American Exceptionalism

Americans do not feel entitled to food, shelter, pensions or health care. Citizens of other countries may be entitled to such things, but, by God, not us! Eat your bootstraps, if you're hungry. Sleep under a bridge, unless the Super Bowl is coming to your town, then get the hell out of there.
Americans DO, however, feel entitled to tell other people how to run their countries, and Americans DO feel entitled to overthrow other people's government, bomb them, and invade them and Americans DO feel entitled to taking over countries resources and seizing their assets.

Most Americans do not even realize that attacking other countries is a war crime. This article, from last year, is well worth reading again.

And this is a relevant quote...."To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

And another thing. Americans supported the attacks on countless countries after WW2 because....''communism''.
But after the USSR was destroyed in 1991, they no longer had that excuse, so they switched to ''humanitarian intervention''.
They bombed Yugoslavia because ''Milosevich is killing his own people''.
They bombed Iraq because ''Saddam is killing his own people''.
They bombed Libya because "Ghaddafi is killing his own people''.
They are bombing Syria because ''Assad is killing his own people''.
Yet 1204 Americans were shot dead last year, summarily executed, usually on the streets, or in their own homes. Even children were shot or wounded.
Yet, I have not heard one American call for another country to bomb us, to protect us from the government. Not one.
And now we see that the people of Flint are being poisoned, yet I have not heard one American call for the bombing of Michigan, in order to ''save them''.
Why not?
Wouldn't it be ''humanitarian intervention''?


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Under Our Thumb

Around Sept 14th,2015....''Germany surprisingly left the alliance formed together with the United States which intended to block Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict.

Minister of Defence Ursula von der Leyen told Der Spiegel that she welcomed president Putin’s intentions of joining the fight against the extremist organization “Islamic State”. It would be a matter of mutual interests, she said.''

Around Sept. 18th,2015...''Volkswagen's emissions scandal could be far more painful for investors than BP's disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Credit Suisse (CS) estimates that the total cost to the company could hit 78 billion euros ($87 billion) in a worst case scenario. That's about 60% more than the cost of the Deepwater Horizon spill to BP (BP). ''

Oct. 2,2015....''We express our deep concern with regard to the Russian military build-up in Syria and especially the attacks by the Russian Air Force on Hama, Homs and Idlib since yesterday which led to civilian casualties and did not target [ISIS],” read a statement from the governments of the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. “These military actions constitute a further escalation and will only fuel more extremism and radicalization.”
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Years ago, while in nursing school, I did a rotation at a mental hospital. I was sitting with a paranoid schizophrenic, one day, when he pointed across the large open common area, at a woman sitting with another patient.

"You see her? She's out to get me. But I'm going to get her first", he told me.

Wow, that was chilling. I imagined how it would be to be targeted by someone and you wouldn't even know it, until they attacked you, for no reason.

It took me more years to realize that the USA is a giant insane asylum, and that the inmates are deliberately made paranoid schizophrenic, in order to further the goals of our ruling overlords.

Vietnam is going to get us! Nicaragua is only a day's drive from Texas! Iraq is going to fly nuclear bombs to the US on drones! Russia invaded Ukraine and we're next! Americans are bombarded, daily, with propaganda designed to make us afraid of other people, and ready to kill them before they kill us.

Imagine being a citizen in one of the targeted countries. You have no idea, at first, that you are a target. Why would you be? You have done nothing. But then the bombs start to fall, and your family is killed, or forced out of your homes, to be refugees.

Medea Benjamin, of Code Pink, talked about going to Afghanistan, to a hospital filled with the victims of the US attack. One woman asked her "Who did this to me?" She told her "The Americans, from America". The woman said "What is America?" Like Americans, who have no idea where the countries are that they are bombing, she had never heard of our country.

Throughout the years, I have dealt with many more psychotic people and I know that you cannot reason with a person in full-blown psychosis. They are incapable of hearing reason or logic.

So, now the US is targeting, among others, Russia. Putin is baffled, and unable to understand how anyone could twist facts so much. "Doesn't anyone even listen to us?" he asks, plaintively. It is sad, watching a rational person try to appeal to logic and reason.

Sorry, Putin. Sorry, Russia. Americans are now so conditioned, so crazy, that we hate on command. It takes fewer and fewer weeks to work us up into a killing frenzy.

Charlie Manson never actually killed anyone, you know. He just inspired others to do so. That would be the function of Obama, Bush, Kerry and the talking heads on TV.
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Identity Politics

Divide and conquer is the best way to keep the great masses of people from rising up and overthrowing the tiny minority who rule them. Keep us fighting among ourselves, tell us that differences of sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. are more important than the difference of who owns and controls the means of production, and the 1% can laugh all the way to the bank (that they own).


