Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World

Middle East Analyst Juan Cole on US Policy

in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Beyond

Juan Cole, internationally respected historian and blogger, is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and a longtime analyst of US-Mideast affairs. His blog, Informed Comment, receives 250,000 unique hits every month. He is author of numerous books. In this interview Cole takes an in-depth look at US foreign policy under the Obama administration, from the plan for withdrawal from Iraq, to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, the continued US drone attacks inside Pakistan, US policy toward Israel and the Occupied Territories and much more. Cole joins Amy Goodman on Democracy NOW! on the first day of the publication of his new book, Engaging the Muslim World.

For video, audio, or transcript, please go here: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/17/engaging_the_muslim_world_middle_east

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The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Winter Soldiers Speak Out in Europe

by: Maya Schenwar, t r u t h o u t Report

Last March, a group of soldiers and veterans gathered in Washington, DC, to recount their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. They spent three days testifying, confessing and mourning. They revealed atrocities never before spoken of - the brutal murders of civilians, the destruction of homes and villages, the rape and sexual assault of both civilians and US military women - and displayed photos and video footage to back up their claims. The event was titled "Winter Soldier," harkening back to the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, in which veterans gathered in Detroit to give testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed in Vietnam. Both Winter Soldiers zeroed in on the US military policy's devastating effects, straight from the mouths of those charged with carrying out that policy.

On Saturday, March 14, a third Winter Soldier conference unfolded - this time, overseas. In the leadup to NATO's 60th summit next month in Strasbourg, France, Winter Soldier Europe took place in Freiburg, Germany. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Germany, the UK and the US testified, revealing the impact of the occupations on civilians and service members alike. The event was organized by the nonprofit Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), in an effort to amplify the voices of soldiers - voices that are often drowned out by military leadership and political commentators, according to Zack Baddorf, one of Winter Soldier Europe's organizers.

"We've all heard American generals on TV," Baddorf told Truthout. "We've all heard the talking heads. We've all heard the politicians. But by hearing voices of troops who were on the ground, who experienced the reality of combat, the event hopefully inspired resistance and true change. We've served our country by joining the military; now, we're serving our nation by opposing this war."

For Chris Capps-Schubert, head of IVAW's Europe chapter and the originator of Winter Soldier Europe, the event represented an intertwining of the personal and political effects of the "war on terror." The testifiers' words issued a vivid warning to the leaders converging in Strasbourg in April, urging them to consider the human toll that inevitably follows militarized policy decisions. On a broader scale, the event called out to the international public, reminding them that even though the global economic crisis has shifted attention away from the "war on terror's" consequences, the bloodshed continues. And, on a personal level, Winter Soldier Europe allowed service members to bear witness to the shocking, sad, sometimes torturous experiences with which they wrestle long after returning home.

More: http://www.truthout.org/031709A

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Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. ~ Hermann Goering (quote verified at snopes.com)

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. ~ Jimi Hendrix

Everyday we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life..., our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

by John Nichols & Robert McChesney

Published on Friday, March 20, 2009 by The Nation

Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.

After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry. Journals ranging from Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New Republic to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times concur on the diagnosis: newspapers, as we have known them, are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of extinction. Time's Walter Isaacson describes the situation as having "reached meltdown proportions" and concludes, "It is now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters." A newspaper industry that still employs roughly 50,000 journalists--the vast majority of the remaining practitioners of the craft--is teetering on the brink.

Blame has been laid first and foremost on the Internet, for luring away advertisers and readers, and on the economic meltdown, which has demolished revenues and hammered debt-laden media firms. But for all the ink spilled addressing the dire circumstance of the ink-stained wretch, the understanding of what we can do about the crisis has been woefully inadequate. Unless we rethink alternatives and reforms, the media will continue to flail until journalism is all but extinguished.

