Warlords and killers seek reelection in Afghanistan

Problems with the Army and New Orleans levees

7 civilians killed in US/Iraqi raid

More Americans are poor than ever before

Net neutrality vital to assuring free speech

Bailed out banks biggest financers of payday lenders

Gaza left out in the cold

Holy war

Deep in Ecudor’s rain forrest, a plan to forego an oil bonanza

A call to action for Muslim Americans

Brianna Waters granted new trial

Unfortunately, you would probably be wrong in the last example (and to be perfectly honest, I doubt many police would pick up trash in a park). We have seen time and time again that in battles between activists – people who dedicate their lives to make the world a better place – and corporations – murderers who dedicate their lives to make more money – the police protect the corporations. Not only that, but in the vast majority of the cases, the courts (and often times the media and, therefore, public opinion) also side with the billion dollar corporations. Even if the person on trial has never done anything to intentionally hurt the other beings that they share the earth with, and the corporation has a long history of abuse and neglect, chances are the corporation will win- or at least not lose.

When people think about Anarchy, they think about looters smashing windows, murderous gangs roaming the streets, and garbage piling up on every corner of every avenue. However, would a world in which we govern ourselves truly be worse than what we have going on now? If the outcasts were the people who purposely destroyed the earth and hurt other people and beings instead of the people who tried to protect these things, would that be bad? Would doling out the world’s natural renewable resources evenly to every human being, instead of being horded (and then sold) by the rich and privileged be a world full of violence and complete chaos?? I think not. Our elected officials won’t make this happen, the police will not steer us in that direction, and most schools do not teach us to desire a world like this. The only way this will ever stand a chance of occurring is if we – each and every one of us – treat the world in the way described above, even if this means battling with the police or ending up in prison.

The reason why I wrote what I wrote today is because of these people; if even half the world had a quarter of the courage as these men and women, I wouldn’t need to have a blog.

Four Israeli’s killed in West Bank

Iraq withdrawl: amid heat and broken promises only the ice man cometh

Afghanistan bomb attacks kill 21 US soldiers in 48 hours

Media didn’t buy Petraeus command’s story of low Taliban morale

Another false ending; contracting out the Iraq occupation

Two wars don’t make a right

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something else?

The August day Plutocracy would love us to forget

When will we all need to carry identity papers

Facebook “friending” lands eco-activist in prison

Surge in government repression

I have studied the women’s rights movement; for hundreds (if not thousands) of years of white male dominated culture, women were treated as objects (and I’m not claiming that many women still are not, just as I’m not saying slavery is over). They were born as property of their fathers and then bought by some lucky man. They were on this earth to rear children and take care of the household duties. If they talked back, cheated, or attempted to leave, their owners had a right to kill them.

I have studied the civil rights movement; generations after the end of slavery, black people were still being lynched, locked up, and denied other basic human rights. White people had their own establishments, their own seats on the buses, their own (cleaner) water fountains and bathrooms. Although they were not called slaves, if someone was black they were treated as less than someone with a lighter colored skin.

The list of people who were denied human rights for decades and then fought back, goes on and on; the examples are endless. In all of these situations (and more) I have agreed with the downtrodden who chose to fight back. It doesn’t matter what their means were; they were people who had been oppressed for their entire lives and decided that they couldn’t and wouldn’t take it anymore, so they rose up.

Now there is another group of people rising up. Is it black people, realizing that slavery hasn’t ended, that the prison industrial complex is still keeping them down? Is it women, realizing that although some positive changes have been made, the only way a woman gets the same respect as a man is if the acts like a man, and even then not-so-much? Is it Muslims who have finally had enough of the fact that they are being blamed for the acts of a very small amount of people who have similar beliefs? It’s none of these people, instead it is the upper-class (and middle-class, who think they are on the verge of becoming upper) white people who are finally fighting back. After years of being denied…um….the right to have a white president, they are finally fed up. Responding to the threat that they may one day have to pay the same amount of taxes as their poorer counterparts, these courageous, often misunderstood, severely oppressed group of people are finally fighting back. Hopefully not too many lives will be lost, and one day soon these poor, poor people will get to experience the freedom that they have so long denied other…oh, I mean that they have so long been without…

Other stuffs:

Measuring progress five years after Katrina

Iraq special report- US sacrificed some, but we sacrificed more

NATO Afghan bases come under attack

Activist goes from battle field to protest lines

Our bloody Valentine

Climate predictions are coming true in Pakistan

Is fracking even worse than drilling?

