Ryan Ruminates

In my last day visiting home (before I drank way too much which lead to me now feeling like throwing up all over the airport floor) the wife and I saw a play- Rock and Roll Revolution. While I thought it a fine piece of performance with a great soundtrack, it made me a bit depressed; I can’t help but feel that things will probably never change too much and that all theories for a better society get lost somewhere in the translation from theory to reality. I’m pretty sure democracy is not supposed to be the two-party system we are stuck with today; the only person even talking about running on a “third” party ticket is Michael Bloomberg who is as much an independent as Joe Lieberman claims to be. Glenn Greenwald calls him Rudy Giuliani with a couple billion dollars to spend, and it’s true- the guy is a business man, which is something we definitely do not need more of in the White House.

                Not only is our party system completely off the wall, but the way a nominee gets chosen is also a little bit on the strange side. In the race to be the Democratic nominee there is a virtual tie between Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. As the Anonymous Liberal points out in his blog today, whoever wins in Iowa will likely get a giant bump in their numbers and go on to win the nomination. The Democrats will decide who represents our country for the next 4 to 8 years simply by what a small percentage of people in a pretty small state say; eleven months before the actual elections. The nominee will be pretty much decided approximately eight months before this years Democrat Nation Convention in Denver. What is the point of having a convention if a candidate is already chosen? They might as well just give me the millions they will spend on renting out the center, paying police and security, advertising, accommodations, and so on and I’ll throw them all a party for much cheaper.

                Things in Pakistan have taken a strange turn, as the son of Benazir Bhutto has been chosen to take over the Pakistan People’s Party, formerly run by Ms. Bhutto. The kid is 19, has spent hardly any time in Pakistan (he was raised mostly in Dubai and is currently in school at Oxford) and has no political experience. Does this make him any less able to fulfill the duties than any of the candidates we have running in the United States? I think not. He is being used mostly for his name anyway, and chances are that even if his party comes to power he will finish his degree before taking over. Elections are still scheduled to go on as planned – on January 8^th – and I am very interested to see what is going to happen.

There is not much going on in the world of blogs today; I guess people have decided to take their New Years vacation a day or so early. Chris Floyd’s entire blog is just one long quote from an essay by John Pilger about the state of the UK. Although he talks greatly about the freedoms being lost by the Brits and in inequality of the money division in that country, almost everything he says can be applied to the citizens of the United States. Pilger references an interview he did during the Cold War with a Czechoslovakian dissident writer who said that complacency and silence can destroy freedom just as quickly and surely as tanks and guns. The only reason governments like ours and the one in the UK are not using tanks and guns on their own people are because we aren’t giving them a reason. After the riots, protests, and civil unrest in the previous generations, they have found a way to fight us without even firing a shot. The rich have become richer, the lower and middle classes have this false Bill Gates fantasy swimming through their heads, newspapers and magazines are owned by their advertisers, and TV has become saturated with ad’s for pills that make you forget what a fucked up world we’re living in. The more “civilized” we become, the more we accept being ruled by people who don’t give a rat’s ass about our best interests.

                It appears that one of the main reasons the CIA destroyed the torture tapes was the same reason why they started taping in the first place- paranoia. It seems that they started taping the interrogations because they wanted proof that they weren’t torturing the suspects too harshly, but then after the whole Abu Ghraib scandal, they decided that maybe the public didn’t need to see what was really going on. Once they stopped recording the torture, they took all the old tapes and hid them in some secret overseas warehouse or something that not even the president knew about. They then started to get paranoid about the tapes getting out, worrying about the safety of the interrogators if their faces were shown throughout the world waterboarding someone. I’ve watched TV shows where they’ve interviewed people whose faces couldn’t be shown in public for whatever security reason, and they simply blacked out the faces- why couldn’t the CIA do that? Certain CIA members also pretty much admit that waterboarding is torture and torture is wrong, but they were told to do it by the higher-ups and they had no choice. When SS guards were caught and brought to trial for putting innocent human beings into gas chambers, they had the exact same excuse. It wasn’t acceptable then and it’s not acceptable now. If one of the hijackers who flew into the WTC somehow survived, was apprehended, and said the reason he killed thousands of USians was because he was “following orders”, would the CIA just let him go? It’s time for a major shakeup.

                Bin Laden is the perfect example of how lazy and ignorant we choose to be. The US government gives his group weapons, he attacks their country a few years later, the US attacks a couple countries where he isn’t, choosing not to go after him; he releases tapes, the US government uses those tapes as reasons why their presence is still needed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention Al Qaeda was nowhere near as big as it was before the US started this global “War on Terror”. Al Qaeda was not in Iraq, then – after troops are sent in – they spring up there, then the US kills a few of their members and calls it a victory. It’s the same thing they do with the gas prices; a gallon of regular will be $2.80 and we will accept it, suddenly it shoots up to $3.10 and everyone is outraged. Right when it seems that people might actually start driving a little less or buying smaller cars, prices get lowered 10cents in one day and people are happy, not realizing that it’s still 20cents higher than it was just a short time ago. The US completely destroys Iraq, then sends in even more people, makes it a little better than it was before the surge and people are proud of the “progress”.

