Dear George Bush and Dick Cheney, You Are Guilty of Murder: A Letter from a Dying Veteran

"I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to beg for forgiveness."

 

Former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, pictured in 2011, advised his party's candidate in the upcoming US elections to pick a running mate with more experience than Sarah Palin.

March 19, 2013  |  

 

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality in America -- The Contrasts Will Drop Your Chin to the Floor

Any of the ten richest Americans could pay a year's rent for all of America's homeless with their 2012 income.

March 24, 2013  |  

 

 

 

 

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.
1. $2.13 per hour vs. $3,000,000.00 per hour

Each of the Koch brothers saw his investments grow by $6 billion in one year, which is three million dollars per hour based on a 40-hour 'work' week. They used some of the money to try to kill renewable energystandards around the country.

Their income portrays them, in a society measured by economic status, as a million times more valuable than the restaurant server who cheers up our lunch hours while hoping to make enough in tips to pay the bills.

A comparison of top and bottom salaries within large corporations is much less severe, but a lot more common. For CEOs and minimum-wage workers, the difference is $5,000.00 per hour vs. $7.25 per hour.

2. A single top income could buy housing for every homeless person in the U.S.

On a winter day in 2012 over 633,000 people were homeless in the United States. Based on an annual single room occupancy (SRO) cost of $558 per month, any ONE of the ten richest Americans would have enough with his 2012 income to pay for a room for every homeless person in the U.S. for the entire year. These ten rich men together made more than our entire housing budget.

For anyone still believing "they earned it," it should be noted that most of the Forbes 400 earnings came from minimally-taxed, non-job-creating capital gains.

3. The poorest 47% of Americans have no wealth

In 1983 the poorest 47% of America had $15,000 per family, 2.5 percent of the nation's wealth.

In 2009 the poorest 47% of America owned ZERO PERCENT of the nation's wealth (their debt exceeded their assets).

At the other extreme, the 400 wealthiest Americans own as much wealth as 80 million families -- 62% of America. The reason, once again, is the stock market. Since 1980 the American GDP has approximatelydoubled. Inflation-adjusted wages have gone down. But the stock market has increased by over ten times, and the richest quintile of Americans owns 93% of it.

4. The U.S. is nearly the most wealth-unequal country in the entire world

Out of 141 countries, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

Yet the financial industry keeps creating new wealth for its millionaires. According to the authors of theGlobal Wealth Report, the world's wealth has doubled in ten years, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion, and is expected to reach $330 trillion by 2017.

5. A can of soup for a black or Hispanic woman, a mansion and yacht for the businessman

That's literally true. For every one dollar of assets owned by a single black or Hispanic woman, a member of the Forbes 400 has over forty million dollars.

Minority families once had substantial equity in their homes, but after Wall Street caused the housing crash, median wealth fell 66% for Hispanic households and 53% for black households. Now the average single black or Hispanic woman has about $100 in net worth.

What to do?

End the capital gains giveaway, which benefits the wealthy almost exclusively.

Institute a Financial Speculation Tax, both to raise needed funds from a currently untaxed subsidy on stock purchases, and to reduce the risk of the irresponsible trading that nearly brought down the economy.

Perhaps above all, we progressives have to choose one strategy and pursue it in a cohesive, unrelenting attack on greed. Only this will heal the ugly gash of inequality that has split our country in two.

11 Most Absurd Lies Conservatives Are Using to Brainwash America's School Kids

When you can't win, indoctrinate.

March 11, 2013  |  

 

If recent elections have taught us anything, it’s that young Americans have taken a decided turn to the left. Young voters delivered Obama the election: the under-44 set voted Obama and the over-45 set broke for Romney. The youngest voters, age 18-29, gave Obama a whopping 60% of their vote.
Now Republicans have a plan to try to recapture the youngest voters out there: Take over the curriculum in public schools, replace education with a bunch of conservative propaganda, and reap the benefits of having a new generation that can’t tell reality from right-wing fantasy.
How well this plan will work is debatable, but in the meantime, these shenanigans present the very real possibility that public school students will graduate without a proper education. To make it worse, many of these attempts to rewrite school curriculum are happening in Texas,  which can set the textbook standards for the entire country by simply wielding its power as one of the biggest school textbook markets there is. With that in mind, here’s a list of 11 lies your kid may be in danger of learning in school.

Lie #1: Racism has barely been an issue in U.S. history and slavery wasn’t that big a deal.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute reviewed the new social studies standards laid down by the rightwing-dominated Texas State School Board and found them to be a deplorable example of conservative wishful thinking replacing fact. At the top of list? Downplaying the role that slavery had in starting the Civil War, and instead focusing on “sectionalism” and “states rights,” even though the sectionalism and states rights arguments directly stemmed from Southern states wanting to keep slavery. There’s also a chance your kid might be misled to think post-Civil War racism was no big deal, as the standards excise any mention of the KKK, the phrase “Jim Crow" or the Black Codes. Mention is made of the Southern Democratic opposition to civil rights, but mysteriously, the mass defection of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party to punish the rest of the Democrats for supporting civil rights goes unmentioned.