Obama resists pressure for red line on Iran

Chilcot inquiry accused of fixating on west and ignoring real victims

The prince and the punishment

Would AlQeada prisoners really be reading Harry Potter?

Rare victory for the environmental and civil society in Russia

Sure, hatred is one of the foundations of our country. There was slavery, then every one hated the Irish, then Italians, then Asians, then Jews, then… the list continues. Then the sixties came and everyone fought for equal rights. New laws were made and race relations got slightly better on the surface. However, what has been happening for the past couple years shows that the hatred did not go away, in fact it probably didn’t even lessen. For the past thirty years it has been brewing just below the surface. The election of a black president, the economic downturn (blamed on the Mexicans) and mosques being built have busted everything out into the open.

There are incidences all over the country over the past few months of brown people (illegal Mexicans to some, human beings to others) being attacked for whatever reasons, by good ol’ patriotic ‘Mericans. There are examples here about how we are headed for something bad. I don’t know what it is, but all this rising hatred against people who are different (who are slowly making up more and more of the country) has to explode somehow. We have elected officials being openly racist, we have beatings and killings of people who are different, and we have mid-term elections that will be based solely on undocumented workers and the building of mosques.

I can’t put into words what I think about this stuff. I believe that we are taught about others from the minute we’re born. We are laughed at if we relate to a tree or (as adults) play in the mud. When we’re at the point where people who care about all humans and their environment are marginalized by the genocide committing, hate spreading people who control their lives, something is fucked up.

California hotel walk-off strike continues new wave of worker militantcy

GM salmon may go on sale after public consultation

Facing prison for filiming police

Obama boxed in by generals on Afghanistan

The other side of the anchor: where else to US born kids belong?

Monsanto in Gates’ clothes? The emperor’s new GMO’s

Rotten eggs and our broken democracy

Am I an activist for caring about my grandchildren’s future? I guess I am

Climate camp vs media

California man found guilty of G20 vandalism

I cannot imagine a need for a permanent standing military however. I can understand that, even in a so-called borderless world, where we run in tribes or small villages, there is a need to protect what belongs to one. If, in times like this, an army were to spring up, I do not completely see a problem with it, but to have what we have now is excessively overboard.

Many people (probably most people) believe that there is a need for police. They believe that some police are in it for the wrong reasons, but the overall doings of the US police forces are directed at helping us. On the same note, they believe that the US is or should be in charge of policing the world. They believe that we are just doing our duty when we drop bombs on Yemen or send pilotless drones to destroy villages.

What I am imagining today is a police force that protects and serves those who need the most protecting and serving, and an army that does the same. If we were to cut the amount of money that goes to ‘defense’ and wars in half, using the cut half for things like schools and libraries, and then reorganize the role of the DoD, I think we could be on to something. If, when Afghanistan is being overrun by so called terrorists, the US Army went to the most affected parts of that country and used a very, very miniscule percentage of their budget to build schools and infrastructure, would we be where we are? If, instead of ousting popular leaders, the US would have spent the same amount of money to insure that Haitians were well educated, had buildings that could withstand natural disasters, and were able to support themselves; the tragedy of last year’s earthquake would have been much less. What if, instead of spending hundreds of billions to train Pakistani militants and to drop bombs, the US would have done the same thing as in Afghanistan and Haiti, would hundreds of thousands of people be starving and homeless?