                With all this attention on Iraq, most people have completely forgotten about the beating the US and its allies have been putting on Afghanistan. This video is a small reminder about the blood we all have on our hands. A quarter of all Afghani children die before their fifth birthday- can you imagine if that was the case in the United States? Imagine if it was happening because of foreign occupiers? Would we just sit around and accept it, thanking the murderers for giving us freedom and democracy? I think not. If anyone can look at these children or in the eyes of the parents and not feel sick about what is being done with our tax dollars, they have serious mental problems. What if we took 1/10^th of the money we’re spending on the war and defense and instead used it to build schools and hospitals and buildings for these people? I bet not as many people would hate our country.

I wonder if any country in the history of the written word has ever had a reliably honest media. I understand that the US probably has more newspapers and magazines committed to honest reporting than most (and maybe all other) countries, but that does not change the fact that the papers sold at newsstands and read by the majority of people are almost all complete bullshit. The fact that the nutty right wing propagandists call the NY Times a liberal rag is proof that we are being fed what the people in charge want us to be fed. Bill Kristol is an example of a batty pundit who has been preaching war for as long as he has been getting published. I saw him on the Daily Show once and after the interview, I was left with the feeling that he is thoroughly insane. He wrote an article before the war saying that the Democrats, France, and the UN will be proven wrong when the US discovers WMD and makes the rest of the Middle East bow down. It has been almost five years since that article and he still has not admitted he was wrong. Instead he continues to squawk that there are WMD and we had the right to go in there and the Middle East is a better and more democratic place because of it. How is he rewarded for being a mouthpiece for the administration? He is very close to getting a job at the NY Times; what a surprise.

                As I’ve said before, we can choose what we read and whom we obey; we can put a stop to this entire system simply by ending our obedience. However, in order for something like this to happen it obviously has to be on a very large scale, and the difficulty I’ve been struggling with is how to organize that many people. One possible way is for individuals and small groups to go and commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action and hope that people will take notice and follow (even though most of the acts get little to no coverage in the mainstream media). An example of this is John Nirenberg who is currently in the middle of walking from Boston to Washington DC in order to meet with Nancy Pelosi and demand the impeachment of Dick Cheney and George W Bush. Most people would not do this because they would view it as pointless, and that may be right, but what if it isn’t? When Cindy Sheehan camped near Bush’s ranch, people probably told her she was crazy because no one person can make a difference. A few days later some media began to show up which caused more people to join her which lead to more media; and so on and so forth until she became a household name with a few books under her belt. I’m sure most people never even hear of ninety-nine out of one hundred Nirenbergs or Sheehans, but how many people end up getting involved because of that one that we do hear of? If you ask me, it’s worth it and eventually when the numbers start getting big enough, the media has no choice but to report on it.

                I have a lot of views about life and the way we should be allowed to live it, but I’m not always very good at expressing myself. Sometimes I go on rants and often times I say things that don’t make too much sense, but I’m getting better. Today I read an essay by David Green that pretty much sums up how I feel. While he doesn’t give any resolutions – and instead just complains for a couple pages – he lays out all his beef with the past seven years of Bush rule, and he does it very simply and thought provokingly. Hopefully there’s a part two to it because it isn’t enough to just point out all the things that are wrong, there have to be solutions offered as well.

                Things could get interesting over the Iraq spending bill. Silent until right when he was about to sign the funding bill into law, Bush suddenly decided that he did not like part of the bill and plans to veto it. That’s not the interesting part though, the interesting part concerns something that got less than a paragraph in the liberal rag it appeared in- the fact that Bush is choosing to give the bill a pocket veto. Instead of saying no, which is what a normal veto does, he will choose to ignore the bill for ten days at which point it will become inactive. The difference between this and a normal veto is that this cannot be overruled by a 2/3-majority vote. This only works when Congress is not in session because  the bill would become law after ten days. It gets interesting because Congress has been gaveling in and out – holding 1 to 3 minute sessions – for the past week in order to prevent Bush from sneakily assigning recess appointments. After the ten days goes by, the White House will claim that the bill has been vetoed while Congress can claim that the bill has become law. If the Democrats have anything left of their spine, this could get very ugly. For more on what a pocket veto is, check out the source for all information- wikipedia.