Lie #2: Joe McCarthy was right.
The red-baiting of the mid-20th century has gone down in history, correctly, as a witch hunt that stemmed from irrational paranoia that gripped the U.S. after WWII. But now, according to the Thomas B. Fordham report, your kid might learn that the red baiters had a point: “It is disingenuously suggested that the House Un-American Activities Committee—and, by extension, McCarthyism—have been vindicated by the Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage activities (which had, in reality, no link to McCarthy’s targets).” Critical lessons about being skeptical of those who attack fellow Americans while wrapping themselves in the flag will be lost for students whose textbooks adhere to these standards.

Lie #3: Climate change is a massive hoaxscientistshave perpetuated on the public.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been hard at work pushing for laws requiring that climate change denialism be taught in schools as a legitimate scientific theory. Unfortunately,  as Neela Banerjee of the  L.A. Times reports, they’ve already had some serious success: “Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change.” Other states are taking the “teach the controversy” strategy that helped get creationism into biology classrooms, asking teachers to treat climate change like it’s a matter of political debate instead of a scientifically established fact.
The reality is that climate change is a fact that has overwhelming scientific consensus. In 2004, Science  reviewed the 928 relevant studies on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found that exactly zero of them denied that climate change was a reality, and most found it had manmade causes. To claim that climate change is a “controversy” requires one to believe that there’s a massive conspiracy involving nearly all the scientists in the world. So, your kids are not only not learning the realities of climate change, they are also learning, if indirectly, to give credence to conspiracy theory paranoia.

Lie #4: The Bible is a history textbook and a scientific document.
Texas passed a law in 2007 pushing schools to teach the Bible as history and literature in schools. Since that was already being done in most schools, the law was clearly just a backdoor way to sneak religious instruction into schools, and a report  by the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) demonstrates that many of them have taken full advantage. One district treats the Bible stories like history by “listing biblical events side by side with historical developments from around the globe.” Many other schools are teaching that the Bible "proves" that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. The Earth is actually over 4 billion years old.
Lie #5: Black people are the descendents of Ham and therefore cursed by God.
Among the courses justified by the 2007 Bible law, TFN found two school districts teaching that the various races are descended from the sons of Noah. All the Bible really says about the sons of Noah is that Ham was cursed by his father so that his descendents would be slaves, but American slave owners used this passage to claim that Africans must be the descendents of Ham and therefore their slave-owning was okay by God. Make no mistake. The only reason this legend has persisted and is popping up in 21st-century classrooms is that conservative Christians are still trying to justify the enslavement of African Americans over a century ago.

Lie #6: Evolution is a massive hoax scientistshave perpetuated on the public.
Creationists have an endless store of creative ways to get around the Constitution and the courts when it comes to replacing legitimate biology education with fundamentalist Christian dogma. Various states have employed an extensive school voucher system that has allowed creationist dogma to flourish. College-age activist Zack Kopplin has been chronicling the problem, and has found various schools nationwide using taxpayer dollars to teach that evolution is a “mistaken belief” and that the Bible “refutes the man-made idea of evolution.” Why do these school administrators believe that scientists are hoaxing the public by making up evolution? Kopplin found a Louisiana school principal who claimed it’s because scientists are “sinful men” seeking to justify their own immorality, and another Florida school teaching that evolutionary theory is “the way of the heathen.”

Lie #7: Sex is awful and filthy, and you should save it for someone you love.
While things are improving, even in notoriously fact-phobic states like Mississippi and Texas, “abstinence-only” education continues to persist in school districts across the nation. TFN found that  nearly three-quarters of Texas high schools are still teaching abstinence-only, which is based on the fundamental and easily disproved lie that premarital sex is inherently dangerous to a person’s mental and physical health. On top of this, TFN found that many schools are still passing on inaccurate information on condoms and STI transmission, usually exaggerating the dangers in a futile bid to keep kids from having sex. Unfortunately, even Texas school districts that use curriculum that educates correctly on contraception use are still trying to spin abstinence-until-marriage as a desirable option for all students,  even though premarital sex is near-universal in the real world.  Abstinence-only may be discredited with the voters, but sadly it’s still very normal in Texas, other red states, and  even across the nation.

Lie #8: Dragons actually once existed. 
As much as “Game of Thrones” fans might wish otherwise, dragons are not real and have never existed.  But as reported by Mother Jones, Louisiana’s notorious voucher school system has let some crazy nonsense fly in the classroom, including the claim that dragons used to roam the planet. A book being used in Louisiana classrooms titled Life Science and published by Bob Jones University Press claims that “scientists” found “dinosaur skulls” that the book suggests are actually dragons. “The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke,” the book claims.