If these things were done fifty years ago, the “need” for police and the military would be minimal. If these structures were put in place, the budget for things like militarizing the police forces or training hundreds of thousands of people to be killers, would be little to none. Imagine that? The United States and the world would be in a better position today and in the future if, instead of killing and raping, we simply educated and helped. Strange, I know.

Afghanistan: Outster of contractors throws US strategy in doubt

No south Afghanistan handover for a few years: US

US admits human rights shortcomings in UN report

State department details blackwater’s violations of US laws

Should the US be bombed?

Women- still a menace?

They go or Obama goes

Cutting through the media’s bomb Iran debate

Apple seeking to patent spyware

Tiny electric car blocks mining train

Capitalists, global warming, and and the climate justice movement

It has almost been almost nine years since the first US troops landed in Afghanistan for the official start of the War on Terror. In these past nine years, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have had their lives altered on battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and who knows where else. Some have spend months witnessing murders, rapes, genocide, torture, and we can only imagine what else. Many have had to go back twice, thrice, or even four times and we are finally getting the bill. The vast majority of the people who join the military – especially after 9/11 – do so with good intentions; they want to protect their country. They are brought up to believe that the invisible line that separates the US from the rest of the world is real. Not only is it real, but it is there to make sure the best people in the world have a place to live. This way of life – freedom and riches – must be protected. Whether or not these people still believe these things, their lives are changed; they have witnessed horrible, horrible things and will never be the same.

Many of these combat experienced soldiers are now walking the streets of the US. They have been through what most of us don’t even have nightmares of, and now they are taking it out on their families, friends, and total strangers. They have been taught (probably from the time of birth, as US culture mirrors – to a less intense degree maybe – military culture) that what they did or saw was right. If it fucked them up, they are to deal with it like men (even if they’re women) and keep it to themselves. They are told that the general population won’t understand and that if they ask for help, they are unAmerican pussies. However, over the past months more and more soldiers are seeking help. I’m not one to quote statistics too much, but if you read this article you can get that side of it. Some bases, like Ft Hood (discussed in the above mentioned article) are constantly hiring more and more shrinks because the ones they have are working six days per week with full schedules.

Despite a record number of vets seeking professional help (and therefore a record number of vets on prescription meds) there are still tens of thousands of them keeping their problems – their nightmares, their flashbacks – to themselves. I’m not sure what the solution is, but if the soldiers who are seeing shrinks are getting helped, then more shrinks need to be provided at whatever cost. Unfortunately, the military is given very little money for things like this. Trillions are being spent on fighting wars, on locking people in holes, and on inventing new and unheard of ways to kill whole populations, but there isn’t much to spare when it comes to helping the pawns who are involved in all of this.

Obviously an end to war, an end to a standing military, and an end to US global hegemony would stop most of these problems, but we obviously aren’t there yet. Before we get there we will have to deal with all of these men and women roaming the streets (assuming they don’t commit suicide, which is at record numbers among combat experienced vets). I don’t know what it’s like to witnesses the things that these people have witnessed, but I do know that we should all be doing everything in our power to help them through whatever it is they are going through.

Danish warship blocks Greenpeace oil protest

Obama plays down plan for post-2011 Iraq troop presence

Outrage at UN decision to exonerate Shell for oil pollution in Niger Delta

Far from ground zero, other plans for mosquest run into opposition

Islamo-Gangestism: in a deteriorating Afghanistan, a new breed of Taliban

Blackwater vs Pinkwater: wife of Erik Prince picks a fight with CODEPINK

Living for change: if not now, when?