                The close US ally of Pakistan is quickly falling apart as riots are going on all over the already fragile country. Although things like this (a country supported by the US exploding in violence) should not surprise me anymore, seeing soldiers kill their fellow countrymen always makes me sick. Countries fighting against other countries does not make too much sense to me, but for some reason it’s always less shocking than seeing people kill people that look like them and speak the same language. I wonder what is going through a soldiers mind as he fires indiscriminately into a crowd of his own people who are gathered simply to voice their outrage at the direction their shared country is headed. How does he or she sleep at night with the knowledge that the bullet fired out of his or her gun could have killed a neighbor or grade school friend? My thoughts are with the opposition over there and I hope they continue to take to the streets and demand freedom- eventually the soldiers will tire out and see the inhumanity of it all.

What will you use to decide whom you vote for? Will it be foreign policy, social issues, or will you just vote along party lines? Glenn Greenwald, in one of the shortest blogs I’ve ever read by him, cites a Peggy Noonan article in which she claims we need an adult for president. I guess it’s pretty hard to argue with that, since none of us want a fourteen-year-old kid running the world, but what are the qualifiers for being considered an adult? Well, according to Noonan, the reason why John Edwards is not an adult – and can therefore never be considered for president – is because a camera caught him fixing his hair before a debate four years ago. I don’t know if she thinks we need a bald president or just someone who doesn’t care about personal grooming, but Greenwald seems to think it goes farther. He says that her wording, “John Edwards is not reasonable. . . . .[W]e can’t have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair”  implies that she is really referring to his rumored homosexuality. Apparently ‘poofing’ is a British word for gay person. So- he’s gay, Obama is a Black Muslim terrorist, and Clinton is really a man who would let her husband cheat on her and therefore let the crazy Muslims take over the US; thank whatever that the Republicans have some hard-hitting, intelligent, sincere candidates.

                Maybe there is hope yet; a bunch of prominent lawyers (1,300 from around the US) have gotten together to sign a petition directed at congress telling them to do their job and investigate the CIA torture tape destruction for real and not just go through the motions. This may not seem like much, but when groups like lawyers start to unite and work together, that’s when things have a great potential to change. When workers see that these upper class people are uniting, then they start to believe and maybe begin to organize themselves. We need the ‘brainy’ section of society – doctors, lawyers, and other intellectuals – to do the planning and writing while the workers put a stop to everything. We walk around thinking that the billionaire corporation owners control everything, which is true, but only because we let it be true. With a snap of the fingers, it could suddenly be the workers who become the lifelines of our society. If the owners suddenly disappeared, things would go on the same or better, but if all the workers decided not to go to work – even for one day – there would be a lot of consequences. Maybe this will lead to something… or maybe this will be the only thing we read about it.

                If there is any place in the United States that is ready for change, ready for something to start, it is New Orleans. The protests that have been going on over the planned destruction of the affordable housing are truly amazing. They are all self-organized, have people from all walks of life (from lawyers to homeless people), and the best part is that the police, SWAT teams, and other local law enforcement (keep an eye out for Blackwater) are beginning to get violent which means they know their power is shrinking. The lawyers can do things like draw up proposals and actually get meetings with city officials while the workers can refuse to go to work, refuse to pay taxes, and take all their money out of the local banks. They can all use nonviolence – continue to protest and get sprayed and tasered while the world begins to pay more and more attention, chain themselves to bulldozers, whatever it takes – to win this battle; which could end up being a catalyst for much more. The rest of us should take notice also; as Martin Luther King Jr and this article (without giving credit to MLK) said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Anyone with money and time should be down there side by side with their brothers and sisters. The rest of us can find out what companies are involved in the destruction of the housing and write them letters and boycott them. We should also be writing the senators and congresspeople listed in the article, and doing whatever else we can to help out our fellow humans.

                People tend to get annoyed at me when I go on one of these rants, but I do it because I see how much people don’t care. As I’ve said before, I understand that there are warmongers and evil people and they bother me, but the one’s whose fault 9/12 is going to be are the one’s who know better and still are sitting at home doing nothing. Ray McGovern wrote a brilliant essay in Common Dreams yesterday about a book that was written by someone who saw the Nazi’s slowly come to power in 1930’s Germany (and is now being pushed on US citizens by his daughter). Germany had lost WWI and needed someone to blame; the US had gotten bombed and needed someone to blame. The Nazi’s were able to fully come to power because the Social Democrats laid down and let them; the Neocons are gaining more and more power because the Democrats are lying down and letting them. The comparisons are infinite and just like our German counterparts we sit around and watch our rights slowly being taken away, and all we have to hear is “9/11” or “terrorist” and we shake our heads and go back to whatever it was that we were doing. We still have a chance now as the German’s still had a chance in the 30’s, but pretty soon we’ll be sitting in a war zone wondering how the fuck it got so bad in the greatest country in the world.

