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Fifty-eight years ago, on July 26, 1953, 160 Cuban rebels attacked Moncada Barracks near Santiago de Cuba. Had the rebels been able to take the fort with 1,000 troops—a good possibility—it would have started a revolution that might well have defeated the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista within a short time.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

After being held for 76 days in isolation without access to reading material, Fidel Castro, the 26-year old leader, came into a courtroom filled with 100 soldiers. He gave a rousing defense of the need for revolution to topple the dictator and change the corrupt and brutal socio-economic system so that all could be fed, obtain education and health care, so that farmers could own land and all have a voice.
In his five-hour speech, Fidel said, “The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.”
Instead of asking for acquittal, he demanded to be with his brother and sister rebels in prison.

“Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me!”

Fidel Castro considers ethics and morality to be essential for revolutions. In My Life: Fidel Castro, the 2006 interview book with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel speaks of these highest principles on numerous occasions. He asserts that “especially ethics” is what he learned most from the national liberation hero, José Martí.
Jose Marti: Cuban independence hero and inspiration for Castro and Che

With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks.
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books.
You’re very well read
It’s well known.

But something is happening here
And you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

– Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

Every once in a while a news story pops up that makes you laugh because it opens up a window on an absurdity of modern life. In this case, the absurdity involves two major national issues: Helping war-stressed combat veterans cope with life back home and the 40-year-old War On Drugs.

The New York Times reported recently that a group of researchers want to launch a study on the benefits of marijuana for Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans who suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The question looming over the study is will a stubborn federal government mired in the Drug War allow the study to even get off the ground.

The Times reports on an Iraq veteran in Texas suffering from a leg wound and several head injuries who told them “marijuana helped quiet his physical and psychological pain, while not causing weight loss and sleep deprivation brought on by his prescription medications” It seems the “munchies” can be beneficial to someone facing loss of appetite and emaciation.

“ ‘I have seen it with my own eyes,’ he said. ‘It works for a lot of the guys coming home.’ ”

I know a number of Vietnam and Iraq veterans who use marijuana. From my very unscientific survey it seems quite plausible that marijuana could be scientifically shown to bring a sense of calmness and pleasantness into a life burdened with harsh combat memories.

One vet who uses it fairly frequently says it helps him concentrate on creative matters. He says he’s not sure how much it actually helps his PTSD. He feels that is a matter of effectively addressing the issues causing the PTSD; in other words, marijuana or anything else is no replacement for the hard work necessary in recognizing why something is troubling an individual. But, still, he feels marijuana is a responsible, positive factor in his life.

Dr. Rick Doblin, left.

Another veteran who has used marijuana off and on for decades sees its usage as positive for balancing out life’s frustrations and difficulties. He laughs and says his wife will testify to how nice it makes him. But, he adds, it can be abused. “Too much of the stuff and it will make you stupid,” he said. “What’s important is to ‘understand thyself,’ then come to an understanding what effects, good and bad, marijuana has for you.”

All it takes is listening to the incredible litany of horrific warnings about the side effects of legal pharmaceuticals in current TV advertisements to understand what he means. Everything can be abused and different people react to different things in different ways. The difference between legal drugs and illegal drugs is simple: One is legal and designed by a corporation to make money, while the other has been deemed illegal and, thus, is distributed by a criminalized class that makes the profits.

It’s about ingesting a chemical that interacts with the body’s chemistry. In the case of psychotropic drugs, this interaction shifts the balance of certain aspects of consciousness. The body doesn’t care if the stuff is legal or illegal or who is making money off its use. If it has a benefit, that’s good.

Rick Doblin is the moving force behind the marijuana study. He has a doctorate in public policy from Harvard. For years, he has worked to legalize marijuana. Once he got his PhD, he set up the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Santa Cruz, California. The study proposed by Dr. Doblin and MAPS would involve 50 combat veterans whose PTSD has not responded to other treatments. It would be a blind study with placebos.

Glenn Greenwald has just written that President Obama, by playing a leading role in pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits as part of the whole kabuki-theater drama over the debt ceiling, and the alleged crisis of America’s national debt, has cut out the “soul” of the Democratic Party.

Let’s start by saying that if the Democratic Party ever had a soul, it was sold long ago to the Evil Ones who run corporate America, and especially the horned legions on Wall Street. But the point Greenwald makes is a good one: Obama and his backers in the Democratic Party in Congress — the power brokers like Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and the sell-outs like Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Mark Warner (D-VA), who are the Democratic half of the so-called Gang of Six currently putting forward a proposal to raise working class taxes while cutting taxes for the rich, and to slash $3 trillion from programs that are critically important for the poor and the sick — have abandoned any commitment they and the party might once have had to working class America and to the poor and have gone over completely to a strategy of trying to compete with Republicans in currying the favor of the rich and the powerful.

