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I took a walk up the hill yesterday.
It was a little muddy for sneakers.
I could feel the chill
Coming up through my soles.
At the top I turned
And was surprised to see
That the sky to the west,
Backlighting the hills,
Was the same intense orange
As the posted sign
In the field.
Instead of heading back down
I kept walking a bit,
Glancing over my shoulder
At the sunset
Now fading to rose.

One little-noted but important result of the November election in the US that returned President Barack Obama to the White House for another four years is that the right-wing Israeli government and the Zionist lobbying organization AIPAC (for American Israel Public Affairs Committee) took a surprising drubbing and emerge a much weaker political influence going forward in US politics.

According to the recently created liberal Jewish lobbying organization J-Street, which advocates a peacefully negotiated two-state solution to the decades-long Israel-Palestine issue, Jewish voters in the US did not flock to the Zionist cause this election. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds from AIPAC and some wealthy Jewish Americans that were contributed to back hard-line Zionist or pro-Zionist political candidates for president and Congress, and despite a vicious anti-Obama ad campaign in southern Florida and in New York City targeting Jewish voters, exit polls the organization commissioned show that 70% of Jewish voters nationwide cast their ballots for Obama — the same percentage that has historically voted Democratic. Perhaps more important, given the current bluster by the Netanyahu government in Israel about the urgency to attack Iran, exit polls showed that 90% of American Jews list domestic issues as their main concern, not Israel. As one example of the kind of fear-mongering ad campaigns Zionist funders were running in Florida and New York, there was a large billboard put up along the state’s main north/south interstate highway, which showed an Iranian missile heading towards the state of Israel, with the message: “Friends don’t let friends get nuked. Stop Obama!”

The biggest blow to the Israeli government and to AIPAC, of course, was the defeat of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

This billboard was placed all around south Florida before the last election. It didn't work.

Okay, the etch-a-sketch vulture capitalist who would have given us four years of that smarmy missionionary-at-your-door smile, was thankfully sent packing by the voters, and Barack Obama gets four more years in the White House.

It was less an election than a contest between two hugely financed products. There was no “movement” for either candidate (though Romney actually claimed to be heading one) — the president made only one televised ad endorsing a member of his party running for Congress — a last minute promo for Chris Murphy, the representative in Connecticut who ultimately defeated wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for the seat of retiring former Democrat Joe Lieberman.

In the end, after both parties spent a combined record of over $2 billion in the presidential race, and another $4 billion on the Congressional races, we have ended up more or less with the same balance of power between the two corporatist parties, with the House having a few more Democrats in the minority and the Republicans still in control, the Senate with the Democratic caucus picking up perhaps two seats, and the president back in the White House.

So in a sense nothing has changed, but then actually, there are a lot of things that have changed. Let’s look at some of the implications of this election:

First off, most of that staggering $6 billion came from corporate funders and rich people, and those donations came with the expectation of a payback. Starting today, we citizens, and those of us who are still journalists, will have to watch and ferret out who’s looking for a favor, and what those paybacks are, and we’ll have to fight to prevent them.

Next, the people, mostly on the left, who keep claiming that elections are a fraud and that they will be stolen by a secret cabal of Republican operatives and the corporate crooks who own and run the makers of the computerized voting machines, have a lot of explaining to do, since this incredibly close election, in which winning margins in states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and other jurisdictions were decided by one or two percentage points, were ideal places for electronic voter theft to have occurred. It did not happen.

Karl Rove lamely disputing Fox's calling of Ohio for Obama. Where was his vaunted vote-stealing magic?

(A version of this article first appeared on the website of PressTV)
 

Tuesday’s national election in the US is shaping up to be a bruising affair, with both parties hiring armies of lawyers to fight over likely contentious battles over voter access to polling stations, dealing with long lines that could prevent people from voting after polls officially close, the counting of votes cast, and now, the right of international inspectors from the respected Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the process.

The OSCE, a 56-member international organization (including the U.S.) which routinely sends observers to monitor and oversee elections in countries around the world, has been monitoring US elections since the highly controversial presidential election of 2000, which ended up having the presidential race decided by a split 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. (The OECD was invited to start monitoring US elections in 2004 by none other than President George W. Bush, who was handed the presidency in 2000 by the Supreme Court.) Until this year, its monitors have had no problems doing their job, but this year hard-right officials in at least two states — Texas and Iowa — have threatened to have the international observers arrested and criminally charged if they attempt to monitor any polling places in those two states. Other states may join them.