The left in America was smashed by the Palmer Raids, imprisonment and deportations during and after WW1, but rose again during the Depression.

Smashed by the American Inquisition, 1945-1960, when leftists were purged from unions, the media, education and government, it rose again in the 60s.

Smashed by COINTELPRO, murders and imprisonments, what was left of the left turned to identity politics.

If we fight among ourselves, lining up in our various oppressed groups, arguing over who is the most oppressed and angrily denouncing any potential allies from other groups as unable to understand our pain, since they have more privilege, the ruling class doesn't have to bother dividing and conquering.

But then came the Occupy Movement. We Are The 99% was succinct way of putting the class issue back on the forefront. The response of the ruling class should be instructive.

The talking heads on corporate media shrilly denounced the protesters, and their impudent emphasis on Wall Street, instead of Washington, DC. They ordered the protesters to go get their parade permits, and march around an empty White House on a Saturday, the way they have been taught to do. But the Occupy Movement ignored the marching orders. It spread to almost every big city and many small towns across America. It was smashed.

The Black Lives Matter movement arose in protest of the wanton police murders of Black citizens all over the country. The response of the police was to increase the numbers killed. Why? Shouldn't police departments all over the country have warned their officers to back off, at least for a while? Instead, they seem to have declared open season. This fans the flames of outrage.

So now we are well into the quadrennial election "cycle", and two of the corporate candidates openly discuss class.

Bernie Sanders has been attacked for his discussion of wealth inequality in the USA by being called "racist". Yesterday, August 8th, he was actually stopped from speaking at a rally by self-proclaimed BLM activists.

Donald Trump, in the first Republican debate, pointed out that he,as a rich man, has bought and sold politicians, who do what their donors tell them to do. He was openly discussing the fact that the capitalist class owns our government.

So what happened? Trump was immediately attacked....for being sexist. It was announced that he was disinvited to the next showing of candidates.

It doesn't get any clearer than this. You can argue about identity politics all you want, but you must not discuss That Which Shall Not Be Named....the fact that our country is owned and controlled by a small group of people, who are busily stripping it for parts.

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Resistance Is Necessary

Greetings and salutations. I am running for Congress because I am part of the resistance to corporate-occupied Washington, DC.

The 1 % have used the wealth they have gained in the last 34 years to buy themselves media, think tanks, lobbyists, congressmen and the Supreme Court, as well as the Presidency. They are using their ill-gotten gains to further increase their wealth.

Our country is under attack. Mountains are being blown up, waters are poisoned, topsoil is stripped for export and the earth beneath the soil is being fractured.

Our people are under attack. Millions are in prison, the police kick down doors and shoot dogs with impunity, millions have been thrown from their homes, and wages, pensions and the safety net are being reduced.

Our governing institutions are under attack. Equal justice is gone. The rule of law is ignored for the wealthy, while the poor are imprisoned for trivial offenses. The NSA spies on all of our communications, while Homeland Security gropes and radiates us, and we need ID to go just about anywhere. The Bill of Rights has been gutted. Even the Magna Carta has been overturned. The Executive Branch, which has abrogated the right to declare war from Congress decades ago, now gives itself the right to conduct world wide assassinations, including Americans. I am not one who believes that Americans have more rights than other nationalities, but the fact that they openly proclaim their intentions to kill American citizens without evidence, arrest or fair trial should give us all pause.

We are under attack, yet our trillion dollar military is not used to defend us. The president uses it as sort of a private hit squad, ordering assassinations and destabilizations using drones, bombs and death squads, to target people in other countries.

This is not going well.

There are many amazing people working on documenting the destruction of our institutions and our planet. Scientists measure the loss of ice, the rise of the oceans, and carefully document the loss of each species. Princeton researchers have just released a study which proves that the US is an oligarchy, not a democracy. Others have come up with innovative ways to preserve our environment, to protect our ecosystem and to order our affairs in a more just and sustainable way.

Yet our public policy bears no resemblance to the wisdom prescribed by those who study, observe and prescribe. There is no public discussion of the way we wish to order our affairs. We are ruled by greedy oligarchs, who are stripping the country for parts, and jailing or killing anyone who gets in their way.

One of the values of the Green Party is Future Focus. This means that we consider the effect of our choices on future generations. When the frackers tell us that we have a few years of natural gas left, as long as we poison our water, air and topsoil and cause earthquakes to get to it, is this a wise decision? Is it worth destroying the basis of life in order to get a few more years of fossil fuels? Who would vote for such a thing, if such a thing were put to a referendrum, instead of decided by bought out politicians?