Let's begin with the crisis. In a nutshell, media corporations, after running journalism into the ground, have determined that news gathering and reporting are not profit-making propositions. So they're jumping ship. The country's great regional dailies--the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer--are in bankruptcy. Denver's Rocky Mountain News recently closed down, ending daily newspaper competition in that city. The owners of the San Francisco Chronicle, reportedly losing $1 million a week, are threatening to shutter the paper, leaving a major city without a major daily newspaper. Big dailies in Seattle (the Times), Chicago (the Sun-Times) and Newark (the Star-Ledger) are reportedly near the point of folding, and smaller dailies like the Baltimore Examiner have already closed. The 101-year-old Christian Science Monitor, in recent years an essential source of international news and analysis, is folding its daily print edition. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is scuttling its print edition and downsizing from a news staff of 165 to about twenty for its online-only incarnation. Whole newspaper chains--such as Lee Enterprises, the owner of large and medium-size publications that for decades have defined debates in Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin--are struggling as the value of stock shares falls below the price of a single daily paper. And the New York Times needed an emergency injection of hundreds of millions of dollars by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in order to stay afloat.

More: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/20-0

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We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. ~ John F. Kennedy

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. ~ Noam Chomsky

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Water scarcity 'now bigger threat than financial crisis'

By 2030, more than half the world's population will live in high-risk areas

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

Sunday, 15 March 2009

Humanity is facing "water bankruptcy" as a result of a crisis even greater than the financial meltdown now destabilising the global economy, two authoritative new reports show. They add that it is already beginning to take effect, and there will be no way of bailing the earth out of water scarcity.

The two reports – one by the world's foremost international economic forum and the other by 24 United Nations agencies – presage the opening tomorrow of the most important conference on the looming crisis for three years. The World Water Forum, which will be attended by 20,000 people in Istanbul, will hear stark warnings of how half the world's population will be affected by water shortages in just 20 years' time, with millions dying and increasing conflicts over dwindling resources.

A report by the World Economic Forum, which runs the annual Davos meetings of the international business and financial elite, says that lack of water, will "soon tear into various parts of the global economic system" and "start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue".

It adds: "The financial crisis gives us a stark warning of what can happen if known economic risks are left to fester. We are living in a water 'bubble' as unsustainable and fragile as that which precipitated the collapse in world financial markets. We are now on the verge of bankruptcy in many places with no way of paying the debt back."

The Earth – a blue-green oasis in the limitless black desert of space – has a finite stock of water. There is precisely the same amount of it on the planet as there was in the age of the dinosaurs, and the world's population of more than 6.7 billion people has to share the same quantity as the 300 million global inhabitants of Roman times.

Water use has been growing far faster than the number of people. During the 20th century the world population increased fourfold, but the amount of freshwater that it used increased nine times over. Already 2.8 billion people live in areas of high water stress, the report calculates, and this will rise to 3.9 billion – more than half the expected population of the world – by 2030. By that time, water scarcity could cut world harvests by 30 per cent – equivalent to all the grain grown in the US and India – even as human numbers and appetites increase.

Some 60 per cent of China's 669 cities are already short of water. The huge Yellow River is now left with only 10 per cent of its natural flow, sometimes failing to reach the sea altogether. And the glaciers of the Himalayas, which act as gigantic water banks supplying two billion people in Asia, are melting ever faster as global warming accelerates. Meanwhile devastating droughts are crippling Australia and Texas.

The World Water Development Report, compiled by 24 UN agencies under the auspices of Unesco, adds that shortages are already beginning to constrain economic growth in areas as diverse and California, China, Australia, India and Indonesia. The report, which will be published tomorrow, also expects water conflicts to break out in the Middle East, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Colombia and other countries.

"Conflicts about water can occur at all scales," it warns. "Hydrological shocks" brought about by climate change are likely to "increase the risk of major national and international security threats".

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/water-scarcity-now-bigger-threat-than-financial-crisis-1645358.html

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A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ~ Albert Einstein

Dr. Ravi Batra: New Thinking on the Economy

Monday 16 March 2009
by: Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t Interview

Maverick Southern Methodist University economics professor Ravi Batra says the financial crisis is just one symptom of a long-festering economic disease - a disease caused by neglecting basic economic principles over the past 30 years. Comments made by President Obama seem to echo Dr. Batra's understanding of a domestic economy choked by consumer debt.