“The OSCE’s representatives are not authorized by state law to enter a polling place,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abott, an activist in the right-wing Tea Party movement who is in his first term as the state’s top law enforcement officer.  “It may be a criminal offense for OSCE representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place’s entrance. Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE’s representatives to criminal prosecution.”

Abbot’s threat to arrest OSCE poll watchers was echoed a few days later by Iowa’s secretary of state, Matt Schultz, who warned that any international monitors who came within 300 feet of voting stations in his state would be “criminally prosecuted.”

Meanwhile, in Florida, Congressman Connie Mack, the Republican candidate for US senate in that state, playing to widespread antipathy among right-wingers towards the United Nations, which the more fevered among them believe is trying to take over the US, angrily denounced the monitors saying, “The very idea that the United Nations — the world body dedicated to diminishing America’s role in the world — would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad, and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting.” (Mack needs to do his homework: The OSCE is a European-based organization, not a UN organization, and in any case, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran are not members. Only Russia is, and it allows monitors — including US monitors — at its elections.)

Years ago, voter suppression was overt. Now it has become more sophisticated, but more widespread

I, for one, can’t do it.

As much as I loathe the Republican Party and its standard bearer, the incredibly smarmy shape-changing one-percenter and serial prevaricator Mitt Romney, I cannot bring myself this Nov. 6 to vote for the re-election of President Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Laureate with the mushrooming Kill List on his desk.

First, by way of full disclosure, let me state that I did, with misgivings and angst, vote for Obama in 2008. I did it with eyes open, based upon a (you’ll excuse the expression) “hope” that the many progressive voters, including a huge cadre of idealistic young people voting for the first time, and an unprecedented wave of minority voters, as well as working-class people of all races, religions and ethnicities, would come together after the vote and press him to be a progressive president, much as the working people of America back in the early 1930s had pressed a new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the bankers’ candidate from New York, to be a progressive president.

Boy was mine a vain hope!

What we got instead was a president who backed down in advance at almost every challenge, telegraphing his fall-back position, whether it was pulling troops out of Iraq or defending Social Security and Medicare, or even his supposed signal “achievement,” the passage of the so-called “Affordable Care Act,” now known as Obamacare.

There are good third party alternatives in the Presidential race. It's not just Tweedle Dem or Tweedle Lie

 
For an ordinary American these days, there isn’t much one can do to affect the direction of the federal government of the United States. Much of what our leaders do with that government — especially the more and more secret military and surveillance activities symbolized by the Pentagon — exists beyond the realm of real change.

One very small power a citizen retains in his or her public life is the vote. The problem, of course, is that critical issues are not discussed in the mainstream media where the national political dialogue occurs. For instance, you can’t use the term “class,” you can’t use the phrase “global warming” and you certainly can’t use the term “imperialism.” They are embargoed terms. And anything you cannot talk about and discuss in an effective manner is difficult or impossible to change.

As one soon learns in the journalism business, a national issue has to become a Democratic-Republican “pissing contest” before the mainstream will even touch it. Then it becomes a circus of who’s up and who’s down. So our imperial military-industrial complex — absurdly lumped under the euphemism “defense” — is discussed only by out-of-the-mainstream publications like This Can’t Be Happening and by third party candidates.

.

My more revolutionary friends, thus, see voting for President Obama as tantamount to selling out to the beast. I understand how they feel. While I’m as much a red-blooded American citizen as anyone and while I feel many Americans are good people, I’m thoroughly disgusted with the leadership in this country and the steady rightward drift over the past 30 plus years.

This feeling began for me when I came home from doing my service as part of the international war crime called the Vietnam War. I went to college and then started a career in journalism. Along came Ronald Reagan and his Shining City On a Hill. He preached the line that there was no “malaise” in America, and too many Americans ate it up like a herd of hungry cattle.

It’s bad enough that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lies repeatedly on the campaign trail and top Romney surrogates like John Sununu crassly engage in race-baiting that elicits no rebuke from Romney.

But the Republican Party’s penchant for prevarication and prejudice in pursuit of the U.S. presidency is reaching a new low – yet again – with actions by a GOP aligned group called Raging Elephants.

This group is funding billboards in Texas and Tennessee trumpeting the factually flawed assertion that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Was a Republican,” and is urging black voters to “VOTE REPUBLICAN.”

A Raging Elephants’ billboard campaign in Memphis links that MLK-was-a-Republican line with requests to vote for a black female Republican congressional candidate running there.