Americans insist that we love our children. Let's pretend that that is true, and ignore the fact that the US is one of only 3 countries in the world to not give paid maternity leave to new mothers, or the fact that we have the highest rate of child poverty of developed nations.

Our schools, while also under attack by the rich, now teach our children to share and care, and frown upon bullying and violence. These lessons are the opposite of what our children learn in the outer world.

Imagine a kindergarten in which one child buys the teacher and uses her to enforce his will. Only the children that he picks can play on the swingset. The others must sit and watch them. Snack time also, is only for the favored. The other children go hungry. The child bulldozes the ballfields so that he can see if there is a prize underneath them. He scatters garbage all around the school room and playground. The child organizes an attack on the third grade, because their teacher is “evil”.

This sounds absurd to us, because our public schools would never allow such behavior. Why then, should we allow such behavior in our grown up world?

Greens sound radical because we believe that the 1% should not be allowed to destroy our ecosystem for profit, because we believe that each person deserves the basics of life, and because we believe that we must preserve our ecosystem, not just for future generations, but for other species on this planet. We believe that the values we teach our children in school, and that adults learn in church, are values that we should live by. We believe in solving differences peacefully, which now is considered downright anti American. Ask yourself why? Why would the country which hosts the United Nations have gone so far down the military path that it seems too radical to consider diplomacy as an option?

It is time to fight back. It is time to stop the corporate occupation of Washington, DC. The only way we can save the country is to organize. Join the Green Party and help the resistance.



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Letter to Mother Earth News

Mother Earth News, to which I have subscribed for years, published an article about the CEO of Whole Foods, and his book on the wonderfulness of capitalism, and the many goods it provides. I wrote this letter in response.

To Mr. Welch,

I was disappointed that you could be swayed by John Mackey's paean to capitalism, as evidenced by his self-identified wonderfulness.

The "free market" that we have all been raised to believe is the only way to provide for human needs, is actually that which leads to environmental devastation and the eradication of indigenous cultures, as you mentioned in the beginning.

The eradication of indigenous cultures is not something that stopped when the last Native American was killed or put onto reservations. It is going on today. John Mackay celebrates the fact that most people today make more than $1 a day. What does this mean?

It means that the last hunter gatherers, subsistence farmers and tribal herders are being driven from their lands and forced into gigantic slums, all over the planet, in order that capitalists can expand into their traditional lands. The Amazon people, people of the Congo, Indonesian hunter gatherers, people living in the jungles of India - all under attack, whether from dams flooding their homelands, to armies hunting them down, to deforestation, to climate change. I read the account of a man forced from his home in the jungle to live in Calcutta, who said that he used to have 40 kinds of fruit to choose from, but his children have never tasted fruit. Even though he probably makes more than a dollar a day, and therefore John Mackay counts him as a success. Billions of people who never needed money to live, now are forced to, and this is a good thing?

That is a bizarre thing to hold up as a triumph of capitalism to Mother Earth News readers, most of whom are trying to live on less money, with more happiness, as I understand them.

The "free market", which means producing for profit instead of needs, has led to the horrendous environmental destruction that we see today. Capitalism must grow or die, boom or bust, expand or shrink. This is why we send our military into other countries to "open their markets". Why we keep making consumer goods long after our needs are sated. Why we are bombarded with advertisements telling us that we must buy more to make us happy. That is why there are floating islands of plastic in the oceans, along with mountains of trash on our lands.

And why, when we have enough washing machines, or TVs, or boats, the factories shut down, and people are thrown out of work.

We have 10,000,000 empty houses, and millions of homeless people. How is this rational? And the talking heads on TV and in the White House tell us "Housing starts are up!! The economy is recovering!" And we're supposed to cheer? That more McMansions are being built on former farmland or in the deserts? That forests are being razed to build houses that no one can afford? That community tax money is being spent on expanding infrastructure to the farm fields, or deserts, instead of meeting the needs of the citizens? We know damn well that those houses are not being built to house the homeless, as they would be in a rational society. No, this is freedom, right here in the USA. We don't build houses for the homeless. We don't grow food for the hungry. That would be a planned economy, and therefore anathema.

Most of the advances attributed to capitalism over the last 200 years are actually human beings finding new ways to use fossil fuels to do the work that human labor used to do. Of course, the dependence on fossil fuels is now leading to mountains being blown up, and pushed into valleys, vast oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, and other places, tar sand devastation of the beautiful province of Alberta, national parks being destroyed, mass extinctions of the beings with which we share the planet, and the very climate in which human beings evolved being permanently altered.

