Anarchoblogs

There is an inside quiet place Where nomadics move about More than several inland routes No one has count how many   Where two rivers flow confluentially The water let loose became three subsequently Out of cedar, poplar, alder, spruce The flow once held tight by their roots   Proclaimed stewards of the square earth [...]

Continue reading at UTOPIA or: BUST …

While I was at the beach enjoying my last few days here in Nicaragua before heading back to the center of All That Is Wrong With America (Media Division), I guess -- at least judging by all the liberal-sense-of-superiority fellating coverage -- that Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan became president of the world or something? By the law of the blogosphere, then, that means I am duly bound to share some sort of anecdote about the man. So.

Back when I was trying to be a respectable reporter in Washington -- up there with blacking out in Tijuana as one of my top five terrible life decisions -- I used to cover Ryan's doings on Capitol HIll as a freelance correspondent for Wisconsin public radio. One-on-one, he was unremarkable; just another white dude doing his damnedest to leave a world for his offspring more shitty than the one he was born into. But I'll give him this: after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006 on the back of promises -- oh, the promises -- to end the war in Iraq, Ryan was a fuck-of-a-lot more honest about the political reality than any "anti-war" progressive in Congress, Dennis Kucinich excepted.

At a hearing I attended in October 2007, Ryan -- who was arguing in favor of more war spending; that is, he's an asshole -- noted that despite all the lofty promises from the likes of Nancy Pelosi, a certain unjust, immoral war continued to be consistently funded to the tune of whatever the hell George W. Bush demanded that month. As Ryan put it:

"[Since Democrats took over Congress] we’ve heard comparisons about how much we are spending on the war as opposed to children's health insurance or education programs or what have you. But nothing has really changed. The president continues to send his war funding requests to the Hill and, in the end, he continues to get what he asks for.”

This comment came around the time that my suspicion the Democratic Party was nothing more than a marketing scam designed to put a liberal veneer on the corporate state became an article of well-supported faith. While I never had any doubt that the party was terrible, its leaders cynically exploiting the hopes and fears of their base just as much as the GOP, I had thought that maybe -- ya never know -- that they would choose to withhold funding for the war in Iraq if only for cynical, political purposes, the only reason anything is ever done in Washington. I even voted for one of the bastards under that assumption.

And then reality happened and I saw firsthand how the Democrats passed bill after bill funding a war they claimed to oppose with but weak, base-placating provisions attached meekly requesting that the president maybe get around to outlining a plan for withdrawal, which Bush of course threatened to veto. And then I witnessed Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin go on television and say straight up that, well, if the president vetoes our weak-ass request for a plan for withdrawal, then why of course we'll pass a no-strings-attached bill funding the war. We don't want to play politics with the lives of our brave men and women in uniform, after all, so we'll support them the only way we know how: by spending billions of dollars more to send them off to kill and be killed in an unjust war of aggressession.

Word.

At the time, I remember thinking: Wow -- I mean, gosh -- I'm only a half-decent poker player and even I know you're not supposed to show your cards before the turn. These are professional politicians! They should be better at bullshitting; it's what they do. And then it occurred me: The Democrats weren't playing cards with the Bush administration, they were playing with the dupes who voted for them.

Sorry, got off message there. Where was I again? Oh yeah: Paul Ryan is arguably the worst man to have ever walked the Earth, a Randian racist who'd rather curb stomp your grandma than provide her affordable access to medical care. And the role of vice president is really important!

       

DrPorkbeast 25 June 2012 2:20PM

The Big Fat Lie.

          It was not the banks and their casino business practices paid for by borrowing other people’s pensions. It is not the idle undeserving rich who own 90% of the wealth despite only paying a fraction in taxes if any at all. Its not all our politicians who were bought by big business years ago and championed the gambling addiction of the banks.

     No the Big Fat Lie is that it was your fault people. You are lazy, addicted to welfare, demotivated to take up the hundreds of thousands of full-time high paying jobs that employers have to offer. Its often the immigrants fault because they are easy to spot on the whole and even easier to scapegoat as 20th century history warns us. Also you voted for - insert party you hate here – and they have destroyed our economy with their –insert your very own cretinus world view here. Also its is Europe that has beggared us as if the French were personally responsible for Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns. What about foreign aid, or the disabled’s unreasonable demands to have access to a job like at Remploy. Yes little people it as your fault and now you must pay with your pensions, services and freedoms.

      No we need to funnel even more money from the bottom to pay bankrupt Zombie banks billions in UNSECURED loans. To achieve this we need to stop the poor from going to university or receiving training (EMA). We need to make the disabled compete on “a level playing field” in the job market, scrap funding for libraries and council run crèches. Stop the unemployed from living in social housing, push them into the landlord’s greedy hands. If they need to move to work they can always sleep under a bridge. Whats more our military industrial complex needs your taxes to invade foreigners and bomb them back into the Neolithic past. We have been at war forever it seems. War on communists, war on drugs, war on Argentineans over a rock and some Penguins, war with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan (again), war on terrorists, war on wedding parties for some reason and more to come. Welfare is expensive but death from above is not cheap either.

     Why do they lie? Because they are a class of rich expensively educated out of touch toffs who hate ordinary people. Don't be old, don't be ill, don't be unemployed under the Conservatives. All they have to offer is lies, lies, self serving lies.

I would amend the last bit to read:
        "Don't be old, don't be ill, don't be unemployed under CAPITALISM. All 
They have to offer is lies, lies, self serving lies."

 ann arky's home.