Lie #9: Gay people do not actually exist.
After being beat back by gay rights and sexual health advocates, Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are once again trying to bring back the “don’t say gay bill.” The law  would ban a teacher from admitting the existence of homosexuality to students prior to the 8th grade, even if the students ask them about it. Instead, the bill would require turning a student who confesses to being gay over to his parents, with the legislators clearly hoping that punishment will somehow make the kid not-gay. The entire bill rests on and promotes the premise that homosexuality isn’t a real sexual orientation, but just the result of mental illness or confusion, and if it’s enforced, that message will come across to the students.
Lie #10: Hippies were dirty, immoral Satan-worshippers.
In the 1960s, it was common for conservatives to try to discredit the left by stoking paranoia about hippie culture and denouncing the supposed evils of rock 'n' roll. Forty years have passed, but in Louisiana, some school administrators are apparently still afraid that possessing a Beatles record means a young person is on the verge of quitting bathing and taking up a lifestyle of taking LSD and worshipping Satan at psychedelic orgies.
A history textbook snagged from a Louisiana school funded by the voucher program tells students: “Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles and these youths became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.” It’s unclear if the book also teaches that if you play a Queen record backward, you can hear Satan telling you to smoke pot, but that kind of critical information could also be conveyed during the teacher’s lectures on the subject.

Lie #11: Ayn Rand’s books have literary value.
Idaho state senator John Goedde, chairman of the state’s Senate Education Committee has introduced a bill that would require students not only to read Rand’s ponderous novel Atlas Shrugged, but also to pass a test on it in order to graduate. Goedde claims to mostly not be serious about this bill, but instead is using it as a childish attempt to piss off the liberals, but it’s still the sort of item parents need to watch out for.
After all, Texas textbook standards  require that an obsession with the gold standard be taught as a legitimate economic theory instead of the mad ravings of cranks that it is. We live in an era where no amount of right-wing lunacy is considered too much to be pushed on innocent children like it’s fact. Anyone who doubts that should just remember one word: Dragons.

Raising 5 Kids in a Tiny Camper? The Atrocious Ways America Treats Poor Women and Children

What happened to a safety net that's supposed to catch poor women and children when they fall?

March 11, 2013  |  

 

 

 

 

The following article is part of AlterNet's ongoing series on poverty in America, Hard Times USA. 
Leaving her husband became the only option for "Stacy" after he became violent with the children.  She returned to her hometown, Las Cruces, NM, with her 5 little boys in tow. Other than lacking an emergency family shelter, this is a pleasant mid-sized city. The family stayed for a while at the domestic violence shelter. Her time there ended without her finding housing, and she scrambled for a desperate, stopgap solution: her mother’s old, tiny camper.
For $300 a month, including utilities, the family could park their leaky camper in a park in her town. She had no money. We connected at the campground and made arrangements with the manager. Stacy didn’t have the prerequisite water and sewer hoses or electrical adapters.

For years, I've travelled the country meeting families in desperate straights. My 27’ motorhome teaches me how to live small, but I cringed as I left her and her under-9 troop of boys in their 13’ tin-can-home. She stalwartly said they’d make it despite sporadic child support, a host of legal and custodial issues swarming around her, unaddressed trauma lingering like storm clouds, and the challenges of raising a large family in miniscule space.

Much of what I have continued to learn about the inadequacies of our so-called safety net I’ve learned from families like Stacy’s. As with everything else, it’s theory and reality. The theory—resources are available to assist families in homeless situations—is dreadfully far removed from reality. Let me explain.

Poverty—Fast Track to Homelessness
For the 7 million families hovering in poverty, longtime homelessness expert, Dr. Ralph Nunez, founder of the Institute of Children, Poverty and Homelessness, bluntly predicted the ominous reality when he said: “If you’re going to be poor in the 21st Century, you’re going to be homeless.”
Reasons include: Skyrocketing housing costs, stagnating wages, plummeting employment, unaffordable health care, shredded safety net programs, and failed child welfare practices, including the abuse and neglect of the foster care system (1-page list of causes of homelessness from my book, Crossing the Line: Taking Steps to End Homelessness). Two decades of that deterioration has left its mark. The economic malaise of the oil and housing bust jolted previously stable families, pushing many into poverty and homelessness, ill-equipped to navigate the fragmented assistance network, straining existing resources.
Ancillary services that might ease family homelessness—legal assistance, child welfare programs, nutrition, counseling, childcare—were also slashed. Stacy and millions of other families found themselves with no recourse. It’s ugly.
Stacy and her boys would not get out of their 13’  camper for a brutal 6 months, enduring heat, cold and dust storms. In that time, because of the trauma she’s experienced that tends to make women vulnerable for bad relationships, she became pregnant. This loving mother didn’t consider another mouth to feed as a problem. Enduring pregnancy in the below-freezing winter and sizzling summer was indescribable.
What happened to a safety net that's supposed to catch poor women and children when they fall?

