A Parable For Our Times

Equality is not an objective that can be achieved but it is a goal worth fighting for. A more equal society would bring us closer to the “self-evident truth” of our common humanity. I remember the early 1960s, when for a season one could imagine progress among the races, a nation finally accepting immigrants for their value not only to the economy but to our collective identity, a people sniffing the prospect of progress. One could look at the person who is different in some particular way—skin color, language, religion—without feeling fear. America, so long the exploiter of the black, red, brown, and yellow, was feeling its oats; we were on our way to becoming the land of opportunity, at last. Now inequality—especially between wealth and worker—has opened like an unbridgeable chasm.

Ronald Reagan once described a particular man he knew who was good steward of resources in the biblical sense. “This is a man,” Reagan said, “who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who worked in the stores.”

That man was Barry Goldwater, a businessman before he entered politics. It’s incredible how far we have deviated from even the most conservative understanding of social responsibility. For a generation now Goldwater’s children have done everything they could to destroy the social compact between workers and employers, and to discredit, defame, and even destroy anyone who said their course was wrong. Principled conservatism was turned into an ideological caricature whose cardinal tenet was of taxation as a form of theft, or, as the libertarian icon Robert Nozick called it, “force labor.” What has happened to us that such anti-democratic ideas could become a governing theory?

Bill Moyers | TomPaine.com

December 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

Global Orgasm for Peace Day

When anti-war activists Paul Reffell and Donna Sheehan planned their latest peace-making project — the synchronized global orgasm — to fall on Dec. 22, they may not have realized that it’s the last Friday before Christmas. It’s a day many people take off, and so, have a little extra time on their hands. Sweet coinkydink or a holiday miracle, today’s your chance to improve the world — batteries not included.

The goal of the Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace (or as I think of it, The Other GOP) is to effect a change in the world’s energy by having as many people as possible orgasm while focusing their thoughts on world peace.

The rules are simple: Yes, you can do it on your own. No, there’s no specific time. And, no, you can’t fake it.

Liz Langley | AlterNet

December 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

Military Escalation: Bush Can’t Kick the Habit

Here we go again: A new secretary of defense and yet another call for ending the war in Iraq by escalating it. What are they smoking in the Bush White House?

Even as government statistics now show marijuana is America’s No. 1 cash crop, it is important to remember that militarism is the most dangerous drug threatening our sanity. Yet even formerly sober folks — first Colin Powell and now new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — get a contact high from cozying up to the walking hallucinogen that is our president.

Succumbing to the Bush fantasy that freedom is fertilized by firepower, a vision that has mucked up Iraq beyond recognition, Gates told CBS that “as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for generations to come.”

Robert Scheer | Truthdig

December 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

Worse Than Apartheid

The debate over Jimmy Carter’s book, one that dishes up a fair number of Israeli myths about itself and states a reality that is acknowledged even by most Israelis, misses the point.  The question is not whether Israel practices apartheid.  Apartheid is a fond dream for most Palestinians.  The awful question is rather will Israel be able to unleash a policy so draconian and cruel that it will obliterate a community that has lived on this land for centuries.  There are other, far more loaded words for what is happening to the Palestinians.  One shudders to repeat them.  But unchecked, unstopped, the current wave of violence and abuse meted out to the Palestinians will echo down the corridors of history as one of the greatest moral and tactical blunders of the early part of this century, one that will boomerang on Israel and on us, bringing to our own doorsteps the evil we have allowed to be delivered to the narrow alleys and refugee camps in Gaza.  When it was only apartheid, we had some hope.

Chris Hedges  | truthdig

December 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

Reject the War

A parent’s worst nightmare is the death of a child. Or is it? What if you have two sons, and one murders the other? Wouldn’t that be the worst thing? But what, then, if you and your spouse recognize that you yourselves are the cause of the one son’s heinous act, and of the other’s victimhood? Who could stand such knowledge?

That chain of circumstance, in fact, describes the universal tragedy, and it was given masterpiece expression in the story of Adam and Eve. The terrible consequences of their banishment from Paradise are usually identified as the pains of childbirth and the burden of work, but what are those griefs compared with what that couple surely felt upon learning of the murder of their son Abel by their son Cain? From then on, savage fratricidal war would define the human condition. Imagine the steely glances that Eve and Adam must have exchanged at the news. And imagine with what self-accusation they must have turned from one another. We did this.

Or perhaps not. Was the first act of war followed by the first act of denial? The story of Cain (”a tiller of the ground”) and Abel (”a keeper of sheep”) is a parable of primordial conflict between settled farmers and nomadic herders, and the lessons are timeless. Each warring group claims to have justice on its side, and believes that the way to peace is through conquest. War is always fought in the name of justice-and-peace. But peace achieved through war inevitably leads not to justice, but to conditions that cause the next war. History is the record of that succession. Victory through violence is the way to further violence.

James Carroll | Boston Globe

December 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Chaos Unleashed by Invasion

A rare joke was circulating among Iraqis shortly before their prime minister met George Bush in Amman recently. What would the US president be demanding? Answer: a timetable for Iraqis to withdraw from Iraq.

It was a barbed reference to the huge number of Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homeland since the US invaded and presided over a catastrophic collapse in security. Up to 3,000 are leaving every day, according to the UN.

Jonathan Steele | Guardian / UK

December 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

Powell Says US Losing in Iraq

I’d want to have a clear understanding of what it is they’re going for, how long they’re going for. And let’s be clear about something else…. There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops. That’s how you surge. And that surge cannot be sustained.” The active Army is about broken.

Colin L. Powell | truthout

December 18th, 2006 || PermaLink