This Can't Be Happening!

Free Wall Street, NY – For God’s sake, all you liberal, progressive, anarchist, socialist, communist, hippie, hip hop, yippie, punk whatevers of all aligned and unaligned varieties no matter what your age! There’s a little spark of something down in Zuccotti Park in the heart of darkest darkness near Wall Street! Many hundreds of people have gathered there without permit, declared it their own and are refusing to leave until Wall Street reforms its evil ways!

Now is not the time to stay home and read blogs about how horrible everything is!

Now is not the time to overeat, drink, shoot up, watch television, look at internet porn or whatever else you use as an antidote to despair!

Now is the time to go to Zucotti Park and overthrow capitalism!
Where's the support? A group of activists has occupied a piece of Wall Street since Saturday

The first thing that needs to be said to the heartless boneheads who, at the last Republican presidential debate, cheered at the idea of letting a hypothetical 30-year-old cancer victim who hadn’t bought health insurance die, is that this is no mere hypothetical situation. The second thing that needs to be said is that most such people in real life don’t “refuse to get” health insurance. They either cannot afford it (and their employer doesn’t provide it), or they are rejected by insurers because of pre-existing conditions.

If you are a young person, earning a take-home salary of perhaps $20,000, are trying to raise two kids on your own, and you live in Texas, for example (Medicaid eligibility is set state by state), you would not be eligible for Medicaid coverage. Your two kids would supposedly be eligible, but not you. Meanwhile, if your employer, like most employers who are paying minimum wage, doesn’t offer some kind of group policy, if you were lucky enough not to be rejected for some pre-existing medical condition like diabetes or a heart murmer or something, you’d have to come up with perhaps $3,000 to cover yourself with a plan that would not pay for doctor visits, just major hospital bills. But say you were paying $800 a month for rent, and another $3000 a year to keep some 12-year-old rust-bucket of a vehicle insured and on the road to get you to work and home. That would only leave you $7,000 to feed and clothe your kids and yourself. Would you take $3000 of that to pay for health insurance for yourself and reduce your money for living expenses to $4000 for the year?

Of course not! It would be coming right out of your childrens’ mouths!

All over America, especially these days with one in five of us either out of work or working at some job like the one described above or worse, while looking for a decently paying job, millions of individuals and families are struggling with this desperate problem.
The only exam the uninsured in America can count on is a wallet biopsy

Hvalsoe, Denmark–It was with joy that I watched television coverage of election day, September 15. According to all the nine political parties running, and the mass media, there were no wars in the world and Denmark no longer was involved in three wars—Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya–alongside the USA.

In fact, all through the three-week long election campaign, none of the parties spoke of war, or of that most fundamental of moral questions a society must ask: do we kill other people who do not attack us?

There were eight political parties in the 179-member parliament before election day. The right-wing coalition of liberals (Venstre, middle-to-large farmers’ traditional party) and conservatives (Konservativ, businessmen’s traditional party) held power for a decade but to achieve a parliamentary majority had been compelled to rely on the far right, racist People’s Party (DF).

These eight parties form two blocs: red (center left) and blue (center right).Two in the red bloc declare themselves to be socialist: The People’s Socialists (SF) and the Red Green Alliance (Enhedslisten/Unity List or EL). Another is the traditional majority party, Social Democrats (SD). The fourth “red” party, which shifts between blocs, is the Radical Liberals (Radical Venstre/RV, small business employers and self-employed).

In this election, significant shifts in the numbers of parliamentary factions occurred. EL went from 2.2% of the vote to 6.7% for a gain of eight MPs, 12 in all. The Conservatives lost ten of their 18 (from 10.4% to 4.9%), with most of those votes going to the RV (from 5.1% to 9.5%), which went from nine to 17 MPs, and the laissez faire, libertarian capitalist party, Liberal Alliance, which went from five to nine MPs (and from 2.8% to 5% of the vote).

The red bloc now has 89 MPs and the blue 86. Semi-autonomous Greenland and the Faroe Islands each have two MPs in the Danish parliament. These four are usually divided between the two blocs. So the red bloc, despite lacking one vote for a majority, can form a government and rule only if the Red Green Alliance does not oppose its three new partners over principled anti-war morality or pro-socialist economic policies, which is not likely to happen. In the past ten years, several billion dollars has been used for war and new billions are slated to buy more killing machines. Other billions have been used to bail out the banks here, just as in the US. EL’s new partners have supported these policies and continue to do so.

Since its founding, in 1989, EL has opposed aggressive wars. But in this election, it decided to join the red bloc and negotiate with it, if victorious, for a state budget based on a capitalist economy.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, 44-year-old leader of the Social Democrats, will become Denmark's first female prime minister

At what point does Israel and its complicated settlement situation become a liability for the United States as Americans cope with the growing pain of recession and decline?