The Feds Get Dragged Into Addressing Homelessness
Spurred by my mentor and ferocious radical Mitch Snyder’s relentless hunger strikes and activism, President Reagan directed Congress to designate a modicum of money and administrative attention to address homelessness back in 1987. The McKinney Act, now the McKinney-Vento Act, is the supposedly comprehensive federal plan to address homelessness.

Federal law mandates that all federal departments sit at the same table to coordinate efforts, under the auspices of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, USICH. However, scant attention and resources (a meager $2 billion) are ineffectively directed at this growing national crisis.

When Snyder and our ambitious cadre of activists marched on Washington for “Housing NOW!” back in October 1989, we were determined to make our case for, well, housing now.
The alcohol-addled, grizzled guy on the street, purportedly a dangerous substance and sex abuser, became the poster child for homelessness. Criminalizing homelessness became the more common response. Federal funds barely touched the crisis of homelessness. In the process, with the inaccurate image of a scary homeless guy on the street corner engraved in the public’s mind, the needs of the emerging younger and more vulnerable population—homeless families and unaccompanied youth—languished. Over the past 25+ years, political will and capital dried up like an Arizona desert.
Communities were slow to realize that the underlying shift in federal policies excluded families from homelessness assistance. Unbeknownst to many policymakers, legislators, local officials and the public, the assumed safety network of homeless shelters for families and youth barely existed, in far too few communities (Map).

In fact, to this day, many communities lack any emergency shelters for families or youth.
Simultaneously, many families were devastated and became homeless in the aftermath of the dismantling of public assistance, aka “welfare reform;” coupled with countless policy tweaks to HUD’s public housing regulations, such as the barring families with bad credit and increasing punitive restrictions; and a greatly reduced budget for subsidized housing.
Starting in President Bill Clinton’s administration and intensifying under George W. Bush, HUD focused on derisively labeled “chronic” men and women on urban streets—veterans, elderly, mentally ill, physically diminished. Some communities struggled to fill the gaps and to provide humanitarian aid, mostly in the form of emergency overnight shelters that relied on benevolent faith-based volunteers, but many of those efforts excluded families or erected barriers to inadvertently turn families away.Parents, ashamed of their failures, disappeared in the background, fearful of child welfare authorities removing their children, which still happens despite laws to prevent it.

Defined Out of Homelessness—Beleaguered Families Become Invisible
HUD requires communities to count their homeless population, a task often done annually. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, HUD doesn’t count families like Stacy’s, inadequately—to say the least—housed in that tiny camper, or those doubled-up (or worse) with family, friends or acquaintances, or those in motel rooms (with a convoluted set of exceptions). That’s supposed to change, but years of ignoring families took its toll, and it bamboozled Congress.
HUD reports to Congress that 633,782 individuals were counted in the latest Point-In-Time counts, justifying appropriating few federal dollars to a diminishing number of programs serving a spiraling number of people without homes. The U.S. Department of Education reported slightly over 1 million homeless students, contrasting with HUD’s numbers. Yet HUD and their minions boast about the success of the 10-Year-Plan to end homelessness, a reminder of “Mission Accomplished” delusions.
HUD’s housing dollars have shrunk over the past decades, as poverty and housing costs shot up. Family assistance supports, aka “welfare,” also shriveled. Families unable to get cash assistance clamor to get into subsidized housing, but they find the waiting lists years long and no viable options. These families, “at the bottom of the poverty ladder,” as Nunez astutely points out, will become homeless. And we have scant ways to help them.

Astoundingly, even to me, a seasoned veteran in the world of homelessness, is the dearth of emergency family shelters in many communities nationwide. Too often, a family displaced by trauma (violence, disaster, economic crisis, etc.), has no place to turn for short-term help, often worsening their circumstances. For Stacy and her little boys, the camper was it. The only family shelter in her community, Las Cruces, NM, closed in 2007 due to administrative and funding problems. It has yet to reopen.
Families like Stacy’s often turn to motels, an expensive and complicated solution. Motels allow families to pay by the day or week, not requiring deposits or credit checks, and they include utilities and amenities such as TV and air conditioning. But it requires a tremendous chunk of a family’s tenuous monthly income, using their limited resources up to pay the room, leaving nothing to help them get out of their quagmire. The grueling small space—I’ve been in a 200-sq. ft. room shared by mom, dad and their 5 kids—lack of cooking facilities and no privacy are at the top of complaints I’ve heard from these beleaguered and invisible families. But it’s better than the streets.