There is at this point only one thing to do, and it’s not to encourage some liberal figure to run a quixotic primary campaign against Obama for the 2012 Democratic Presidential campaign. Nor is it to write a letter to the President vowing not to vote for any reduction in Social Security Benefits, as 61 House members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus did late this week.

It is to move forward with a strategy to develop a fully-competitive progressive Third Party to run races in every Congressional district and for every Senate seat up for grabs in 2012, and to run a serious candidate for President.

________________________

Exhibit 1: The sad state of alternative media:

This article was submitted to both Truth Out and Common Dreams for publication on their sites, which have been filled with articles criticizing President Obama’s sellout of traditional Democratic Party principles supporting Social Security and Medicare. Neither site has been willing to run this story. Common Dreams has gone further, actually pulling a letter I wrote in the comment section of a Sunday CD piece by Jeff Cohen which was calling for Bernie Sanders to run in the Democratic Primary against Obama. My letter made the point that running in a primary against Obama would only lead Obama to again lie about his being a progressive, only to ignore any promises he might make should he be re-elected. In the letter, I linked to this article, and mentioned that CD had chosen not to run it. Apparently, at Common Dreams, letters criticizing CD editorial decisions are not allowed, yet this is exactly one of the criticisms we on the left have been leveling at the NY Times and other corporate media for years. So how different then is Common Dreams from the MSM? How different is Truthout for that matter, if it cannot run pieces that are outside of its own political viewpoint? Another reason why readers of this particular online newspaper should be sending us financial support.
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“Project Nim” is a twisted mirror image of “Grizzly Man.” The former is about a guy who thinks he can make a wild animal human by raising it in civilization. The latter is about about a guy who thinks he can make himself a wild animal by living in the woods. The former gets tenure. The latter gets eaten. Both want to be famous.

“Grizzly Man”, a 2005 documentary by Werner Herzog, concerns one Timothy Treadwell, a suicidal misfit who goes to live among grizzly bears in Alaska every summer for 13 years. He videos his encounters with grizzlies and concludes that because he hasn’t been eaten yet, he is one of them. He also sees himself as their protector, even though they are already protected in a national park. And then the bears decide to eat Treadwell and his girlfriend.

Moral: Bears will be bears.

The tragic hero of “Project Nim,” a 2011 documentary by James Marsh, is Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who is raised by humans who think they can teach him to communicate using sign language (chimps don’t have the throat structure to talk). The alpha scientist of the project is Herbert Terrace, a Columbia psychology professor who acquires Nim at the age of two weeks in 1973. Nim is violently separated from his distraught mother at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma and shipped to New York. It is clear in the movie that Terrace hadn’t given the experiment or his chimp much thought. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have given Nim to a family of rich, vaguely bohemian intellectuals with seven children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They seem like nice people, but nobody knows anything about chimps or sign language. This is also true of the press, who do a lot of soft features on the project.

For 18 months, Nim wrecks the home and marriage of his surrogate parents, and becomes dangerous as he gets larger and stronger. No “science” is getting done, so Terrace moves Nim to a country estate north of the city, from which Nim commutes to a classroom at Columbia. Various student assistants try to teach Nim sign language and are lucky to escape with their lives. Fearful of getting sued, Terrace decides that he’s got enough data in 1977 and sends Nim back to his birthplace in Oklahoma. He sees Nim a year later to have his picture taken for an anecdotal memoir bragging about all the sign language Nim learned. In 1979, he changes his mind and publishes an article in Science saying that Nim had learned nothing, that chimps can’t learn language.

After the trauma of adjusting to life in a cage with other chimps, Nim gets lucky for a while. One of his keepers is a hippie Deadhead named Bob Ingersoll who appreciates Nim for his essential ape-ness. They play a lot in the woods and smoke dope together. The reserve closes because of financial problems, and Nim is sold to an NYU lab where vaccines for hepatitis are being tested on primates. It is also a medieval torture chamber. Ingersoll lobbies to get him purchased and moved, and Nim ends up in Cleveland Amory’s private animal prerserve, where he has a few happy years and finally dies of a heart attack at the age of 26 (about half of his expected lifespan) in 2000. Since Nim’s favorite foods in New York were ice cream and pizza, one wonders if his handlers ended up killing him with arteriosclerosis.