The United States has been an enthusiastic partner of Israel’s worst Iron Wall policies since the beginning of the state in 1948 and, most intimately, in the years following the 1967 war. The decision to see the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem as conquered, militarily occupied territory and the acceptance or encouragement of a settlers’ movement has led to a world-class impasse and growing international anger at Israel.

The madness has gotten to the point that, even if leaders of the United States and Israel suddenly woke up one morning and accepted a Palestinian state, the state of Israel would be at odds with its own settlers it sent out to colonize the conquered areas. Accepting a Palestinian state would require Israel to take on some of its most volatile citizens with military force to dislodge them.

Israeli settlers and two settlements

The more Israel insists on its role as conqueror of Palestinian territory, the more dicey Israel’s hold on international respect becomes. And it all seems to be coming to some kind of a head this month as the hurricane known as The Arab Spring heads into totally uncharted waters.

“We’re watching a potential train wreck,” a senior western diplomat (speaking anonymously due to the gravity of the situation) told The New York Times.

Among the many shameful and cowardly things that President Barack Obama has and has not done, few can rival his complete unwillingness to express outrage at the Israeli military’s murder of a young American teen executed at close range during the Israeli Defense (sic) Force assault on the Turkish-flagged aid ship the Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea back on May 31, 2010.

Furkan Dogan, born in the US to Turkish parents, both legal residents of the U.S., and educated in the US, was a volunteer on the Mavi Marmara, the flag ship in a six boat aid flotilla that tried to sail with humanitarian aid from Turkey to the Israeli prison colony known as Gaza only to be stormed and captured and pirated to Israel.

When IDF forces boarded the ship from helicopters and speed boats they shot and killed nine people, one of them young Dogan.

When the assault occurred, there was no protest from the White House, even though an American citizen had been killed. (There was little reporting on the murder either in the U.S. corporate media, which consistently referred to him as Turkish-American–a designation usually reserved for immigrants–despite his being native born in the U.S.).

Nor was there any protest from the White House when the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine reported a month later that the autopsy conducted on Dogan showed that, like most of the other eight IDF victims, he had been shot in the back and in the back of the head, as well as in the face — hardly the kind of killing that would have resulted had he and the others — as the Israeli government claimed, been “attacking” the IDF boarders. (In fact a smuggled video shows two IDF officers brutally kicking a person identified by the filmer as Dogan while he is lying on the deck of the ship, and then shooting him repeatedly with their weapons, which my colleague Linn Washington says appear to be pump-action Remington 870 shotguns — a deadly gun popular around the world and among police for “riot control” actions. The weapon is part of the IDF arsenal.)

A UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who investigated the IDF assault on the Mavi Marmara concluded that Dogan, far from “assaulting” IDF forces, had been trying to video-tape their slaughter of others when he was attacked and slain.

As for President Obama, who is forever echoing his predecessor George W. Bush about his important job of “protecting Americans”?
Furkan Dogan, American teen murdered by Israeli troops, ignored by President Obama and the US government

London – Simon Woolley, the Executive Director of the London based Operation Black Vote, was one of the first British citizens to fly into the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks when he participated in a tour of America sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Woolley was originally scheduled to fly into the U.S. on September 12, 2001 but the cancellation of all commercial air flights in and into the U.S. in the wake of the attacks postponed his trip for a couple of days.

When Woolley arrived stateside he was amazed at what he encountered.
“There was a truly historical, magical movement of unity during the days after 9/11,” Woolley said.

Unknown to most Americans, nearly 70 British citizens died when the twin World Trade Towers in New York City collapsed during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the highest death total of any single country behind Americans.

“I stood in a line for an hour in the rain outside of the U.S. embassy ten years ago to sign the book of condolence. People forget how much empathy there was for the USA post 9/11,” London resident Paul Bower said.

“The biggest wreath was from the Communist Party of Kurdistan.”

Many Muslims came to the U.S. embassy to pay their respects.
9-11 Sculpture in London made from steel from the Twin Towers in New York (photo by Linn Washington)

When you are the New York Times, or in this case, one of the only real liberal columnists working for the Times anymore, there are apparently some things you just cannot mention.

How else to explain how a seemingly intelligent economist like Paul Krugman can scorch the Republicans in Congress and President Obama in a Labor Day column for failing to deal with the crisis of joblessness and deepening economic collapse in the U.S., but never once mention the endless and pointless wars into which the country is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year?

Here’s Krugman:

“I don’t mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising healthcare costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running right now–deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are no threat at all.”

What planet is Prof. Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, living on?