"Even as we're focused on the financial system and the credit markets, we are laying the foundation for what I'm calling a post-bubble economic growth market," Obama said Friday afternoon, adding "the days when we are going to be able to grow this economy just on an overheated housing market or people spending - maxing out on their credit cards, those days are over."

Dr. Batra insists that pursuing economic policies that begin to reverse a decline in the real wages of individual consumers is the only way to heal the limping economy. Changes in the "wage-productivity gap" - or the difference between how much consumers earn and the value of goods and services an economy produces - can explain the current situation and can help guide policy-makers out of it.

I spoke with Professor Batra about the current meltdown and how it can be viewed through the lens of the wage-productivity gap.

Matt Renner: What is the wage-productivity gap and how does it affect the health of an economy?

Dr. Ravi Batra: The wage-productivity gap is the gap between the real wage and labor productivity. The real wage is the purchasing power of the average salary. If productivity rises fast and the real wage rises slowly, then a wage-productivity gap develops and grows.

MR: When there is production and wages don't keep pace, what is the result?

RB: Productivity is the main source of supply, whereas wages are the main source of demand. If this wage-productivity gap keeps rising over time, supply will rise faster than demand and then we face the problem of overproduction.

Many like [former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan] Greenspan and other economists love the productivity rise, but if it leads to overproduction, that leads to high unemployment such as we are seeing now. Overproduction is a disaster and it leads to depressions.

If businesses don't sell what they produce, they lose money, and when they lose money, they have to lay off people.

MR: In the United States, how did the recent wage-productivity gap begin to rise?

RB: It started off with [President Ronald] Reagan. The wage-productivity gap started to develop in 1981. Reagan's economic policies increased productivity while restraining wages. One example is "free trade," which increased productivity but also reduced the real wage in the United States.

Also, the policy of regressive taxation. Reagan raised every tax that burdens the poor, but sharply reduced the income tax; all this caused a fall in consumer demand. Economic growth fell after Reagan's policies were introduced. Slow economic growth leads to pressure on wages because low growth means low demand for labor relative to labor's supply, so wages fall.

The third reason the wage-productivity gap grew as a result of Reagan was the "merger mania." Big firms were permitted to merge with each other. Each time there was a merger, there were layoffs, which also exerted downward pressure on wages. Mergers also increase productivity, further widening the gap. Reagan's anti-union policies were also responsible for the falling wages.

MR: If the wage-productivity gap was widening, how did policy-makers prevent the inevitable overproduction and economic contraction?

RB: Each time the wage-productivity gap goes up, the economy will contract because of overproduction. What they did was come up with a scheme to create debt in the economy because, by creating debt, they could raise demand to the level of supply.

Initially they started off with increased government debt. The deficit went up under Reagan, which raised demand to the level of supply. Then Greenspan took over as Federal Reserve chairman and whenever there was the threat of overproduction, like when the stock market crashed in 1987, he brought interest rates down sharply. By bringing interest rates down, he lured people into borrowing. This began to create private debt on a larger scale.

This really postponed the wage-productivity gap problems for the future because under these policies, productivity rose every year, so debt had to increase every year unless wages were to rise. Since productivity rises exponentially, debt had to rise exponentially as well. In such a situation, it is not hard to imagine a day when the credit system would simply explode. That's what happened starting in 2006 or 2007.

MR: The financial emergency, or the freeze in lending, is being touted as the most pressing aspect of the crisis. Why are banks unable or unwilling to lend?

RB: The biggest problem is that consumer debt is so high and the public has used up all its collateral. The banks don't feel confident enough to lend to anybody. The banks have lost so much money that they are feeling gun-shy now.

What we are seeing now is called "debt-unraveling" which is the biggest pain in the world. The potential for this scenario is worse than what happened in the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, consumers did not have that much debt.

The situation could be as bad as the Great Depression because, while banks are protected by the government, the 401ks and other investment plans are not protected. People are losing their savings through the fall in stock prices. The end result is the same: their savings are disappearing - the same thing that happened in the Great Depression.