                Who in the world killed Benazir Bhutto? It could have been the Pakistani government, it could have been carelessness on the part of the Pakistani government, it could have been fundamentalists, it could have been someone who just had a beef with her, or it could have been the CIA. No matter who did it, Pakistan is in trouble; the country was already unstable and now they are in complete and utter disarray. The reason I have been focusing on Pakistan for the past couple months is because I think what’s going on there could be happening here pretty soon. I think the Bush administration was watching to see what happened during the State of Emergency that Musharraf declared in November and now they’re watching to see what happens when elections are called off because of the assassination of the president’s most likely replacement.

                Maybe I’m crazy, maybe everything is fine, maybe there’s no reason to be up in arms or out on the streets protesting every day, but what if I’m right? I’d rather err on the side of caution than be sitting in a secret jail cell saying ‘damn, I should have done something more’.

                It’s been a while since there has been a funny This Modern World and today is no exception. However, what it lacks in humor it makes up for in the things that make you go ‘hmm’ factor.

                Usually the humor is done after the comic section of my morning, but today Glenn Greenwald is pretty funny too. Falling in suit with the rest of the country a couple days before the new year, Greenwald does a best-of list; this one involving quotes. It starts out as some funny ones – funny in a sickening way – but then it gets just plain angering and depressing. The media in this country is one of the most imperative parts of our democracy; they are the bridge from the what’s going on in the world and in Washington to the US people. It is their job to sort through all the bullshit that we’re all told, figure out what is probably not true or being covered up, and search for the truth so that we can all be informed. I can understand when the politicians or CEO’s don’t want the public to know things, but when the media starts to do it, that’s when we’re all in trouble. The media is also key in any revolutionary effort that would ever take place; they are the ones who inform the people in Kansas that the people in Oregon are up to something- and not with a two-paragraph blurb on page C-25. Since the media being all propaganda is one of the first sings that a democracy is failing, maybe the media starting to do it’s job again is one of the first signs that the people are regaining control. It is up to us to stop reading all the bullshit, stop watching the news channels and start writing letters and emails and making phone calls telling the papers and magazines what stories they should be running.

                The Anonymous Liberal also takes offense at our media, but his is directed (today) at Slate writer Paul Krugman, who wrote a blog that AL quotes at length about how the Democrats need to stop compromising. Krugman says that the Dems need to start being partisan, that that’s what the US voting population is looking for, not a party who bows down to the other side over every decision. AL says that this is false; the voters in the middle are the voters that every candidate needs to go after. He then goes on to talk about how most voters don’t care about the issues anyway; they just care about the personality or likeability of the candidates. He backs this up with some quotes from just after the ’04 election from people who disagreed with Bush because he lied to get us into war or only helped the rich, but voted for him anyway because he has personality. I don’t really understand his argument with this one because he claims that a candidate should not be partisan, but then uses Bush – who is just about as partisan as they come – to make his point. It doesn’t matter either way, whether we vote for the candidate we would most like to have a beer with or the one whom we think has the best grasp of the issues we are most concerned about, we are fucked just the same unless we see that it is our duty to do more than just vote for our representatives. It is our job to make sure they are doing their job every single day, and if we decide they aren’t then it’s our job to do something about it.

                I was watching The Sopranos last night (I am in Jersey) and began to think about good and evil. We are preached at in school (my school anyway) that everyone has a basic goodness, and a lot of people in my classes seem to think that anyone can be helped, that no one is truly bad. I know Tony Soprano is not a real person, but there are plenty of people exactly like him who are evil. Maybe they weren’t born evil, maybe it’s not their fault that they ended up evil, but none of that changes the fact that evil is what they are. I still believe that the high majority of the world is good, but seeing stuff like this leaves no doubt in my mind that there is definitely a section of us that does not stand a chance. I preach about how jails are bad and they do more to hurt people that get locked up than to help, but I have no solution about what to do with people who kidnap a large number of kids in order to make money.

                For the first time in the short history of my blog, I have breaking news. At a rally in Pakistan, a suicide bomber killed former president Benazir Bhutto. There isn’t much information available yet, but apparently there was a rally with a few hundred people, someone blew himself up, and now one of the leading dissenting voices in Pakistan is dead. This goes towards proving my theory that the right wing is crazier than the left; Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, John F Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm X was assassinated, and so on while the crazy right wing guys like Ronald Reagan, Adolph Hitler, and George W Bush survive. When something like this happens in the US, we tend to cry for a couple days and then move on, but most of the world doesn’t react like that. I’m very interested to see what will happen throughout the rest of the day in the already very fragile country of Pakistan.