The U.S. has over the past decade spent some two trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the so-called “War” on Terror. The actual spending has been much higher (as the honest Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has explained), because only about 50% of the U.S. budget each year, including expenditures for “intelligence” and the military, is covered by tax collections from individuals, corporations, import duties and other federal fees and collections. The rest is financed with borrowed money, all of which has to be repaid in later years with interest. This country has spent another $5 trillion or so on the bloated military budget over the last decade, to finance a military complex that costs as much as the rest of the world combined spends on war and preparing for war. And again, only half of that amount was actual tax revenues. The rest has to be paid back over coming years with interest, because it’s all been borrowed.

Hey Krugman! Why don’t you tell people the real reason why the U.S. has a “deeply worrying” fiscal problem looming over the next couple of decades? Isn’t it really because we’ve got to pay for all these wars and all the militarism that we’ve been buying on credit? Be honest. It’s not future health care spending that’s the problem. It’s current and future military spending.
Spending on war and military power does little for the economy in the short term and it devastates economies over the long term.

This faux “workers’ holiday” on Monday is not a day for celebrating for American workers.

The official unemployment rate, just released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed unemployment in July to be 9.1%, which is exactly the same as the rate was in June, and which is an increase from the months in the spring. But that’s not even the real picture.

Worse than the official number of unemployed is the BLS’s official number of unemployed together with those who are part-time employed, usually in marginal low-paid jobs, but who want to work full-time. That figure hit 16.2% in July. Things are likely to get worse, though, because the BLS also reported at the same time that in August, no net new jobs were added in the U.S. — the first time the new jobs figure was zero since 1945.

But even that is only part of the story of the miserable economic situation facing American workers. The BLS doesn’t even count people who have stopped trying to find a job because they’ve tried for so long unsuccessfully that they have realized the effort is pointless. Many of these are people who are now staying home, perhaps helping to raise children. Many others have decided to retire earlier than planned (and earlier than they can afford to). Adding these people to the mix raises the unemployed rate to 17.7%

The Gallup polling organization, which uses a different methodology to count the unemployed, found the total of unemployed and under-employed in August to be 9.1 and 9.4 percent respectively, or a total of 18.5%. That is up 0.5% from 18.0 percent in Gallup’s July survey.

All of these numbers still don’t tell the real story, though, but a little math can help.
Being jobless is no picnic and Labor Day shouldn't be either

It’s a sad reality of our day that denial and bullshit seem the most useful talents to getting elected and to govern in America.

Bullshit is meant in the sense used by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his popular book titled On Bullshit. He defines bullshit as language with no basis in truth or fact focused on obtaining power. A liar knows the truth and tries to sell falsehoods; bullshitters simply don’t care what the truth is.

Some of the most popular candidates for the Republican Party (think Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman) are classic bullshitters who completely disdain rational analysis. For them it’s OK to say anything, like Perry and others’ denial of evolution and global warming. Reason and responsible history are for the weak.

Even “liberals” like Barack Obama are masters of bullshit. You can’t be elected President of the United States as a “peace” candidate and then run three wars, expand the use of lethal drones and special ops assassination teams and attempt to jail NSA whistleblowers, without being an excellent bullshitter. Obama’s bullshit is less the counter-Enlightenment stuff of Perry and Bachman; his bullshit is the art of seeming to fight for change as he really nestles into the status-quo.

In such a climate of bullshit is it any wonder Americans are living through such unprecedented stress and difficulty? And all indications suggest it will only get worse before it gets better.

Harry Frankfurt, left, Rick Perry and President Barack Obama

The problem is the current raft of bullshitters insist on propagating a master narrative from the 19th and 20th centuries that no longer works for the reality of the nation as it moves into the 21st Century. Master narratives are based on national myths and are found in the nostalgic assumptions of identity that people believe and want to keep alive in the future. The key myth in this context is the Myth of American Exceptionalism that says we Americans are the best of history and humanity — a super-nation at the pinnacle of global political evolution destined by our affluence and narcissistic assumptions of greatness to be the world’s role model and policeman.

Dig a little deeper and read some responsible history and it becomes clear we’re a complex nation — like all humanity, a struggle of opposites like good and evil — founded and sustained by ambition, violence and conquest. Now, in the unfolding 21st century, the whole project is running low on gas. The sense of exceptionalism is becoming more nostalgic, making sustaining the myth more costly and more detrimental to a good future. This means greater and greater amounts of bullshit.

Become a “major destabilizing influence” in your neighborhood, school or workplace, and spread the word, and the web address, of our alternative online newspaper.

Check out the shirt and the ordering information by scrolling down the right side of this home page.

These all-cotton shirts are bright red with black lettering, and cost $18 including shipping (except overseas). Get one free with a $50 donation to the paper. Be sure to specify a size: S, M, L or XL