The cruel and unusual punishment of Teresa Lewis

It’s no wonder the Haitians wanted Wyclef Jean

The coming carnivalesque rebellion against consumerism

Malaysia: Migrant workers protest ends in victory

I am not saying that boycotting something to prove a point is worthless, because it isn’t. When black people in the South boycotted the bus system, the buses suffered greatly and were forced to give in to demands. When the boycott of South African items gained steam it was integral in forcing the rulers to back off apartheid. Refusing to buy products that are made in Israel or the occupied territories, if enough people sign on, could help bring that occupation to an end.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that where we choose to spend our money can make a difference. Sure, Wal-Mart is not going to go out of business because you spent $20 at a local store instead of $10 at their hell hole, but if enough people did it on a regular basis, it would make a huge difference. While this method works in many circumstances, boycotts shouldn’t be used to mask other issues. Maybe instead of patting ourselves on the back for filling our car up at Conoco instead of BP, we should think about our reliance on said car. Is someone who spends $10,000 a year in gas switching their allegiance from BP to Exxon going to have a more positive effect on the world than someone who fills up at BP, but drives once or twice a month?

I don’t know what the right answers are. When searching for shirts for my company I ran into this issue. Should we shop at the local store or the big chain store. The local store has shirts that are non-organic and made in China, but the money would be helping a longtime resident of Boulder who has roots in the community. The big chain store is sending most of its money out of state and underpays its employees, but they have shirts that are made from hemp and organic cotton, right here in the US of A. I can’t give advice as to which to pick, because I don’t know myself. I guess I just want people to stop patting themselves on their backs because they fill up their Humvee at a Shell station.

Other good stuffs:

Combat brigades in Iraq under different name

Hamad Karzai: US taxpayer-funded private contractors engaging in terrorism

The violent agrarian counter-reform conspiracy

Wikileaks founder wanted in Sweeden

There are no heroes in illegal and immoral wars

Spotlight on police violence fails to illuminate

Juvenile justice military style

Israeli soldiers, after killing innocents, now selling possesions of Flotilla occupants

Waking up from the air-conditioned dream

Experiments with truth

Vets engage in direct action against troop deployment



Oh wait- despite the fact that our fearless leader, the honorable Master Obusha, has told us combat is over and despite the child soldiers running idiotically down Iraqi streets screaming “we won”, it’s really not over. There are a couple obvious ways in which this occupation continues- there are still a very high number of troops who will remain overseas away from their families in danger. Although it is said that their only purpose is to train the Iraqi army, insiders say that the Iraqis are at least a decade away from being able to defend their own country.

The biggest military base in the world belongs to the United States military and is located in Iraq- and that’s just one of hundreds of bases we have throughout their country. The fact that billions of dollars were spent to build these monstrosities, leads one to believe that they are not just temporary structures designed to house US soldiers while they wait to go home. In fact, it seems pretty obvious that – if the administration has their way – US troops will never actually fully leave Iraq.

Let’s assume that no US (or NATO) soldier fires a weapon in the country of Iraq ever again. Let’s assume that there are no deaths that occur because an 18 year old Marine played too many video games and drank too much Red Bull. Let’s assume that these enormous bases will eventually be turned over to the Iraqi Army. Great. The only thing is that tens of thousands of mercenaries still remain in the country. Fact is that the occupation of Iraq by US troops is slowly drawing to a close, but the private army will remain. The private armies that do not have to follow any laws, which cannot be disciplined or get dishonorably discharged, are roaming the streets of Iraq with some serious weaponry. I don’t have the time or the attention span to go into why this is possibly the scariest part of the US military industrial complex, but one day I will.

We can fool ourselves into thinking that these mercenaries are just there to keep the peace. We can tell ourselves that their jobs are to protect USers who come to visit or to make sure the President of Iraq (whoever that is…Obama?) doesn’t get shot driving down the street. Even if this were the case, and assuming every single US troop will be out of Iraq within the next year, I would make the argument that the war is not actually over, that wars are never truly over. How many tens of thousands of people – hundreds of thousands, if not millions if we include Iraqi civilians – have seen combat (or other fucked up, life-altering events) some time in the past seven years in Iraq? The vast majority of these people will be changed forever and not in a good way. Many of them will end up killing themselves or other innocent people. What about the families of these people? What about their friends? What about the people who will have their lives changed by someone with PTSD? What about the next generation? Are these soldiers going to be able to come home to peace and quiet or will they be shipped out to Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen or…?