The Houla massacre was a disgusting crime, but who was responsible for it? Footage of the Houla massacre's aftermath has sparked waves of revulsion around the world amongst those who have seen the footage. More than a hundred were killed at close range, with children comprising almost half of the victims. Body parts lay scattered about, skull bones were exposed - the cameras captured a scene

Under George W. Bush, it was an Outrage! that the U.S. government was indefinitely imprisoning poor, innocent foreigners without so much as charging them with a crime. Under Barack Obama, killing poor, innocent foreigners without so much as charging them with a crime is now a mark of a Successful Foreign Policy, showing the president has the cojones to authorize mass murder based on an international stop and drone strike policy of profiling.

For the better part of four kind of depressing months, I returned to my old imperial stomping grounds in Washington, DC, to help research and write a book with Code Pink's Medea Benjamin on this new form of remote-controlled war, which has dramatically expanded under the Nobel-laureate-in-chief, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (turns out precision isn't such a grand thing when you have no idea who precisely you're targeting). As Medea and I show, drones are not the revolutionary, life-saving tools they have been sold as to the American public, but merely the latest evolution of inherently indiscriminate air warfare, one that threatens to make war more sanitary for television audiences but no less bloody for the faultless men, women and children who always bear the brunt of state-sanctioned violence.

Buy it or find a torrent or something.

As ever, America's imperialist propaganda is breathtakingly hypocritical To get some idea of how absurd the Syria situation is, imagine the following scenario: The United States government is under attack by an insurgent group, which lists kidnappings and bombings in its modus operandi. The insurgents are being aided by Canada and Mexico, with Mexico planning to seize some US territory in

Check out my latest column for Al Jazeera, on Spanish-language broadcaster Univision's sudden shift to producing English-language war propaganda.

I was about to blog something sarcastic about the fantasy “War on Christmas” decried by Fox News and the rest of the right when the real news stopped me in my tracks. In Nigeria, Islamic militants bombed three churches, killing dozens and causing “mass carnage” on Christmas Day. The pictures are arresting: twisted metal, cars [...]

A couple weeks ago the editors at The Washington Post did something rather out of character: they published a piece by reporter Scott Wilson on the impact Israeli drones have had on the residents of Gaza, noting the hundreds of civilians killed in the past few years and detailing the way it has impacted every aspect of daily life -- you may not want to go over to a friend's house if there's something hovering outside armed with missiles and programmed to eliminate anybody wearing a keffiyeh. Obviously, this is outrageous. Clearly. This is the Post we're talking about: its Pulitzer Prize-winning team of journalists is supposed to be focusing on the quiet, turgid courage of those pulling the trigger, not on the torments of the targeted.

Dan Arbell, deputy chief of mission for the Israeli embassy in Washington, agrees. In a letter to the editor, he writes:

Oddly, The Post devoted a massive front-page headline and two full pages of print not to the tens of thousands of terrorist rockets aimed at Israeli neighborhoods or to the rapidly nuclearizing Iranian regime that routinely threatens to wipe Israel off the map but to Israeli drones over the Gaza Strip.

More inexplicably still, most of the article deals with the drones’ impact on Gaza residents while mentioning only in passing the trauma and devastation wrought by the more than 13,000 rockets and mortars fired at millions of Israeli civilians since 2000. Not one of these Israeli victims was interviewed for the article — in contrast to the numerous quotes from Palestinians — nor was any Israeli government source cited. Rather, the article relies solely on the infamously biased Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Israeli drones save lives. They protect Israelis from terrorist attacks and reduce the need for large-scale ground operations in Gaza. This fact, too, was overlooked in an article that failed to meet Post standards.

Dan Arbell, Washington
The writer is deputy chief of mission for the Embassy of Israel.

Dude's right about the "standards" thing.

One thing you learn after living outside the United States for awhile is that other countries do not fetishize soldiers and military service quite like Americans do, their cultures being nowhere near as militarized. Televised sporting events, for instance, do not begin by saluting the brave men and women abroad helping kill poor foreigners for Our Freedom. Uniformed military personnel aren't used to sell shitty beer at half time. The armed forces aren't billed to potential recruits as a more glamorous version of ITT Tech.

In the land of the free, by golly, we sure do love The Troops, don't we? We Americans salute their service even as a solid majority of us concede that the war in Iraq was, if not a grave crime, at least a mistake -- oops! we just killed a couple hundred thousand A-rabs -- and agree that the occupation of Afghanistan is a waste of (American) lives and money.

This love is curious for a nation that likes to bend over and blow itself for being the world's most free and ruggedly individualistic. And it's dangerous: how many people have chosen to become the American empires hired guns because they were led to believe it was a just and honorable profession?

It's not, mind you, that I think we ought to shout "baby killer!" and hock a loogie at anyone in uniform -- generals and recruiters, sure -- but neither should we heap praise on those who have chosen a profession that just in the last couple decades has asked them to kill people in at least a half-dozen unjust wars from Panama to Pakistan. That decent, upstanding men and women sometimes join the military and become part of the evil enterprise of empire should be lamented, not lauded, lest other impressionable young people come to the conclusion that there's any honor in mass murder.

But I've said this before. Humor me this holy Veterans Day and check out some of my past writings on the topic of America's wars and the saluting of the rank-and-file soldiers who make them possible:

 -- "That anti-patriotic feeling": It is said that soldiers don't decide the policy, they just follow orders. Fair enough. But is suspending one's conscience in the service of an immoral act a praiseworthy move?

-- "On 'supporting the troops'": The U.S. women's soccer team took time during a recent match to, literally and rather creepily, the American troops in attendance for their "service." But their service isn't an abstraction, so shouldn't the decision to salute them be based on the reality of what it actually entails?

-- "'Unconditional' allegiance is for machines, not people": Liberal blogger Adam Serwer says we "should support servicemembers unconditionally because their service is unconditional." I call bullshit.