MR: What policies close a wage-production gap?

RB: We should be following policies that close a wage-production gap, but that means you have to go against policies that created it: free trade, regressive taxation, and merger mania. This is not going to be easy and it will require a revolution in thinking.

This will entail breaking up companies, raising taxes on the rich and lowering them for the poor. I'm not sure the country is ready for this yet, but it will be once we fall deeper into the abyss.

MR: What do you think about the current steps the Obama administration is taking to address the economy?

RB: First of all, they are confusing cause with effect. They think the cause is the financial crisis, but actually that is the effect. The cause is the rise in the wage-productivity gap. The gap between supply and natural demand [as opposed to artificial demand created by easy access to debt] is so vast now. That gap cannot be plugged easily, especially if you're not looking in the right place.

Freeing the credit markets won't end the recession, because why would a bank lend money when it's afraid that it won't come back? When the borrowers are not creditworthy and have no collateral, why would a bank want to lend them money?

The Obama administration should focus on trying to help the economy grow. The stimulus package will help in the sense that it will slow down the bleeding, but it won't stop it. If all the policies that led to the growing wage-production gap remain in place, the stimulus package will not end the recession. Balancing trade - reducing the trade deficit to zero - would be a huge step in the right direction.

Look at the economic policies of the 1950's and 1960's - balanced trade, breaking up monopolies - for example, Exxon-Mobil will have to become Mobil and Exxon; raise taxes on the wealthy and cut them on the poor. Those economic policies will close the wage gap. Those were the decades in which growth was very strong, between four and four and a half percent every year. Since Reagan took over, growth has been three percent or less.

http://www.truthout.org/031609A

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It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest. ~ David Korten

Seymour Hersh: Cheney Ran Assassination Squad

Seymour Hersh is of course the American Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. I had the great honor of seeing this extraordinary journalist a couple of years ago. People like Seymour Hersh give me hope that investigative journalism in America. He is a true American hero. It is also my supreme hope that the truth of the criminality of this last administration will be revealed to all and that justice will prevail. I do not want to see these lessons go unlearned and passed on instead to future generations. Peace ~ Molly

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Sy Hersh: Cheney Ran Secret "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad"

Will Menaker
dearleaderblog.blogspot.com
Posted March 13, 2009 11:52 AM (EST)

Minneapolis, MN -- Speaking Tuesday night at the University of Minnesota's "Great Conversations" event, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made news by letting slip allegations that the Executive branch has been running a covert military operation independent of Congressional oversight, code-named "The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad." In response to a question from a student in the audience, Hersh said, "Yuh. After 9/11, I haven't written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet." Hersh said of the secret kill team, "Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on."

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-menaker/sy-hersch-cheney-ran-secr_b_174666.html

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Seymour Hersh: "Executive Assassination Ring" Answered to Cheney,

Had No Congressional Oversight

By Eric Black, MinnPost.com. Posted March 12, 2009.

Investigative journalist Sy Hersh dropped a bombshell revelation on Monday

about international killings ordered under Bush.

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota [Monday] legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective ... that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

More: http://www.alternet.org/rights/131153/seymour_hersh:_%22executive_assassination_ring%22_answered_to_cheney,_had_no_congressional_oversight/

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Countdown: Cheney's Secret Assassination Ring:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rkYvOaA6xk

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We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.

~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Fighting Back in America's 30-Year Class War

Wednesday 11 March 2009
by: Jim Hightower Visit article original @ Creators Syndicate

David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this conservative and rather-professorial columnist for The New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag with disappointment - you can practically hear the tsk-tsks and the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When most commentators on the right see things that offend them, they get snarling mad; Brooks gets sad.

What saddened Brother Brooks this time was Barack Obama's budget. In a recent column, he noted that the $3.6 trillion total is "gargantuan" (we columnists are paid to make keen observations like that), but what really upset him was that the tax burden to finance universal health care, energy independence and other big initiatives in Obama's budget "is predicated on a class divide."