Short-Term and Long-Term Solutions
Ignored, to this day, is the need for a flexible variety of family housing solutions with layers of services to address the ongoing trauma and physical damages caused and worsened by abject poverty and homelessness.  It is possible, but rare.
Respected programs, such as UMOM in Phoenix, AZ, demonstrate commendable determination to create myriad housing and individually tailored services, as opposed to inadequate one-size-fits-all approaches. UMOM keeps families together, avoiding what my colleague Pat LaMarche refers to as the “Sophie’s Choice of the 21st Century” conundrum, where the parent has to farm out their teenage males because the shelter bans boys over a certain age (as young as 10) or stay together in adverse circumstances—sleeping in a car, storage shed, leaky camper, or with unscrupulous hosts.
On our 2013 southwest tour to raise awareness and inspire compassion for homeless families, youth and individuals, when asked by The Young Turks host Cenk Ugyur’s about what’s needed to address homelessness, my Babes of Wrath colleague Pat LaMarche provided a perfect answer: housing.
For Stacy, finding a way out was essential, but daunting. I became more involved, conducting long-distance advocacy for her family with the local housing authority. The HPRP, Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Plan, part of Obama’s under-hyped stimulus plan, became her ticket to permanent housing. Because she had no criminal record and didn’t abuse substances, she qualified. Her family moved into a full-size house trailer, two-thirds of her rent paid by the housing authority. Compared to many other families, Stacy's is lucky, for now.

The CIA in Hollywood

 How the Agency Shapes Film and Television By Tricia Jenkins

What’s your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can’t protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA’s image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s.
The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA’s role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency’s and its officers’ involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image.

Table of Contents and Excerpt

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Hollywood’s Propaganda

“Movies have become a happy arm of the United States government as they advocate for violence and war crimes.”

by Margaret Kimberley

 

There isn’t any part of popular culture which allows the citizens of this country to escape the glorification of American imperialism. One can’t watch a football game without seeing an honor guard present the colors, or soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, or in the worst case scenario a flyover of military jets. Commercials advertising everything from cars to dog food present endless images of soldiers returning home from the battlefield.


The movie industry has embraced the glorification of militarism and American violence practiced abroad as eagerly as professional sports or advertising. There is scarcely a big budget action movie whose plot doesn’t include a scene on an aircraft carrier and even children’s cartoons and games are brought back to life with story lines made in cooperation with the Department of Defense.
Now the propaganda has migrated from the backdrop of action movies to being the focal point of serious drama. Two recently commercially successful and award winning movies were all about the empire. They were praised by critics and popular with audiences as they spread vicious lies and or defended the worst impulses of the American government.

Osama bin Laden had barely taken his last breath when Hollywood gave the green light to dramatize the story of his assassination. The film Zero Dark Thirty filled the bill, complete with a validation of torture, which is considered a war crime nearly everywhere on earth except the United States.
The producers of Zero Dark Thirty were given access to classified documents, an action which ought to have impugned the film makers’ integrity and made it unacceptable to audiences and critics. The Obama administration forgot about its draconian whistle blower punishments in order to make sure that the president and his policies were lionized on film.

While in one instance propaganda demanded a speedy take on history, in another case an old story suddenly became interesting. Thirty years after Americans were taken hostage at their embassy in Iran, Hollywood came calling at an opportune moment politically. Argo won an Academy Award at the precise moment that the Obama administration is making its most serious case for war against Iran. The story of the six hostages who escaped to the Canadian embassy would seem to be interesting enough on its own merits, but the filmmakers added a climactic but completely fictional chase down an airport runway just in case any viewers didn’t hate Iranians enough by the end of the movie. Not to be outdone in the propaganda department, the lead role was played by a white actor when the real life and still living protagonist, Antonio Mendez, is Latino.
If there was any doubt that government propaganda was the order of the day in entertainment, first lady Michelle Obama presented the best picture award for Argo at the Oscars. She was surrounded by military personnel in uniform as she did so.

It is a little known fact that the Central Intelligence Agency has a film office. Its entertainment industry liaison office came into being in the 1990s and has been used to by movie and television producers to shape the agency’s image. Of course, that means lying about history. The producers of Argo gave passing recognition of the CIA operation which over threw a democratic government in Iran and placed a monarch in power in the early 1950s. They didn’t raise the question of why all the hostages weren’t released until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day or delve into charges that his administration thwarted Jimmy Carter’s efforts to end the standoff.

There was a time when the entertainment industry promoted an anti-establishment counter culture, consciously creating a space for nonconformity. Movies and music were means of escaping the dictates of the status quo. Now they are part and parcel of the establishment and leave no outlet for true creativity or independent thought. Movies have become a happy arm of the United States government as they advocate for violence and war crimes to be carried out around the world.
Hollywood is after all an important part of corporate media. Like other media, it is now shaped by fewer and fewer players, with large conglomerates replacing the creative people who once made films interesting. The endless sequels and big budget action movies now comprise most of what we can expect to see at the multiplex. In a country becoming more and more imperialistic every day, it isn’t surprising to see the Pentagon’s world view on screen.