This King-was-a-Republican claim resurrects a similar fraudulent claim mounted in 2008 by a group called the National Black Republican Association. That Association placed billboards in South Carolina, Florida and Denver pushing the same flawed contention about Dr. King.

There is no historical evidence that the decidedly non-partisan Dr. King worked for either Republicans or Democrats. There is evidence that King’s father publicly identified himself as a Republican, however many blacks during the early-to-mid-20th Century did, understandably identifying politically back then with the party of slave-emancipator Abraham Lincoln.

A Romney campaign that encourages racism is also trying to lure black voters through lies

Two police lieutenants face a similar criminal charge but one gets a slap on the wrist while the other is fired.

One of these two police supervisors is an officer with a distinguished record of exposing corruption and misconduct.

Guess which of those two veteran police officers received the harsher punishment?

The whistle-blower!

Upon firing Lt. Aisha Perry weeks ago, Police Department officials subjected her to the humiliation of a public arrest, complete with ‘perk walk’ before television news cameras. But they kept a lid on a secret that casts suspicion on the real reason behind Perry’s termination: While publicly firing Perry for theft of utility services, PPD brass were at the same time quietly disciplining seven other Department employees behind the scenes for similar theft of utility service offenses.

Philadelphia Police Lt. Aisha Perry, targeted by vindictive police because she's a whistle-blower

A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana, showing that young children who are fearful in childhood are likely to be conservative when they grow up got me to thinking.

It’s not just that a whole generation of kids who get regularly belted by their parents, who are warned that if they behave in a certain manner they’ll go to hell, or that their faces will freeze in some horrible contorted way, or that they will be thrown out of the house, are becoming Republicans. It’s that virtually the whole country is populated by adults who have been raised in a climate of fear by a media and a government that are hell-bent on scaring the shit out of everyone.

The result is that a nation that once, for better or worse, was full of people who could strike out for unknown regions to stake a claim on land when they didn’t even know how to farm (land admittedly belonging to native Americans who could understandably be expected to react with aggressive hostility to being expropriated), who could weather brutal winters with nothing to get them through but a musket and a store of root vegetables in the cellar, who could stand up to the mightiest military of its day and throw off a colonial yoke and boldly create a new country, now cowers in fear at the imagined threats of a landlocked group of uneducated and incredibly poor people living in a country that is a throwback to the 16th century.

America is supposedly the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” as our unsingable national anthem puts it at its most unsingable point, but to tell the truth, it is no longer either of those things. Don’t believe me? Just try telling a cop who stops you for standing off the side of the road with your thumb out and says you are breaking the law against hitchhiking, that he is wrong and that the law does not in fact bar thumbing. For exercising your right of free speech, even if you were polite about it, he will in response threaten you with arrest. Argue (which is your right), and you’re likely to be slammed against his vehicle, cuffed, and dragged off to the slammer. Never mind that the cop is wrong about the law, and that your charges will be tossed out later. If you resist, or mouth off further during this arrest process, you might even be tased. In the end, you are busted, probably bruised, too, and you’ll be detained for a couple of hours until your family can come spring you by paying an extortionate bail.

In an environment like this, you’re not free, and the cop is certainly anything but brave. And that is the situation we’re in today in the U.S.

When the Twin Towers in New York City were attacked and struck by two planes and collapsed, I agree it was a horrible shock, but at no point was the survival of the United States, or even of the American people, threatened. Even if you throw in the attack by a third plane on the Pentagon, which collapsed a section of the world’s biggest building, the US wasn’t facing any existential risk. But the reaction of the American public to this attack on 9-11-2001, encouraged mightily by the US government, was to hunker down, beg for police-state laws, and to stop all normal activity. (In fact, any serious damage to the US following those attacks was caused by the reaction of government, business and the people of the US to the event, not by the events themselves.)

Americans have been put in a state of mindless fear

According to Webster
the first walls were steep hillsides
or palisades utilized for defense.
 

How many walls do we need
To keep ourselves safe
And to secure all our freedoms?
The strongest walls are subtle,
Like the one built by Descartes
Between the head and heart.
And Darwin’s wall
Between the weak and the strong
Still stands against the relentless attacks
Of fundamentalism
And the academic proofs of real science.
The Papal wall between the Pope
And everyone else
Doesn’t seem to have aged at all!
But there are world-class walls
That are not so subtle
Like the Great Wall of China
Built to accommodate two warhorses
Charging abreast.
And Israel is building a fine wall
In the West Bank – 8 meters tall!
A true wall should outlast its architects!
That one certainly will!
A real wall learns from the failures of great walls of the past –
 

wall