safety violations in its mines, but chose not to fix potentially lethal problems because low penalties made it cheaper to simply keep paying the fines. This spring, 29 miners were killed in an underground explosion at a Massey mine in West Virginia.
4. Michael Taylor was the FDA official who approved the use of Monsanto's Bovine Growth Hormone in dairy cows (even though it's banned in most countries and linked to cancer). After approving it, he left the FDA—to work for Monsanto. Until last year, when he moved back to the government—as President Obama's "Food Safety Czar." No joke.
5. Internal Toyota documents outline how the company was successful in limiting regulator actions in the recalls last year—saving hundreds of millions while the death toll continued to climb.
6. GE and its lobbyists—including 33 former government employees—have successfully lobbied Congress to override Defense Department requests to cancel a GE contract to work on a new engine for the Joint Strike Fighter jet. GE will need $2.9 billion to finish the project.
7. Top executives at 9 big banks including Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley paid themselves over $20 billion in bonuses just weeks after taxpayers bailed them out to the tune of $700 billion.
8. During the waning days of the Bush administration, officials responded to a long-term lobbying campaign by pre-empting product liability lawsuits for dozens of entire industries. They bypassed Congress entirely and rewrote rules ranging from seatbelt manufacturing regulations to prescription drug safety.
9. Sunscreen manufacturers including Johnson & Johnson and Schering-Plough, in the interest of profits, are opposing an FDA proposal requiring full reporting on sunscreen labels. The New York Times just confirmed that current SPF ratings don't even measure sun rays that cause cancer.
10. And of course BP—a company with a record of 760 drilling-safety and environmental violations—was granted safety waivers in order to operate the deepwater drilling rig that ultimately created the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Sources: http://s3.moveon.org/pdfs/top10outragesources.pdf

Hinchey Signs the Pledge!

Good news. Congressman Hinchey agreed to sign the "Fight Washington Corruption" pledge last Friday. We are grateful to him for that and for his work to overturn Citizens United and for fair, clean elections! Call his office and thank him! We also need to call Senators Gillibrand (518 431-0120) and Schumer (914 734-1532) to make sure they join the dozens of elected officials signing the pledge. Almost half million Americans have also signed. Sign here if you haven't yet!

Here are a couple more photos from our rally last week. Look for an article on it and this new national movement in this week's New Paltz Times!

Bob Lusk and Gene Cotton lifted our spirits in song!  M. Kretschmar

New Paltz Rally to Fight Washington Corruption!

Thanks to All Who Came to the New Paltz Rally Aug 10!

Thousands of people across the country took to the streets yesterday to protest the corruption and domination of multinational corporations in our government. Approximately 50 citizens attended the rally in New Paltz, NY, organized by the Ulster County MoveOn Council.


It was a spirited gathering with local musicians Bob Lusk and Gene Cotton providing music while people held signs demanding the overturn of Citizens United (the Supreme Court ruling that will allow corporations to buy our elections) and demanding passage of the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA)- so that grassroots candidates can compete against corporate backed/wealthy ones. Most there agreed that the overwhelming influence of corporate lobbyists, who push for more and more deregulation and higher profits at any cost are hurting hard working American families, our environment and the future of our nation.


Until we can restore the electoral and legislative processes to the people, we will have little chance of passing any meaningful reform- be it in healthcare, reining in Wall Street, clean energy, corporate accountability, or in putting an end to "endless war".

Participants were encouraged to call Congressman Hinchey's office- 845 331-4466 to ask him to sign the Fight Washington Corruption Pledge. It was noted that he has taken a leadership role in co-sponsoring legislation to overturn Citizens United and Fair Elections, for which he should be thanked. Now we just need him to join the many others, including Scott Murphy and Paul Tonko, representatives from the Albany area, in signing the pledge.


A new poll shows a majority of Americans agree with us. Seventy-nine percent (including 72% of Republicans and 75% of Independents) said it was important that candidates commit to reducing the influence of corporations over elections. A whopping 89% want to reduce lobbyists' influence over the way laws are written and 67% are more likely to vote for candidates who support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!