While not surprising, it shouldn’t be acceptable. If Barack Obama or any other president declares that there will be war against Iran, then most Americans will approve. Sadly, that approval will be even harder to fight against if the powerful and appealing images seen on the silver screen are perceived to be part of the call to arms.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dies

Venezuelan officials called for peace and unity after President Hugo Chavez's death on Tuesday, emphasizing in state television broadcasts that all branches of the government and the military were standing together.

Elections will be held in 30 days, and Vice President Nicolas Maduro will assume the presidency in the interim, Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said in an interview broadcast on state-run VTV.

Tearing up as he announced Chavez's death after a long battle with cancer, Maduro called on Venezuelans to remain respectful.

"We must unite now more than ever," Maduro said.

Henrique Capriles Radonski, a former presidential candidate and opposition leader, said Venezuelans should come together.

"This is not the time for difference," he said. "It is the time for unity. It is the time for peace."

Supporters of Chavez poured into a Caracas square soon after news of his death spread. Some wept openly. Others waved flags and held up pictures of the late president.

There were no reports of major violence, but there was palpable tension in the streets, as some Venezuelans heading home from work tried to steer clear of Chavez's fervent supporters.

Venezuela's military is in a "process of deploying ... to ensure the safety of all Venezuelans" and to support the country's constitution in the wake of Chavez's death, said Adm. Diego Molero, Venezuela's defense minister.

iReport: Share your thoughts on the death of the Venezuelan president

Venezuela prepares for funeral, elections

Venezuela's government has declared seven days of national mourning, Jaua said. At Venezuelan embassies around the world Tuesday, flags were flying at half mast.

Chavez's remains will be taken to a military academy in Caracas on Wednesday, Jaua said. There he will lie in state for three days. His state funeral will be held there on Friday morning, Jaua said.

The announcement of Chavez's death came hours after Maduro met with the country's top political and military leaders about Chavez's worsening health condition and suggested someone may have deliberately infected Chavez with cancer.

Chavez first announced his cancer diagnosis in June 2011, but the government never revealed details about his prognosis or specified what kind of cancer he had

Shortly before his last trip to Cuba for cancer surgery in December, Chavez tapped Maduro as the man he wanted to replace him.

 

2006: Chavez calls Bush 'the devil'

 

 

Ban Ki-moon reacts to Chavez's death

 

 

The relationship between Chavez and U.S.

 

 

Hugo Chavez's legacy

 

"He is one of the young leaders with the greatest ability to continue, if I cannot," Chavez said.

Chavez leaves a revolutionary legacy

Maduro made no mention of running for election in his public comments Tuesday, but he is widely expected to be the United Socialist Party of Venezuela's candidate for the job.

During Chavez's absence from the political stage over the past three months, Maduro has been front and center. He has spoken at political rallies around the country and delivered updates about Chavez on national television, drawing growing support from Chavez loyalists.

Opposition critics have said he was campaigning for office -- a claim the government has denied. Even as Jaua said Tuesday that Maduro would temporarily assume the presidency, some critics questioned whether that was constitutional, since Chavez missed his inauguration and was never officially sworn in.

Opposition politicians haven't said who will represent them in the election. But as speculation mounted over Chavez's health in recent weeks, many had turned to Capriles, who lost to Chavez in October's presidential contest.

On Tuesday, Capriles called for a national dialogue including all Venezuelans, not just Chavez's supporters.

"Today there are thousands, maybe millions, of Venezuelans who are asking themselves what will happen, who feel anxiety, and including those who feel afraid," Capriles said.

Chavez supporters, critics react

Word of Chavez's death drew swift expressions of sorrow and solidarity from regional allies.

Ecuador and Cuba both announced three days of national mourning to honor Chavez.

"The national government expresses its solidarity in light of this irreparable loss that puts the Venezuelan people and all the region in mourning and at the same time sends its heartfelt condolences to the family of the late champion of Latin America," Ecuador's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Bolivian President Evo Morales' voice cracked as he spoke to reporters, describing Chavez as someone "who gave all his life for the liberation of the Venezuelan people ... of all the anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists of the world."

But longtime critics of the controversial president offered a different take.

"Hugo Chavez was a tyrant who forced the people of Venezuela to live in fear. His death dents the alliance of anti-U.S. leftist leaders in South America. Good riddance to this dictator," said U.S. Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. "Venezuela once had a strong democratic tradition and was close to the United States. Chavez's death sets the stage for fresh elections. While not guaranteed, closer U.S. relations with (this) key country in our Hemisphere are now possible."

Venezuela-U.S. relations surge into spotlight

Just hours before the announcement of Chavez's death, relations between the two countries appeared to be souring, as Venezuelan officials said they were expelling two U.S. Embassy officials and accused them of plotting to destabilize the country.