With heavy sighs, Brooks expressed great despair that "no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people," adding with a tsk-tsk that "all the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward."

Leaving aside the fact that such things as health-care coverage for every American and a booming green energy economy will benefit the rich as well as the rest of us, Brooks' column was echoing a prevalent theme in all of the right's attacks on Obama's economic proposals: Class War! Indeed, the Times' columnist even suggested (sadly) that Obama's budget was fundamentally un-American: "The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment," he sniffed.

Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good history book (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" would be an eye-opening place to start). While our schools, media and politicians rarely mention it, America's history is replete with class rebellions against various moneyed elites who act as though they're the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a bunch of fire hydrants.

Check out the Tenant Uprisings of 1766, Shay's Rebellion in the 1780s, the Workingmen's Movement of the 1830s ... on into the post-Civil War populist movement that confronted the robber barons, the bloody labor battles at Haymarket and Homestead in the late 1800s, Coxey's Army in 1894, the Bonus March of 1932, the Penny Auctions by farmers in the 1920s and '30s, the rise of the CIO in the Depression years ... and right into modern-day fights involving environmental justice, fair trade, women's pay, workplace safety, tenant rights, janitors, farmworkers, union-busting, bank redlining, consumer gouging, clean elections and so forth.

If Brooks & Co. are so isolated as to imagine that our citizenry harbors no class resentment, they should go to any Chat & Chew Cafe across the land and listen to the locals express their innermost feelings about today's greedheaded Wall Streeters who wrecked our economy for their own enrichment. There is a fury in the countryside toward these plutocratic purse-snatchers who are being allowed to keep their exalted executive positions, draw fat paychecks and get trillions of dollars in bailout money from common taxpayers. People don't merely resent them, they yearn for the legalization of tar-and-feathering!

Yet, Brooks and his political brethren are now bemoaning the plight of the plutocrats, assailing the "redistributionists" who talk of spreading America's wealth. In his column, Brooks cried out for a conservative vision of "a nation in which we're all in it together - in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted on a small minority."

Do we look like we have suckerwrappers around our heads? Where were these tender-hearted champions of sharing throughout the last 30 years, when that same "small minority" was absolutely giddy with redistributionist fervor - redistributing upward, that is?

With the full support of their political hirelings from both parties, this minority created tax dodges, trade scams, corporate subsidies, deregulation fantasies, financial hustles, de-unionization schemes, bankruptcy loopholes and other mechanisms that turned government into a redistributionist bulldozer, shoving wealth from the workaday majority into their own pockets.

Brooks might have missed this 30-year class war, but most folks have been right in the thick of it and are not the least bit squeamish about supporting a national effort to right those wrongs. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over - and being kicked.

http://www.truthout.org/031409C

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Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom. ~ Jim Hightower

Slavery and Colonialism

By Sharif Adbullah

All around the world, people are talking about global climate change as the problem and “sustainability” (meaning different things to different people) as the solution.

I consider this to be the “low-hanging fruit” of the global transformation movement. Relatively easy to see, relatively easy to fix.

["What!?! Sharif, are you CRAZY??? Global climate change is EASY to fix??? What have YOU been smoking!?!?"]

(I thought I’d add that comment, to save the rest of you from having to write it.)

I believe that, in the restoring, “Mending” work ahead for us humans, coming to grips with the legacies of the combination of colonialism and slavery will be the deepest, most painful work that we will have to do. The changes made necessary by global climate change will pale in comparison. If we DON’T take on this effort, there won’t be any of us around to do the climate change work.

Think about the Holocaust. The entire world knows about the deprivations and horrors visited upon the minority people of central Europe, including 6 million Jews being put to death. Outside of a few crazies, no one denies that this exists, or minimizes its impact.

However horrible, the Holocaust is an event that occurred over a 4-6 year period (depending on how you mark the start). That’s half a decade. It impacted people who were the minorities in Germany and its surrounds. That’s half a continent.