Please make sure you sign the pledge yourself! And stay tuned for next steps to make our elected officials answer to us, the voters- not to the moneyed special interests!

                                        

National Movement to End Corproate Abuse of Power!

Please join us to kick off the biggest (and most important) MoveOn initiative ever planned. Go to MoveOn to find a rally near you (or start your own!) If you live in the MidHudson Valley come to the rally in New Paltz -

Fight Washington Corruption and Rein in Corporate Abuse
Tuesday, August 10 - 5PM
In front of Elting Library -  93 Main St, New Paltz, NY
(Bring signs- some will be available. Bring musical instruments if you have them!)
Sign up here

Multinational corporations are dominating our politics, destroying the earth, decimating our economy and threatening democracy at an alarming rate. From the despicable actions of the profiteering insurance companies and Wall Street, to BP and Halliburton (whose latest crime is injecting dangerous chemicals deep into the earth where they leach into the watertable in fracking) - corporations are out of control. The middle class, the poor and the earth are being sacrificed at the altar of the big corporations' insatiable greed.

We need a massive groundswell of community support to rid our democracy of corporate corruption. We are asking elected representatives to sign the Other 98% "Fight Washington Corruption" pledge which has three planks.

1. Amend the constitution to overturn Citizens United v FEC that gives corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts from their vast treasuries to defeat or elect candidates of their choosing. This disastrous ruling overturns a century of law and will result in a tsunami of corporate cash that will swamp our political landscape and drown out the voices of the people. The president has called it  "A strike on democracy itself."

2. Pass the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA) that would provide voluntary public matching funds so that non-wealthy citizens can also run for office and if elected be accountable to us the voters rather than to corporate special interests. There are currently 150 cosponsors of FENA, HR 1826.

3. Pass Lobbying reform! The current system with the revolving door between Congress and K St is unworkable and corrupt. Thousands of lobbyists swarm the Capitol's hallways everyday. We are telling Congress to listen to us- the Other 98% who do not have lobbyists!

We are asking Congressman Hinchey to sign onto this pledge. Please call his office to ask him to too - 845 331-4466. As the congressman already has taken a leadership role in overturning Citizens United and is a co-sponsor of FENA we expect and hope he will have no problem signing. But for elected officials who will not sign - citizens will make this known through meetings, media, emails and any other way they can. It is time for politicians to come clean- are you on the side of special interests or the people?

This rally is being organized by Linda Abbott and Barbara Upton of the Ulster County MoveOn Council. Please come August 10, sign the petition and be a part of the movement to restore democracy to the people!

                                   "This Is What Democracy Looks Like!"

Portrait of a Tragic and Failed War

Most of us didn't need the Wikileaks "War Logs" to know that the war in Afghanistan is a disaster on every level. As the leaked documents show there have been hundreds of civilian casualties that have gone unreported. Like the time we dropped six, two thousand pound bombs on a compound where we thought a "high-value individual" was hiding- but ended up killing 300 civilians instead, or the machine-gunning of buses, yes, even a school bus, resulting in injury and death. We lost the hearts and minds of the Afghan people years ago.

We also learned that the US covered up news of the Taliban's use of heat-seeking missiles (the ones they used to defeat the Soviets in the 80's) and our use of psyops to plant news friendly to coalition forces in the Afghan media. We did the same in Iraq and it was a major embarrassment when that was disclosed. What are the Afghan people going to believe- US propaganda or the carnage all around them?

Over 1,200 US troops have lost their lives there and nearly 7,000 have been wounded. 2010 is on pace for being the bloodiest year yet with 126 young Americans being killed in June and July. And for what? To support a corrupt government that does not have the support of the people? To destroy Al Qaeda that has moved on to other countries? To help our "ally" Pakistan- which we find has been providing support to the insurgency killing our troops? To wipe out the Taliban (which is said to be stronger than at any time since 2001 in spite of our loss of blood and treasure)?