The U.S. officials, both air attaches at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, are accused of having meetings with members of the Venezuelan military and encouraging them to pursue "destabilizing projects," Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said.

"We will not allow any foreign interference in our country," Jaua said. "Do not think that the situation of pain over the health of President Chavez will translate into weakness."

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell denied the accusations.

Opinion: Chavez used force of personality to win votes, influence leaders

"Notwithstanding the significant differences between our governments, we continue to believe it important to seek a functional and more productive relationship with Venezuela based on issues of mutual interest," he said. "This fallacious assertion of inappropriate U.S. action leads us to conclude that, unfortunately, the current Venezuelan government is not interested an improved relationship."

After announcing the expulsion of one attache, Maduro -- addressing the media in a lengthy statement -- asserted that someday there will be "scientific proof" that Chavez was somehow infected by outsiders.

"An assertion that the United States was somehow involved in causing President Chavez's illness is absurd, and we definitively reject it," Ventrell said.

It isn't the first time that a Venezuelan government official has implied that a plot could be behind Chavez's cancer.

Chavez made the assertion himself in 2011, saying at a military event in Caracas that he wondered whether the United States could be infecting Latin American leaders with the illness.

Scandal Spectacle: The 10 Most Corrupt and Compromised Cardinals Voting For the New Pope

While the world cries for the church to reform itself, the next pope's electors include cardinals who coddled priests who preyed on children.

Cardinals on balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica after electing Joseph Ratzinger to succeed John Paul II as pope on April 19, 2005.

Photo Credit: Rostislav Glinsky / Shutterstock.com

February 27, 2013  |

 

Ordinarily, the prelates of the Roman Catholic Church like a good spectacle. If you’ve ever witnessed the pomp and regalia of a bishops’ procession, you know what I mean: the robes rendered in luxurious fabrics, the exotic millinery, the swinging brass chancer billowing clouds of fragrant smoke. But as the cardinals assemble this week in Rome to begin the task of choosing a pope to replace the retiring Benedict XVI, the convergence of men in red hats and ankle-length cassocks is less a glorious display than a spectacle of scandal.
The pope’s abdication, unprecedented in the post-Renaissance period, comes under an acrid cloud of corruption that includes scandals involving the Vatican Bank, sexual harassment by prelates, and most troubling, the collusion of the hierarchy in covering the crimes of sexually predatory priests who preyed on young children and guileless teenagers, and once discovered, turned many of them loose to prey on still more.
Leaving aside issues concerning some fishy doin’s at the Vatican Bank (recounted here by Lynn Parramore), or the sexual harassment scandal that inspired this week’s resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien, archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh (in which three priests and one former priest accused the cardinal of making sexual advances toward them*), we focus our gaze here on 10 cardinals who either aided and abetted the priests who abused children, or who served as apologists for the church in its failure to report their crimes. This list is by no means definitive or complete; there are likely many more among the 120 cardinals entrusted with the election of the next pope who traded the safety and welfare of children entrusted to the church’s spiritual care for the safety of their own place in the hierarchy of the world’s oldest Christian denomination.
It is worth noting that during the height of the sex abuse of children by priests, the church’s presiding disciplinarian was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI. Offending priests were rarely disciplined, and were almost never reported to law enforcement authorities; Ratzinger instead focused his energy on silencing liberation theologians, threatening feminist nuns with expulsion, and punishing a bishop for being too accepting of gay people.
1. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York. For flash and visibility, the archbishop’s post in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral offers a level of media-conferred power second only to that commanded by the pope himself. (Pope John Paul II famously dubbed the New York post as “archbishop of the capital of the world.”) In the wake of Benedict’s abdication, Dolan fast became the subject of talk, perhaps generated by his own noise machine, that he was a contender for the church’s top spot.
Just days before he took off for Rome, however, Dolan sat for three hours of questioning during a legal deposition for a case brought by survivors of sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee during Dolan’s tenure there. According to New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein, lawyers for the plaintiffs, who claim to have been abused by priests when they were children, sought to ascertain when Dolan first learned of the allegations against the priests in relation to when he made those allegations public. It appears the plaintiffs seek to show that Dolan deliberately stalled in order to let the clock run out on the statute of limitations governing the prosecution of such crimes. In the meantime, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee declared bankruptcy, apparently a result of settlements made with abuse claimants.

What it Means that Monsanto Holds the Patents on Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments in a seed patent infringement case that pits a small farmer from Indiana, 75-year old Vernon Hugh Bowman, against biotech goliath Monsanto. Reporters from the New York Times to the Sacramento Bee dissected the legal arguments. They speculated on the odds. They opined on the impact a Monsanto loss might have, not only on genetically modified crops, but on medical research and software.
What most of them didn’t report on is the absurdity – and the danger – of allowing companies to patent living organisms in the first place, and then use those patents to attempt to monopolize world seed and food production.