The period of European colonialism and slavery lasted over 500 years. That’s half a millennia. I can’t think of a single continent, a single country, or a single ethnic group, that has not been negatively impacted by this history. It looms so large on the human horizon, we cannot see it.
I can see it. I am the descendant of slaves.

The two-headed monster of slavery and colonialism destroyed more civilizations than we can count. Greed and arrogance decimated African societies, South American societies, North American societies… Wherever the twin institutions of slavery and colonialism existed, the disruption of the fabric of humanity was the result.

And we haven’t figured out how to put it right yet.Every single war raging on this planet right now (70-100 wars estimated being fought right now), every one of them, is a legacy war of colonialism and/or slavery. No one wants to own up to this. However, until we do, we will continue to dance around this major issue, to our collective doom.

Every time a black man looks at a white police officer (or anyone else who is a visible representative of authority), they look at each other over a gulf of half a millennia of oppression, pain and suffering. This gulf will not be crossed by ignoring the problem. This gulf will not be crossed with a weekend workshop or encounter group. We pretend that the gulf does not exist, but our very pretense makes the gulf wider than ever.

I know this to be true. I am the descendant of slaves.

My white friends say, “But I didn’t enslave your ancestors! I would have been an abolitionist. Why is it on me to make things right?” The answer is simple: just like we must deal with the global warming that started in the Coal Age, just like our children will have to come to grips with the mounds of garbage created in the Disposable Age, we must deal with the legacy wars, the legacy economics, the legacy disruptions created during the Age of Slavery-Colonialism.

No, you didn’t create this Mess. You just get to clean it up.

I do not forget that I am the descendant of slaves. Your task is not to forget that you are the descendants of the slavemasters.

I do not forget my heritage. While I recognize on one level we are indeed all One, I also recognize that we were each put upon this Earth, at this time, in these bodies, with these various histories, for a reason. Our job is not to FORGET our history, but to TRANSCEND it.

And, transcend this we will. We will because we must. I think about the numbers of people around the US and around the world who are doing cross-barrier dialog talks. I think about the various inter-religious, -ethnic, -cultural, -social groups that have sprung up over the years. I think about the hundreds of millions of people struggling with the legacy problems created by the European powers meddling with international borders and international people. (I find it interesting that the first act of the fledgling United Nations was to ratify the world’s international borders. The Third World borders were created for the benefit of the colonial powers, created by arbitrary, capricious and arrogant means.)

Yes, the people of the world will seek and give forgiveness. Yes, the people of the world will reconcile. Yes, we will re-do ALL of our national borders, we will offer and receive reparations for our great grandparents activities, and we will end the legacy wars and the legacy oppression of the Second Millennium.

Global climate change is supposed to change the shorelines of the world’s continents over the next 100 years, as oceans rise. Human activity will change the REST of the world map, as all the lines change when we transcend our history of slavery and colonialism.

And remember: global climate change and slavery-colonialism are just TWO of 50-100 symptoms of “the Mess”. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves and get started!

http://blog.commonway.org/?cat=4

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Every day, consciously or through default, we shape a society that is in line with our values. Therefore, paradoxically, recognizing and accepting our collective responsibility gives us the collective empowerment to make substantive changes in ourselves and our society. ~ Sharif Abdullah

POWERFUL: The Obama Code/Lakoff Article

The Obama Code

Tuesday 24 February 2009

by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t Perspective

As President Obama prepares to address a joint session of Congress, what can we expect to hear?

The pundits will stress the nuts-and-bolts policy issues: the banking system, education, energy, health care. But beyond policy, there will be a vision of America - a moral vision and a view of unity that the pundits often miss.

What they miss is the Obama Code.

For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly. Like other self-aware and highly articulate speakers, he connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the "cognitive unconscious." Speaking naturally, he lets his deepest ideas simply structure what he is saying. If you follow him, the deep ideas are communicated unconsciously and automatically. The Code is his most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new President is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans - both conservatives and progressives - don't yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.

The word "code" can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.

Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.