    It’s the day after Christmas and there’s not much to read. Glenn Greenwald did pretty much what I normally do; he called his blog Various Items and he talked about the different things that other people talked about. I don’t remember most of it (life in Jersey is rough) but the main thing that stuck out to me is when he spoke of Ron Paul as being outside the box on most issues. Greenwald says that he isn’t one of the people who think the Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same on all issues, but does admit to a Republicrat party when it comes to both foreign policy and the War on Drugs. Ron Paul is the only one who differs; he acknowledges that we spend more money on our (insane) military industrial complex than all the other countries combined, while the Republicrats want to actually increase it (another reason to not pay taxes). Paul also acknowledges the racism in the War on Drugs, how millions of people are locked up with their lives being ruined even though they’ve hurt no one but themselves, while the Republicrats don’t even talk about it. There is also a funny little youtube thing about George Bush.

                One thing New Jersey is has done that’s positive is that it became the first state to abolish the death penalty a couple weeks ago. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the wonderful state of Texas; where more than 60% of US executions took place. Although the overall number of (legal) executions are down – both in Texas and the US as a whole – Texas still has a higher percentage than most years. The articles says it’s because most states rarely even use their death penalty, while prisoners in Texas are often executed almost immediately after their appeals are expired. Although the 26 people they executed doesn’t seem like a lot (like a normal afternoon in Iraq), the second highest state total was 3. When my wife and I drove across the country last year, Texas was the only state I was too afraid to light up a joint- I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.

                Up until about a week ago, the Kurdish section of Iraq was pretty much the most stable section of the entire country. Not any more; Turkey has executed five bombing missions into the area in the past week. The Turkish army claims 200 rebels have been killed, while the rebels say only 5 have died while the rest are civilians. Since Turkey is a US ally (based on the fact that they have airspace that we need and they are willing to let us use), we are not objecting to their actions, even though they are making an area with our soldiers less stable. The Iraqi government is screaming at the top of their lungs for this to stop, but the US gives the Turkish army permission (and intelligence) for each individual attack. The worst part is that the NY Times states that the PKK (the Kurdish workers party, the target of these bombings) is labeled as a terrorist organization by both the Turkish and US governments, but does not say why. How much longer before other countries start getting involved?

                Change is brewing in Cuba and it’s a pretty exciting time. The US is pretty much sitting around waiting for Fidel to die; they’re even planning what to do, how much money they’ll make from tourism and plane tickets and whatnot. However, it appears that Fidel is regaining his strength as he sits in isolation from the public for the past year and a half. He has said that he doesn’t plan on holding on to power until he dies and that it’s time for a younger generation to take over, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want Communism to end on the island. His brother Raul, who has been in charge for the past year and a half, compared the US democracy with a one party system, saying that Republicans vs Democrats is the same thing as Raul vs Fidel; same beliefs with different faces.

                That’s all for today; the amount I write and what I write about is pretty much based on the articles and blogs that are out there. Since today is the day after Christmas, there wasn’t much for me to choose from today. Hopefully we get back on track starting tomorrow; otherwise I’m going to have way too much free time on my hands.

Christmas has annoyed me more and more each year and this year I think I’ve hit my limit. It has obviously stopped being a religious holiday (which is fine by me) but instead of becoming a family holiday, it as become a way to put poor people more in debt and help the rich buy more houses. For the sake of the holiday, let’s assume that there was an actual person named Jesus Christ. Didn’t he teach forgiveness, giving, and compassion? That’s not what I see when I’m driving past a mall or especially while walking passed the stores on 5^th Ave yesterday evening. Christmas has become some sick day where people turn into animals in order to show how kind they are by buying things (things usually made by some sort of modern day slave, so that the billionaires can make a couple extra bucks on it) for other people. Couldn’t those hours that are spent sitting in traffic, pushing people out of the way, waiting in line, and then sitting in traffic again be better used to sit down with a family member and bond or write them a nice card or make something that’s truly from the heart? If no one believed in god and we called this holiday Consumers Day or something like that then maybe it wouldn’t be as bad, but it’s the fact that all these people are running around pretending to be devout Christians or Catholics and yet turn into tigers and lions as soon as December rolls around. Sorry about that rant; on a pretty much unrelated note, Glenn Greenwald has a short blog about the presidential candidates using crosses in their ads- how some (McCain, Bush) are allowed to, while others (Huckabee) are not.

                Speaking of religion, Christians are really fucking scary. There is all this talk from the right about how we’re at war with Islam and then the liberals tone it down a little bit and say that it’s just the Islamic fundamentalists who we have a problem with, but either way these people are being demonized. Chris Hedges talks about some truly frightening ideas that the Christian fundamentalists have. Now, having these ideas is fine in my opinion – we are a free(ish) country and therefore are entitled to have any belief system we want – but the fact that they are actually working to bring them to fruition is what should scare the living shit out of people. The Christians take pity on the poor people who have to live under these oppressive Islamic regimes, but what if the Christians in our country were able to seize total power and rewrite the law books? Do you really think it would look that different here than it does in Saudi Arabia or any of those “crazy” countries?