Moral: Chimps will be chimps.

A large gap in “Project Nim” is that the origin of the name Nim Chimpsky is not explained, which means Terrace’s motives—other than to be the first man to talk to an ape— are not explained. The viewer leaves the theater wondering, “Why did he want to tweak Noam Chomsky?”
Nim Chimpsky incarcerated for failure to speak

U.S. President Barack Obama suddenly takes hard-line stances against his Republican political adversaries after over two years of meek accommodation.

International media mogul Rupert Murdoch suddenly exhibits uncharacteristic humility when dealing with escalating scandals in England and America erupting from vicious and illegal activities by employees of his many media entities.

Do these unprecedented actions by these two extremely powerful men make them candidates for “Do the Right Thing” awards?

President Obama is publicly lashing GOP Capitol Hill leaders for being obstructionist.

Obama’s new strident rhetoric arises from his being stung by Republicans spurning his rather conservative compromise solutions to the impasse on increasing America’s debt ceiling, solutions that include the President’s shocking many in his Democratic base by embracing domestic spending cuts favored by conservatives—like slashing Social Security and Medicare.

Rupert Murdoch, a man not noted for demonstrating any capacity for contrition, has shocked many by offering apologies and even embracing investigations.

In seeking to staunch the spiraling governmental investigations and public dissatisfaction arising from illegal activities by some of his employees and top executives, Murdoch is even accepting resignations from some of his most trusted executives.

One of those executives is Wall Street Journal publisher Lee Hinton who worked with Murdoch for fifty-years. Hinton appears to have provided England’s Parliament with misleading information during a cover-up of a previous misconduct scandal by Murdoch’s English news employees.

The FBI is now reportedly investigating allegations of illegal acts by Murdoch employees including their trying to illegally obtain the telephone records of relatives of 9/11 victims. Evidence of telephone and email hacking scandals in England by Murdoch employees now include police investigations into their misdeeds against former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

On the surface, it might appear that Obama’s willingness to offer major spending cuts to achieve compromise with Republicans and Murdoch’s decision to close his most profitable newspaper in England plus shake-up his secretive empire are laudable examples of doing ‘The Right Thing.’

But looks are deceiving.
Rupe Murdoch: It's not easy being (obsessed with) green (and power)

The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.

This amazing situation has resulted not through any brilliant strategy on the part of the Republicans, but by the self-inflicted wounds of the Democrats.

Faced with a collapsing economy that is at serious risk of performing a reprise of the Great Depression, Congressional Democrats and President Obama were in a perfect position to grab the flag and run home with it by declaring war on unemployment and on the party that has unequivocally declared itself openly to be the standard bearer of the wealthy and powerful.

All the president and Congressional Democrats had to do was announce that Social Security, Medicare, education and programs to protect the poor were all off limits in any discussion of the federal budget, and to declare an immediate 25% cut in military spending, as called for earlier by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.

How hard would that have been to do? The polls show it’s what the public wants. Any elected official who did this, particularly someone elected and re-elected as a Democrat, would have been hailed by voters for such a bold action.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late May and released June 11, 60% of Americans correctly attribute the nation’s enormous deficit primarily to military spending, which eats up 52% of every tax dollar (Social Security and Medicare are entirely funded by separate payroll taxes, and not only have not contributed a single dollar to the federal deficit, but have been routinely borrowed from by the government to finance the deficit in the government’s operating budget caused by military spending). Only 24% blame the deficit on domestic spending other than military (and probably every one of those is a Republican or right-wing independent who likely believes that the earth was created 6000 years ago, and is flat, and who will never vote Democratic no matter what).
Military vs. Education spending around the globen (US in company of Iran, China, Russia, UAE and India)

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? … You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
 

Lately, I find myself reading noir crime fiction and thinking about the genre as a way to explain the world. It may have something to do with the fact I’m an American critical of my government and losing hope that positive change is even possible. As hope evaporates, there seems less and less space between political reality and the criminal underworld. Or maybe it’s the obverse of a militarist obsession with Tom Clancy and War On Terror thrillers.

The adherents of wealth, power and violence seem so entrenched and in control that those without power become doomed to ineffectual marginalization and, if they poke their heads up too far, in danger of having their intentions and actions criminalized.