1. Values Over Programs

The first move is to distinguish programs from the value systems they represent. Every policy has a material aspect - the nuts and bolts of how it works - plus a typically implicit cognitive aspect that represents the values and ideas behind the nuts and bolts. The President knows the difference. He understands that those who see themselves as "progressive" or "conservative" all too often define those words in terms of programs rather than values. Even the programs championed by progressives may not fit what the President sees as the fundamental values of the country. He is seeking to align the programs of his administration with those values.

The potential pushback will come not just from conservatives who do not share his values, but just as much from progressives who make the mistake of thinking that programs are values and that progressivism is defined by a list of programs. When some of those programs are cut as economically secondary or as unessential, their defenders will inevitably see this as a conservative move rather than a move within an overall moral vision they share with the President.

This separation between values and programs lies behind the President's pledge to cut programs that don't serve those values and support those that do - no matter whether they are proposed by Republicans or Democrats. The President's idealistic question is, what policies serve what values? - not what political interests?

2. Progressive Values Are American Values

President Obama's second intellectual move concerns what the fundamental American values are. In Moral Politics, I described what I found to be the implicit, often unconscious, value systems behind progressive and conservative thought. Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy - putting oneself in other people's shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better - what Obama has called an "ethic of excellence" toward creating "a more perfect union" politically.

Historian Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, has shown that those values, beginning with empathy, lie historically behind the human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Obama, in various interviews and speeches, has provided the logical link. Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy - to be "our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper" - and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world.

The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality - for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws.

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called "progressive" values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a President who is The Decider - who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire "free market," which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone's interests.

They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama's foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states - with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

How are such values expressed? Take a look at the inaugural speech. Empathy: "the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child..." Responsibility to ourselves and others: "We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world." The ethic of excellence: "there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of character, than giving our all to a difficult task." They define our democracy: "This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed."

The same values apply to foreign policy: "To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and make clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds." And to religion as well: By quoting language like "our brother's keeper," he is communicating that mere individual responsibility will not get you into Heaven, that social responsibility and making the world better are required.

3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship

The third crucial idea behind the Obama Code is biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values - at least on certain issues. Most "conservatives" are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called "partial progressives" sharing Obama's American values on many issues.
More: http://www.truthout.org/022409R

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It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology.

It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.

~ Marian Wright Edelman

Ten Things You Should Know About Obama's Plan (but probably don't)

The plan:
1. Makes a $634 billion down payment on fixing health care that will go a long way toward paying for a more efficient, more affordable health care system that covers every single American.3
2. Reduces taxes for 95% of working Americans. And if your family makes less than $250,000, your taxes won't go up one dime.4
3. Invests more than $100 billion in clean energy technology, creating millions of green jobs that can never be outsourced.5
4. Brings our troops home from Iraq on a firm timetable, finally bringing the war to a close—and freeing up almost ten billion dollars a month for domestic priorities.6
5. Reverses growing income inequality. The plan lets the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire and focuses on strengthening the middle class.7
6. Closes multi-billion-dollar tax loopholes for big oil companies. 8
7. Increases grants to help families pay for college—the largest increase ever.9
8. Halves the deficit by 2013. President Obama inherited a legacy of huge deficits and an economy in shambles, but his plan brings the deficit under control as soon as the economy begins to recover.10
9. Dramatically increases funding for the SEC and the CFTC—the agencies that police Wall Street.11
10. Tells it straight. For years, budgets have used accounting tricks to hide the real costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, and too many other programs. Obama's budget gets rid of the smokescreens and lays out what America's priorities are, what they cost, and how we're going to pay for them.12

Additional aspects of Obama's budget worth sharing:
1. Stops unnecessary government subsidies to big banks, health insurance companies and big agribusinesses.13,14,15
2. Expands access to early childhood education and improves schools by investing in programs that make sure every child has a qualified, strong teacher.16
3. Negotiates for better prescription drug prices using Medicaid's tremendous bargaining power.17
4. Expands access to family planning for low-income women.18
5. Caps the pollution that causes global warming, and makes polluters pay to support clean energy innovation.19

For sources, please go here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x8237821

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Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.

On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

~ Arundhati Roy