                I remember waking up Christmas morning as a child and seeing all the gifts under the tree. My mind would start thinking of all the great possibilities of what could be in those boxes. I sometimes got what I wanted and sometimes didn’t, but my memories of the looking forward to what could be on Christmas mornings are greater than the memories of what I actually got. This Christmas I have this jolt of excitement at the thought that there is even the slightest possibility that sometime in the next 20 years certain people in charge of us will be tried for war crimes. The CIA tapes getting destroyed, despite most people not paying too much attention, is getting bigger and bigger by the day. The tapes allegedly showed waterboarding, which (despite the fact that Bush claims it not to be so) is torture. There are a bunch of different reasons that have been given as to why the tapes were destroyed, but I don’t think any of them matter. The path from their destruction to the door of the White House is getting clearer with each day that passes. If you don’t get excited at the thought of Bush, Cheney (if he’s still breathing), Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, and the rest getting drilled by some international prosecutor in front of the world, then you’re truly lacking the Christmas spirit.

                Since that Christmas wish may be a bit far-fetched, especially if I expect it to happen anytime soon, I have another one. Everyone knows that our tax dollars are going to the war(s), but not many people are willing to take the risks needed in order to stop this from happening. I understand that doing something like refusing to pay your taxes is scary stuff, as my mom said “they could take stuff… my house, my car” but which is more valuable, your stuff or innocent lives? There is an article today by Nina Rothschild informing us about a petition going around saying that we will agree not to pay our taxes- but only if 100,000 people sign and agree with us. The people in power only have power because we give it to them. We complain about all the unfair laws and what’s being done in our name, but when it is suggested to not listen, people gasp. The Iron curtain fell because people refused to follow their leaders, England left India because Indians stopped listening, Black people in the South were given more and more (although still not enough) rights because they refused to believe what their leaders were telling them- that they weren’t as human as people with lighter skin. Anyone who says that not listening doesn’t ever work has obviously gotten too good of an “education”.

                Where else are our tax dollars going, you ask? Well, if you’ve read my blog the past few days you know that a lot of it goes into the pockets of random people in Pakistan while their soldiers are fighting in the snow wearing sandals and carry only ten rounds of ammo. Well, on top of that one billion dollars a year, the government has announced a new plan to give them $750 billion over the next five years to build schools and roads in areas where – right now – soldiers can hardly get into.  This could be a good thing- get some roads and schools built, put some money into their economy, make the tribes lose some of their hate for the US. However, half the money will go to contractors- US contractors who will be in charge of building the roads and schools. The corruption continues, and every time we pay a tax of any kind, we help it along.

                That’s enough for today, as the TV has been turned on and I can’t concentrate anymore. Have a good Christmas.

As a country we seem to love lists to tell us what the best and worst thing are, especially when the end of the year rolls around. Boulder, Colorado is really obsessed with them; just walk into any store and I bet you find something hanging on the wall proclaiming them in the top ten of something in the city. On a positive note, Students For Peace and Justice protesting John Ashcroft at CU was number seven on one of those lists. On a funny note, comics!

I’ve been working very hard to figure out some real differences between Democrats and Republicans; things that make them different enough to truly be called opposing parties. So far I haven’t been able to do this- I’ve come to the conclusion that at most they are at different ends of the same party. However, they do make me feel different. The Democrats tend to make me angry; probably just because they present themselves as the party of change, the party of education, the party of peace, and the party for the working person, but in reality they are none of these. While the Republicans also often make my blood boil, there is something stronger than that and I hadn’t been able to figure out what it was. Reading Glenn Greenwald talk more about the surveys that were sent to all the candidates (which I – courtesy of the Anonymous Liberal – talked about yesterday) make me recognize that the feeling is fear. These right-wing people have been making so much money over the past twenty something years that it has become boring; the only thing left is absolute power. Greenwald focuses mostly on Mitt Romney in his latest blog and paints him (using Romney’s own answers) as a bit of a power hungry psychopath. I thought Romney was all about women’s right and gay marriage a few years ago- to make such a dramatic 180 seems a bit nutty.  Saying things like “Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive” is beyond a bit nutty; it’s enough to make me want to start planning today for either my escape, or the coup if it begins to look like this guy even stands a chance at becoming our next leader.