Even the generals tell us there is no military solution in Afghanistan, but we continue to spend 90% of allocations on death and destruction instead of development, aid and peacekeeping. Drone attacks are surging and Petraeus tells the troops to "fight hard" but "to be a good guest". Really? Is that something like "We had to destroy the village to save it?" Another strike recently killed 50 civilians causing a village elder to ask "Have you come here to protect us or kill us?"

Petraeus has also said our stay there will be "an enduring one". Not if the American people start tuning into what is really happening in Afghanistan and demand an end to this misbegotten war.

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!

BP's Ugly Past and Present

                                      Visualizing the BP Disaster as
IfItWasMyHome.com Thanks to this site for bringing home the reality of the enormity of this disaster.

Almost three months after the explosion that left 11 dead and resulted in the worst environmental catastrophe in our nation's history, BP has capped the gusher that has spewed over 200 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. But don't break out the party hats any time soon- no one really knows what the effect all that oil will have on this fragile marine ecosystem AND there are signs that oil and gas could be coming up now through the seabed floor. The government is worried. They have asked BP to monitor the situation carefully, but the news is BP is already ignoring the warning signs.http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/03/nation/la-na-oil-spill-20100803

The use of Corexit is also an unprecedented environmental experiment. In the trade it is known as Hides It- because that is all it does- break oil into little globules so it is less visible on the ocean surface. Its main ingredient is a neurotoxin pesticide four times more toxic to human and aquatic life than oil. In the beginning government officials asked BP not to use it, but again BP listens to no one. Over 2 million gallons of Corexit have been dumped in the Gulf. BP writes their own rules, not to mention their own faked safety reports.

Here is just a small sampling of their criminal behavior-

• BP had 760 citations for "egregious, willful and flagrant violations" of OSHA's rules over a three year period. In comparison Exxon Mobil had 1citation and Citgo had 2 over the same period.
• They were fined $108 million for willful negligence that resulted in the deaths of 15 workers and injured 170 more at the Texas refinery in 2005.
• BP had to pay $363 million in penalties and settlements for price gouging US consumers
• Fined $20 million for ignoring leaks in the Alaska pipeline. 

Speaking of the Alaska pipeline you may have missed that a BP leak there in May released 100,000 gallons of oil. State inspectors said "procedures were not properly implemented". In the past when a whistle blower complained of conditions at the Alaskan pipe's tanker facility BP's CEO of Alaskan operations got right to work. Fixing the deplorable conditions? No, no. The BP executive hired a former CIA expert who broke into the whistle blower's home. His phone was tapped and they ran a smear campaign against him. A US federal judge called BP's actions "reminiscent of Nazi Germany."

The video below from WKRG in Mobile, Alabama took water and sand samples from beaches that people were told are safe. The amount of oil should be no more than 5 ppm (parts per million). Oil is toxic at 11ppm. The water that tested the highest came out of a hole a little kid was digging in the sand. It was 221 ppm. Even more ominous, one of the beakers exploded in the lab indicating high levels of  methanol or methane gas in the water.



There seems no end to the damning evidence against BP- like the allegation that emerged recently that they helped to free a terrorist who was the mastermind of the Lockerbee bombing to get their hands on Libyan oil. But what can we expect from a company that has its roots in the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in a sovereign nation? I'm referring to BP's beginnings as the Anglo Iranian Oil Company in 1928. British personnel lived lives of luxury while Iranian laborers were paid 50 cents a day and lived in squalor in a shanty town with no water or electricity The company was to pay Iran just 16% from selling that country's oil, but they never let anyone audit the books, so it was probably much less. By the 1950's Iran's prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq tried to nationalize the oil company so that his country could benefit from their own resources. Eisenhower's Sec of State Foster Dulles, a lawyer for multinational corporations viewed this as a dangerous example, so our CIA intervened. Mossadeq was overthrown and the US friendly Shah (with his dreaded SAVAK secret police) was installed. This brought about the rise of Islamic extremists who took over the country in the 1979 revolution.

If BP is a person like the Supreme Court Five insist then it is a psychopath.

The neo-con mantra of "deregulate and allow the free markets to take care of all" is now exposed as the sham it always was.  BP is all about greed and it is the people and marine and coastal life that are left paying dearly.