An article about street newspapers caught my eye today, and since I've been thinking off and on about posting a bit about this phenomenon, I have taken the opportunity to do so here.
It's ironic that the name "Kos" at Google is more associated with gay tourism in Greece than with his own family's luxury resort conglomerate in San Salvador.
With the recent influx of my mailbox and the heart wrenching hopeless nature of some of the messages, I feel that the day has come upon us that this information needs to be given to you.
On July 7, Green Change launched its campaign for a Green New Deal. (I first found out about it on Firedoglake's 'The Seminal'.) Their ten proposals would shatter the earth as we know it (in a good way).
. . . The Green New Deal is our answer to the economic and ecological problems facing communities around the world.
The Green New Deal is a platform of policies aimed at creating broadly shared economic prosperity and effecting the transition to a sustainable civilization. . . .
After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of "a history of abuse". More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. While a small portion of that is legitimately classified, these whistle blower prosecutions and other disclosure controversies demonstrate that the vast majority of this secrecy is devoted to avoiding embarrassment and accountability. It has nothing to do with "national security" -- one of the all-justifying terms (along with Terrorism) for what the Government does. Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.
The great irony is that there is a perfect inverse relationship between the secrecy powers of the Government (which rapidly increase) and the privacy rights of citizens (which erode just as rapidly). The citizenry meekly acquiesces to the notion that it must sacrifice more and more privacy to the Government in order to deter and expose criminality, corruption and other dangerous acts of private citizens, yet refuses to apply that same rationale to demand greater transparency from the Government itself. The Government (and its private corporate partners) know more and more about citizens, while citizens know less and less about the actions of the government-corporate axis which governs them.
Glenn Greenwald posted this pearl in the pigpen of American political discourse on Bastille Day, July 14th, and isn't all the relevant evidence excruciatingly familiar to all of us in the progressive blogosphere, and didn't we totally overlook the simple and now obvious "inverse relationship between the secrecy powers of the Government and the privacy rights of citizens?"
So let's take a moment to thank our (not very) lucky stars for bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, and ask ourselves why all of them are blogging, instead of running the show.
Marybeth Hicks, writing for Townhall.com, has given my tender communistic soul a much needed kick in the balls. You see, dear readers, for years I held the position that when it came to poor kids getting an education, one had to consider a number of factors. Cyclical poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, poor healthcare - not to mention America's (seemingly) apathetic and sometimes downright angry views on the poor - were just a few challenges facing underclass children. Until Ms. Hicks taught me otherwise, I was certain the educational problems of all underprivileged tykes, from white rural redneck kiddies to black inner-city gangsterized youngsters, stemmed from a complicated mess, a collective negligence on America's part, a sickening betrayal of our most vulnerable children.
But how wrong I was. To my surprise, Ms. Hicks explained in her article how the intricacies of an institutional dysfunction in the American education system - for example, the backward practice of funding schools with local property taxes, thus keeping schools in poor neighborhoods rather cruddy - were irrelevant. See, after reading up on a study in which researches provided home computers for underclass children who would otherwise have no internet access at home, Ms. Hicks noted that most of the impoverished children's grades didn't improve. In fact, their grades suffered. Those poor kids were playing video games online instead of using the internet to augment their studies. Why? Because the children have no discipline.
Now the lack of discipline highlighted by Ms. Hicks goes beyond the realm of education, or at least I thought it did, ya know, back when I was a communist who preferred a rolled up an American flag to toilet paper. In those days, especially after growing up with a number of impoverished kids, I held a view which saw the plight of underclass children, and their lack of good parental supervision, as a symptom of a broken economic system, a giant "Fuck You!" from a country that didn't give too much of a damn about it's poor. With a lack of jobs in poverty-stricken areas, not to mention urban (and yes, rural) violence, plus the disintegration of the nuclear family in the ghetto, it's no wonder many poor children grow up with no discipline.
But, again, I was wrong. Now that Ms. Hicks has enlightened me, I understand the discipline problem which causes poor youngsters to consistently not learn shit in school stems from their parents' stupidity. And quite literally so, according to Hicks. She writes: "A well-educated person - no matter what his economic background - will figure out how to get a computer in his home and use it to his advantage."
She goes on to say, "It's time to stop throwing money, technology, and excuses at poor children and calling it education."
You see, dear readers, communistic Kenyan-lovers such as me (and probably you) can't see the simplistic solution to the problems of America's poor. Those welfare queens just don't have enough good old fashioned drive for success, a lack of American elbow grease, and have no interest in pulling their own bootstraps. Poor folks devoid of the American Spirit have, for too long, been spoiled rotten by all of the money hardworking Middle Americans have thrown at them. They already have free public schools, for Christ's sake. (And I know what you commies are gonna say, so I'll tell you now: There wouldn't be so many goddamn crack dealers outside the school if the neighborhood residents didn't hate freedom so much. As for the lack of decent textbooks, crumbling infrastructure, and teachers fleeing urban public schools, well, we'll just...ugh...let the free market take care of it. Or something.)
Ms. Marybeth Hicks is trying to get us dirty leftists of America to understand how simply poor folks can better their own situations. All it takes is discipline. And we mustn't make excuses for poor families who can't break their cycle of poverty; blaming a vanishing manufacturing sector, or a right-wing and corporate-dominated political landscape with no interest in helping the poor, or that happy-go-lucky war on the underclass (otherwise known as The War On Drugs) only diminishes poor people's ability to tap into their inner American Spirit and realize they're just lazy welfare cheats.
Because if anyone is out of touch with mainstream America, it's those dumbass poor kids begging for internet access.
"Success is a poor teacher," says General James N. Mattis, who has been nominated to replace David Petraeus as Commander of CENTCOM, in a strange loop-de-loop of Pentagon pecking order.
Petraeus moves down from overall command in Southwest Asia to run our miserable show in Afghanistan, and Mattis, who was previously passed over for Marine Corps Commandant, moves up.
Why?
Could it be his talent for winning hearts and minds?
"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people."
But even if Mattis isn't exactly a hearts-and-minds kind of guy, maybe he inspires his troops to treat captive populations with sensitivity and respect!
"No better friend, no worse enemy." The words echoed through 2nd Lieut. Ilario Pantano's head on the afternoon of April 15, 2004. That was the motto of Lieut. General James Mattis, at the time the commander of the 1st Marine Division in Iraq.
On Feb. 1, the Marine Corps charged Pantano with at least seven violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including two counts of premeditated murder.
Apart from a few bad apples, what kind of operation made Mattis what he is today?
Mattis played a key role in the April 2004 battle of Fallujah, Operation Vigilant Resolve, by negotiating with the insurgent command inside of the city, as well as playing an important part in planning the subsequent Operation Phantom Fury in November.
On May 1, 2004, the United States withdrew from Fallujah, as Lieutenant General James Conway announced that he had unilaterally decided to turn over any remaining operations to the newly-formed Fallujah Brigade, which would be armed with US weapons and equipment under the command of former Ba'athist Army General Jasim Mohammed Saleh. Several days later, when it became clear that Saleh had been involved in military actions against Shi'ites under Saddam Hussein, US forces announced that Muhammed Latif would instead lead the brigade. Nevertheless, the group dissolved and had turned over all the US weapons to the insurgency by September, prompting the necessity of the Second Battle of Fallujah in November, which successfully occupied the city.
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