However, at the core of things the parties are the same; the Democrats will claim to do one thing while doing another, the Republicans will say they have the right to do whatever they want, but they will both continue to give money to countries like Pakistan without worrying too much about how it’s being spent. Pakistan has received billions of (our tax) dollars over the past six years to help fight the “War On Terror”, but it hasn’t exactly been working. Pakistan has had a record number of suicide bombings, their border area with Afghanistan is in disarray, their leader is squashing the rights of his people, and they are harboring Bin Laden. There is also the rampant corruption- they are supposed to be spending the money on training and supplies, but soldiers are fighting in the mountainous snow areas wearing sandals, using WWI helmets and 20year old guns that contain 10 rounds of ammo. It has been proven that not only are they not even buying certain equipment, but they are also using some of the money in their ongoing battle with India. Yet, no matter which party gets into office next, this will continue because we need as many allies as we can get in the Middle East and if it means that we have to blindly give them a shitload of money every year and suffer in our education, health care and other important social programs, then so be it.

Not only are they stealing our tax dollars to fatten their pockets and further their agenda with India, they are also doing nothing to stop the extremists from doing whatever they want. I have a feeling that after the new year shit is really going to hit the fan in Pakistan, Lebanon, South Turkey, and a lot of our other “allies”.

It’s the holiday season and it’s a time to be happy, but we should still at least be aware of the sorrows of the world. So, this Christmas before you sit in your warm apartment or house, open up all your gifts, and overeat remember people like this. Sorry this is so short, but not much happened I guess (that, and I smoked way too much yesterday).

I don’t think I understand the comic strip today, but it’s making fun of Santa (I think), so it’s OK with me. Driving through Jersey, Manhattan, and Westchester yesterday I almost turned into an animal. It blows me away how many people waited until two days before Christmas to do shopping and how insane they become when put in a small area with a bunch of other high-strung people who also have put off buying presents. I thought Christmas was supposed to be about family, not going even further into debt and getting your blood pressure raised by a couple hundred points. Is that what the comic strip is about?

When a reporter, broadcaster, or blogger is accused of being dishonest or wrong by another pundit, I understand she or he should respond to the accusation through their media. However, I think Glenn Greenwald sometimes takes things a bit too personally; whenever he starts on a rant about someone it tends to last for at least five or six blogs, which may be gong a bit far. Especially from someone like Greenwald, who has so much good stuff to say about so many other things. The rest of his blog is pretty good though; he talks about the not voting for Ron Paul because of his anti-abortion stance and how (as he stated in a previous blog) one should be able to look past that and see that Paul would end the war on terror, war on drugs, and not get us into anything new unless we were attacked first. A reporter for the Washington Post accuses Greenwald of sending women’s rights up the river by supporting Paul (which he made clear in a previous post that he does not do). I find this to be kind of true; while unnecessary wars could and should be ended and a lot of Paul’s other ideas a great (most of them actually), we would still be sacrificing women’s (and gay) rights. Greenwald points out that if that is the case, we are just as evil if we vote for Clinton, Obama, or Edwards who all would continue the war in Iraq, continue the sanctions on Iran, and even pre-emptivly strike countries who ‘pose a threat’ to us. He rationalizes voting for them anyway because – he says – this is the United States and we are given the candidates we are given, there is no way to pick and choose, there is no perfect candidate. For once, I actually disagree with Glenn- I think that there could be a perfect candidate, or at least one who agrees on things like war, murder, and abortion; there has to be someone out there who only disagrees with rational people about things like taxes or free education, and why can’t we demand that person?

Even if a candidate came out of left field and began spewing everything that I would want in a president, how can I believe it? I wonder what the results would be if someone kept track of every stand each candidate takes during their campaign compared to how many he or she actually follows through on. The Anonymous Liberal writes about a survey that was sent to the six major Democrat and three Republican candidates asking questions about FISA, presidential signing statements, and enemy combatants. Most of the Democrats and John McCain gave answers that seem reasonable- we shouldn’t be spied on, signing statements should just be used to clarify ambiguous parts of a law (as they had been used throughout pre-Bush history), and so on. There is nothing that makes them keep these promises once they are elected, so why should we even listen unless there is something to back it up. For example, when it came time to vote on the FISA bill and none of the candidates – obviously not counting Chris Dodd – even showed up to vote. To me that means we shouldn’t believe them when they write something that says FISA is wrong. It’s obvious that we shouldn’t listen to what the media says about the candidates stands, but I’ll take it one further and say that we shouldn’t listen to the actual candidates. Do some research and make up your own minds- that’s why we have them.

The No Child Left Behind act is a perfect example- most of the Democrat candidates have spoken out against it and demanded a change. If one of them gets elected they will probably “change” it, but not in any way that’s going to make a difference. Will they give the schools in the South Bronx the same money per child that they give the schools on the Upper East Side? Will they start teaching kids real history and science and that things like money and houses do not equal happiness? Will they make it so everyone starts out there life with an equal chance to eventually go to college and do something with their lives that makes them happy? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say probably not.  They say that changes will be made, but the main focus will still be on holding the students to a higher standard (through tests). So, if poor schools that have a lack of teachers, hardly any books, and rarely a computer churn out low-scoring students, they will get less money in order to make their students better. Just another way to continue the cycle and make sure only certain people truly get educated.