John Mackay doesn't like regulations. Which ones? The ones that protect workers? He wants to go back to the 19th century, when millions of workers were killed in the mines, foundries, factories, and railroads? Or maybe he doesn't like consumer regulations, which make sure that our milk isn't really chalk, our toys don't contain lead, and our dog food doesn't kill our dogs. Or is it environmental protections he frowns upon? Let the rivers burn! Along with our tap water.

It is unbelievable that Mackay would hold up mass education as a capitalist achievement! Are you kidding? It is governments which provide universal education, as profit-driven education leaves out the majority of the people. And revolutionaries usually put health and education at the top of the list of improvements for the people, when they manage to overthrow capitalist governments. And the US, when it attacks revolutionary governments, usually attacks schools and clinics, teachers and health workers, in order to destroy such governments. Check out Witness for Peace for documentation.

To blame consumers for the state of this planet is outrageous. Who would choose to destroy the environment? Who would choose to have a billion people starving to death, while a billion are obese? Who would choose to have endless wars to take other people's resources?

Picture yourself trying to explain our present state to a visitor from outer space. How do we organize our societies? How do we take care of our needs? Why do we spend so much of our resources on war?

Go ahead. Explain to a visitor who hasn't been brainwashed from birth about how wonderful our system is, how it "works".

I have been brainwashed from birth, being born and raised in the USA, and even I can see that this is not working. We are very near destroying our entire beautiful planet, or at least the outer rim on which we live, and it is intolerable to see my favorite magazine laud the achievement.

peace
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Trying Again for Congress

Like a good Green, I am reusing my program from 2012. Unfortunately, it is still relevant.

We still have tens of millions of unemployed citizens, so my call to put Americans to work rebuilding and repairing America stands.

We still have repression, persecution and spying going on, so my call to repeal the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and the NDAA still stands. We now know that the government is monitoring every American's every communication, which is blatantly unconstitutional and must stop.

We still have ocean acidification, air pollution and devastating climate change, so my call to rebuild our energy and transportation infrastructure still stands.

I called for the repeal of NAFTA and CAFTA, in order to rebuild our productive capacity in the U.S., and stop the emmiseration of the peoples of Mexico and Central America. We now know that Obama is working on a plan to extend the power of multinational corporations, and give up far more national sovereignty to those corporations through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is being negotiated in secret, not only from the American people but from Congress, which Congress has permitted without asserting its authority.

There is something very, very wrong with a Congress that gives up its Constitutional powers so readily to an Imperial Presidency. Only the Congress has the authority to declare war, yet it has permitted this president to commit numerous acts of war against a number of nations. The Congress is to make the budget, and it is also to give an account of its expenditures to the American people. Yet we spend billions of dollars each year on “black budget” expenditures that are kept secret from the American people. Without an open and accountable government, Americans have no reason to call our political system a democracy or a republic.

Who would vote for this? Who would vote for homeless veterans to sleep in the woods, while private jets fly into Southern Illinois Airport to refuel with taxpayer subsidized jet fuel? Who would vote to take food from hungry children while the Federal Reserve gives $85 billion a month to Wall Street bankers? Who would vote to allow fossil fuel companies to contaminate their fresh water with toxic chemicals in order to fracture the very bedrock on which they live?

Anyone who votes for the corporate candidate they think is less evil is voting to continue business as usual: The business of lobbyists openly buying votes from the representatives of the people. The Constitution names bribery as a reason for impeachment, yet the numbers of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. and expenditures for lobbying have skyrocketed since 1970, and it is now accepted practice for lobbyists to actually write bills for Congress. This is corruption at its most blatant.

Anyone who votes for the corporate candidate they think is less evil is voting to continue endless war and homeland repression, since both corporate parties support these policies.

Anyone who votes for the less evil corporate candidate is voting to attack Social Security and Medicare, since both corporate parties claim that deficit reduction needs to come from these programs. This is based on a blatant lie, since anyone can look at their paycheck and see that Social Security and Medicare are separately funded programs.

I am running for Congress in 2014 as the Green Party candidate because the people of Southern Illinois need and deserve a representative who will raise a voice for genuine representative democracy, for standing up to an executive branch that has become too powerful and unaccountable, for putting an end to senseless wars with their enormous waste of money and resources, for protection of the land, water, air, and climate on which our lives depend, rather than allow them to be ravaged and devastated for the profit of a few. We need and deserve a representative who believes that every American deserves a decent life, and that responsive government, serving the needs of all the people, not government in the service of the 1 percent, is the way to attain that goal.


It’s a tough job to run against the candidates of the two corporate parties that will spend millions of dollars flooding the airwaves trying to persuade voters that more of the same is the way to go, or that, “the other guy is more evil, so you better vote for me.” But somebody has to do it, or things will never change for the better. I am ready, willing and able to run in 2014 to ensure that voters will have the ability to make this choice for a better future
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