The case boils down to this. Monsanto sells its patented genetically engineered (GE) “Roundup Ready” soybean seeds to farmers under a contract that prohibits the farmers from saving the next-generation seeds and replanting them. Farmers like Mr. Bowman who buy Monsanto’s GE seeds are required to buy new seeds every year. For years, Mr. Bowman played by Monsanto’s rules. Then in 2007, he bought an unmarked mix of soybeans from a grain elevator and planted them. Some of the soybeans turned out to have been grown from Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybean seeds. Monsanto sued Mr. Bowman, won, and the court ordered the farmer to pay the company $84,000. Mr. Bowman appealed, arguing that he unknowingly bought soybeans grown from Monsanto’s seeds, not the seeds themselves, and that therefore the law of “patent exhaustion” applies.
The press and public have fixated on the sticky legal details of the case, and the classic David vs. Goliath nature of the fight. But win or lose, Mr. Bowman’s predicament is part of a much bigger problem.
The real issue is this: Why have we surrendered control over something so basic to human survival as seeds? Why have we bought into the biotech industry’s program, which pushes a few monoculture commodity crops, when history and science have proven that seed biodiversity is essential for growing crops capable of surviving severe climate conditions, such as drought and floods?
As physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva explains, we have turned seed, which is the heart of a traditional diversity-rich farming system across the world, into a powerful commodity, used to monopolize the food system. According to a recent report by the Center for Food Safety and Save our Seeds, three companies – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – control 53 percent of the global commercial seed market. They have pressured farmers to replace diverse, nutritional seeds, seeds that are resilient because they’ve been bred by small-scale farmers to adapt to local climates and soil conditions, with monocultures of genetically engineered seeds. In the U.S. these crops are predominately corn and soybeans. According to the report, entitled “Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers,” 93 percent of soybeans and 86 percent of corn crops in the U.S. come from patented, genetically engineered seeds.
Monsanto profits handsomely from selling its patented seeds. But the real profits are in selling farmers its proprietary pesticides, like Roundup. Farmers can spray huge amounts of Roundup on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans, killing everything except the soybean plants. It’s a win-win for Monsanto. And it’s sold as a win to farmers, who have been told that by following the Monsanto method, they’ll increase their yields and make more money. Monsanto even claims that its GE crops are the answer to world hunger.
But little of what Monsanto has promised, to farmers and the world, has proven true.
Since farmers first began buying into Monsanto’s scheme in 1995, the average cost to plant one acre of soybeans has risen 325 percent, according to the Center for Food Safety’s report. Corn seed prices are up by 259 percent. Those increases don’t include the cost of the lawsuits Monsanto has aggressively filed against farmers the company claims have violated patent agreements. By the end of 2012, Center for Food Safety calculates that Monsanto had received over $23.5 million from patent infringement lawsuits against farmers and farm businesses.
And the rest of us? What have we gained from this aggressive monopoly of seeds and crops? Nothing. In fact, the losses continue to mount.
Monsanto promised that its GE crops would help the environment by reducing the need for pesticides. But according to the USDA, farmers used up to 26 percent more chemicals per acre on herbicide-resistant crops than on non-GE crops. And as several dozen aggressive " superweeds" have become resistant to glyphosate, the primary herbicide used on GE crops, the biotech industry is ramping up its war on weeds with a new generation of GE crops that can surviving spraying with 2,4 D, paraquat, and other super-toxic herbicides. 
As for GE crops being necessary to feed the world, that promise has also been debunked. In 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that the loss of biodiversity will have a major impact on the ability of humankind to feed itself in the future.
According to “A Global Citizens Report on the State of GMOs: Failed Promises, Failed Technologies:” 

The fable that GMOs are feeding the world has already led to large-scale destruction of biodiversity and farmers’ livelihoods. It is threatening the very basis of our freedom to know what we eat and to choose what we eat. Our biodiversity and our seed freedom are in peril. Our food freedom, food democracy and food sovereignty are at stake.

It’s safe to say that the majority of the general public would love to see the small farmer from Indiana knock Monsanto down a peg. Last year, a Monsanto ally threatened to sue the state of Vermont if legislators passed a law requiring labels on all foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).  Lawmakers capitulated, despite the fact that voter support was running at more than 90 percent. Later in the year, Monsanto and large food corporations spent $46 million to defeat a citizens’ initiative in California that would have required mandatory labeling of GMOs.
Monsanto may be Public Enemy Number One, but a win for Mr. Bowman is hardly a win for mankind. It’s time we ask ourselves: How long are we going to let Monsanto bully farmers and politicians into controlling the very source of life on earth? How long will we tolerate the growing monopolization and genetic engineering of seeds by an aggressive cabal of chemical and pesticide corporations who pose a deadly threat to our health, our environment and the future of our food? And when does “how long” become too late?