And when we aren’t educated we can’t see the big picture. When we can’t see the big picture – what’s really going on in the world – we keep electing the same people over and over again ad nauseam. When we aren’t taught, we look at the war in Iraq as the United States (good) vs. the terrorists in Iraq (evil). But if we look deeper we see that the entire Middle East (which in an of itself is a fucked up term- why is it called the Middle East?) is a mess, and it’s because of US involvement for the past few decades. For the past six years we have given billions of dollars in weapons and cash to President (and former General) Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan because he is “on our side” in the War On Terror, and it’s finally starting to backfire. The Taliban (and probably Bin Laden) are operating out of his mountains, the people are in a state of unrest, and civil liberties are being stripped. If everyone took an interest as to what is really going on over there, how much longer would be able to continue?

If we were all taught about what freedom is, if we all had that seed planted in our heads from the time we were born imagine what the world would look like. Things like this would scare the shit out of us- and rightly so. The majority of people will never find out about those things until they are already implemented, and even most the people who do some research beforehand will shrug their shoulders, willing to give up a few hundred pounds of freedom for a half ounce of safety.

Guess what? Republicans are assholes. As we have all encountered them in our daily lives, this should come as a surprise to no one. However, the media sure does a crappy job of reporting it. It seems to be common knowledge (to reporters, anyway) that liberals are a bunch of long haired hippies who want to have a cookie and milk meeting with Bin Laden and apologize to Saddam, yet no one goes into much detail about how scummy the Republicans really are. Have no fear because today Glenn Greenwald does the job. For the entire history of the senate a bill gets introduced and needs 51 votes to pass. In extreme cases, when someone doesn’t want the bill to even be voted on, they can filibuster (as Chris Dodd did so marvelously a couple days ago) and then the opposing side needs 60 votes to continue on to a vote. Not any more; now the Democrats have decided, “Why put our friends the Republicans through that much trouble” and changed the rules; now a bill needs 60 votes to pass. As Mr. Greenwald points out, the Republicans have used this a record amount of times- that is they’ve been the minority for less than a year and already broken the two-year record. Is this scummyness of the Republicans or extreme weakness from the Democrats ever reported? You tell me.

It’s really astonishing what’s going on in New Orleans; just when it seemed like the poor people couldn’t have much worse of a life, they get dealt another blow when city council members (with a white majority for the first time in a long while) voted to knock down a bunch of public housing. I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but it really looks like they’re taking advantage of a disaster to get all the poor (who happen to be mostly black) people out of New Orleans. Affordable housing is becoming non-existent in a city that used to be flush with cheap apartments. Not to mention the little covered story that FEMA will be taking back their trailers in about a month’s time. Naomi Klein does a much better job than I do of talking about this situation; if you can read her article (and click on the video link) without crying and/or punching a wall, you might not be human. Maybe this is where the revolution will start.

Or, maybe it starts here; the Lakota Indians have succeeded from the United States. When I first saw this headline I thought it was some kind of publicity stunt or weak statement, but it seems that they are serious. The brought a statement of unilateral withdrawal to the state government and also sent them to a bunch of other countries including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ireland, and others. They also plan to sue in order to get back land that they say the US Government illegally took from them over the course of the past couple hundred years. The best part about this whole thing is that the welcome anyone to come live there; they will be making their own drivers licenses and passports and citizens will live tax free as long as they renounce their US citizenship. Someone should start a campaign to get all the poor people from New Orleans set up in this area and spread the word to anyone else who is sick of living under this empire, but still feels like they belong on the land. If I wasn’t in school I would totally pack up all my stuff, renounce my citizenship, and head north today.

It would also be fun to head south to Cuba because things – I believe – are about to get interesting there. No one talks about them too much, but I’ve been wondering almost every day what is going to happen when Fidel finally kicks the bucket. I would say it’s a safe bet that the US will try once again to do what it has failed to do numerous times in the past. When that happens, will Hugo get involved? Will we be safe living in Lakotastan? Or will WWIII start on a small island? One thing is for sure; the empire that the United States is building cannot last forever. While revolutions cannot be planned, nothing can be done without an imagination. We are never taught in school what freedom really means- we are taught that we are free, that people died for our freedoms, that we attack other countries both so they can be free and so we can maintain our freedom. If we each took five minutes each morning (as long as it doesn’t interfere with reading my blog) and imagined what it would be like to be truly free, maybe we as a society wouldn’t be so accepting when we see what little freedom we really have.