This feeling of an amoral tide overwhelming society is hardly new, and for sure, there have been worse times in human history. But knowing that doesn’t help when you look around and see exactly what W. B. Yeats was talking about in his famous 1919 poem “The Second Coming”:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Right now, a good friend of mine is being treated by several governments as if she were a criminal. She’s a retired Army full-bird colonel, and she’s the exception to Yeats’ nightmare vision: she’s a case of the best of humanity not lacking in conviction and passion. Ann Wright and a handful of Americans are still on board The Audacity Of Hope, which has been impounded and is being held at a US Embassy dock under Greek Coast Guard control in Piraeus, a port near Athens. The electricity to the boat has been cut off; the temperature has been around 100 degrees and a Russian grain ship nearby has sent obnoxious dust over the boat.

The criminal boat, Ann Wright and Captain John Klusmire in handcuffs headed to a hearing

The nation of Israel was successful, like the proverbial tail wagging the dog, in getting the United States and other western nations to act as if the honorable people on this boat were somehow potential violent criminals. As has been widely reported, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton effectively gave Israel the right to shoot Wright and others on board if Israeli commandos deemed that necessary. July 1st, the boat attempted to leave Athens harbor to sail to a port in Gaza and was stopped by the Greek Coast Guard. The Captain, John Klusmire, was arrested and charged with illegally leaving port; he was released, but will face trial later.

Years ago while studying in Zurich to be a Jungian analyst, I was exposed to an aura of this great person,  Hearing the recounting of some of the exotic dreams of my fellow students only made me more awestruck.  It therefore came as a  shock when in that setting I dreamt of sitting at a small table across from Jung, a half empty bottle of wine between us, as Jung said  in a slurred voice, “Don’t believe everything I say.”

I was on my way.

Jung once said he would have  had no interest in dreams if they didn’t have meaning.  For thirty years I have been intrigued by Jung’s thoughts on the subject as well as the thoughts of others.  Therefore a recent television program on “Why we dream”  naturally caught my eye. 

It was largely a  behavioral study of REM sleep, in which,  not to my surprise, Jung’s name went unmentioned.

My purpose here is to introduce some of Jung’s thoughts to a largely uninformed public, and to explain  the reason for his omission, which is typical of scientific studies of the dream state, and reports on those studies.

The author's book

It is part of America’s state religion, the Free Market fundamentalist religion that is accepted as gospel by all leading politicians, by the “brain trust” that sets goverrnment economic policy, and by the supposedly hard-nosed analysts who convince American investors where to put their money, that “markets know best.”

How then to explain the panicked reaction of investors and markets to the Labor Department’s monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the latest monthly jobs and unemployment figures?

Those numbers reported out for the month of June, released at 9:00 am after the usual kind of tight secrecy you’d expect of a National Security Administration international risk assessment, came in at an anemic 18,000 net new jobs, and a new official jobless rate up slightly from 9.1% for May to 9.2% for June. An hour later the stock market plunged by about 1% in a matter of minutes (that 1% drop represented a paper loss to investors of $140 billion!). The reason given by analysts and financial journalists for the plunge was that the “expectation” of investors, based upon forecasts of the jobs number made by economists and analysts the day before the BLS announcement, was for somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000 new jobs, and for a dip in the jobless rate to 9.0%.

So because the actual number of new jobs reported by the BLS was somewhere like 72,000 to 102,000 lower than the forecast estimates, and because the jobless rate edged up instead of down, investors dumped a pile of shares, causing the value of most shares on the exchanges to lose value.

That investor reaction, and the poor jobs numbers themselves, were interpreted by those same economists and analysts in the following days as an indication that the US economy was in trouble–that the supposed recovery from the deepest recession since the 1930s had “stalled.”

The “wisdom” of the market was saying that the American economy was stumbling again.

But hold on a minute. What has really changed with those numbers?
Voodoo Economics: BLS figures are used by investors, analysts and politicians like religious icons.

An old rock song plays
Distantly in my head
Behind three waterfalls.
The first waterfall, my tinnitus,
The second,
My faded memory of the song,
The third waterfall, my indifference. . .
 

I find that new songs don’t age well
But the old ones seem to want something. . .
 

You never understood me,
You never listened.
 

Here, I’m on a swing.
On the upswing, air sweeps by
Pretending to resist
But thrilled to make room;
Kids know all about this rush!
 

On the backward swing
The wind is a little confused.
 

Few things in nature move backwards
For good reason. . .
When the tree rocks back and forth,
What is back, what is forth?
 

But forward is the way to center now and
 

This may be the last time, children,
Maybe the last time
I don’t know.
 

GARY LINDORFF is an artist, musician, poet and counselor / dream-worker who practices shamanic techniques, and who lives in rural Vermont with his wife and two dogs. (He is also Dave’s brother.) His website is: BigDreamsWeb