Other good shit:

For-profit schools leave students with debt they can’t repay

Poll: Nearly 6 in 10 oppose the war in Afghanistan

Questions mount about White House’s overly rosy report on oil spill

US Iraq troop withdrawl ‘in name only’

Ahmadinejad says Iran ready for Nuclear talks

Help reclaim Dr King’s dream

The Tiger Woods of nations

For whom the bell tolls

Why the mainstream media can’t stop ground zero mosque hysteria

Dejected Palestinians see no hope in peace talks

That said, the number of innocent people who have been locked up and tortured in secret prisons throughout the world, at the behest of the US Government is beyond comprehension. There are hundreds of people —from teenagers to senior citizens— who are hidden in the secret prisons of Yemen, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and other torturous places. Even though these people are picked up as part of the ‘war on terror’ and are accused of fighting against US and NATO forces, they are not even considered Prisoners of War, which would grant them certain rights. They are considered “enemy combatants” which, according to the good US of A, entitles them to absolutely no rights; No right to see family, no right to have a lawyer, and certainly no right which prevents them from being tortured.  The vast majority of these people have never even been charged with a crime. I have read stories about Muslims who visit Pakistan or Syria for religious  or family purposes and get picked up on the streets for no reason, only to spend the next decade being tortured and degraded. Often times, the police in these countries are being paid by the amount of people they turn over to the US. It doesn’t matter whether the person is guilty or not, as long as they are another fresh body to put in a cell. Consider that only a small percentage of these unfortunate people were actually fighting against US troops. Imagine that! They live in a sovereign nation; another country comes in guns blazing, so in defense the attacked peoples pick up weapons. Next thing they know, life as they know it is over. Then we have the other 90% who actually committed no crime. These are people who did not necessarily dislike the United States; they had regular jobs, families, and would have probably spent the rest of their time on earth minding their own business. Instead they  spend an unimaginably horrible few years being beaten and raped by the US government. What’s going to happen to those people when and if they get out?

While this process has slowed under the current administration, it is still happening plenty more than most people think about and an infinite amount more than it should happen. There are more and more countries probing the events of the past decade. In Italy, CIA members were actually convicted of war crimes and a number of other countries are in the process of building cases. What is the great Obusha doing? Is he sticking up for human rights like our savior should do? Is he using all his resources to find out what the man before him did? Is he releasing people the Pentagon said should have been freed six years ago? Or, is he protecting the biggest war criminal in decades and continuing the torture program? You figure it out for yourselves. Even the people who are being released from US controlled prisons are being sent to other countries, so that the US has deniability.

Most people I talk to in my daily life are against torture and secret prisons. I would be willing to wager that if the people who are for these things were able to meet the people being tortured or the families of innocent people who have been enhancely interrogated to death, the majority of them would change their minds. So, why does this stuff continue to happen? Because people against war, against torture, and against modern-day slavery are in the majority, they don’t have the resources to yell as loud as the war-mongers. Peaceful revolutionaries don’t have cable networks, can’t afford billboards, and will certainly never be in too powerful a position (especially since most refuse to participate in any hierarchical structure). What is the solution? I can’t say for sure, but I do know that we need to be louder. We need to write things in places that people can see, talk to people who we wouldn’t normally talk to, write stupid blogs that 4 people per day read, and whatever else we can do to drown out the ear shattering yelp of the ruling class.

Other interesting readings (according to me)

Labor’s popularity declines amid criticism against public sector unions

Homeowner’s rebellion: could 62 million homes be foreclosure-proof?

More than 1 million South African state workers strike

Blackwater founder moves to Abu Dhabi records show

Dissing t-shirts

Bolton was contradicted by Bush on Iran’s Bushehr reactor

Where’s our money?

Mosque-issippi burning