whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

Keep out  theocratic US

Thank you from Italy, dear Youth.

You might want to check out the Editorial in today's (April 26, 2005) New York Times: The Disappearing Wall
"Apart from confirming an unwholesome disrespect for traditional American values like checks and balances, the assault on judges is part of a wide-ranging and successful Republican campaign to breach the wall between church and state to advance a particular brand of religion. No theoretical exercise, the program is having a corrosive effect on policymaking and the lives of Americans. ...
"In a recent Op-Ed article in The Times, John Danforth, the former Republican senator and U.N. ambassador who is also a minister, said his party was becoming a political arm of the religious right. He called it a formula for divisiveness that ultimately threatened the party's future. With the nation lurching toward the government sponsorship of religion, and the Senate nearing a showdown over Mr. Bush's egregious judicial nominees, it is a warning well worth heeding."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/opinion/26tue1.html?

posted by: Whitebeard at 16:53 | link | comments |

US Values

Incomplete News Undermines US Values
By Peter Phillips

Dozens were kidnapped by roving gangs off the streets of their hometowns, disappeared from families, hooded, chained, repeatedly interrogated, incarcerated for years in military prisons, and then told it was all a mistake. Did this happen in Stalinist Russia, some South American military dictatorship, Apartheid South Africa? No, the gangs were special forces of the US Government operating with approval from the highest levels of the Pentagon, the victims Afghan civilians recently released from the Guantanamo military prison camp in Cuba.

The New York Times published an article April 20 reporting how 17 innocent Afghans were recently freed from Guantanamo prison after three and half years. "Several of the Afghans said in interviews that they had been told by American officers that they were being freed because they were innocent of any crime," the article reported. "The men would be given new clothes, turbans and travel money and allowed to go home," the paper disclosed.

Prior to the release of the Guantanamo prisoners last Fall, Seymour Hersh fully exposed the US's worldwide abuse of power and violation of human right in articles published in the Guardian and New Yorker. Hersh documented that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, with approval from the White House, had authorized a special-access program (SAP) to go on global manhunts for terrorists. It was deemed OK to kidnap suspected terrorists and take them to countries that would get tough (torture) them during interrogations. Several hundred people captured wholesale in Afghanistan and transported to Cuba were deemed enemy non-combatants without rights of due process or coverage under the Geneva Convention.

The New York Times' story covers the release of the internees without Hersh's historical context of high level official approval. Additionally, the NY Times story fails to address coverage of how, in a country that supports due process and human rights, our military could take such tragic action violating the rights of these men and their families. Instead the story implies that the kidnapping of these Afghans was justified in that undoubtedly some of the prisoners were guilty. This is like rounding up the church choir because the minister was caught in bed with the organist.

Failure to publish the full truth regarding the release of the Afghan prisoners is a strong indication that the New York Times and corporate media groups in general are unable and unwilling to fully address human right violations by our own government. The broad publication of stories about the breach of human rights by our national security forces is inconsistent with corporate media's continuing desire to have 24 hour access to sources of news inside the White House, Pentagon and State Department. This failure of nerve to support the public's right to know and insure a transparent governmental process is undoubtedly giving America a black eye in the world community. Increasingly America is seen as an uncontrolled empire of power and abuse. For many in the world we are the Darth Vaders of the planet - pure evil incorporated.

Non-Americans know that the people in the US do not approve of these practices. We must, however, openly share their outrage and demand that America hold to our values of due process and human rights. To do this we must support media that address these issues. We need a media that post and recognize the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in every newsroom. Anything less cuts at the very soul of the American people.

--

Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/

posted by: Whitebeard at 06:29 | link | comments |

PLEASE FORWARD

push bush



April 20, 2005

Dear Friends of the Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience:

This Sunday, April 24th, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will be joining major Christian fundamentalist leaders in a national telecast from Louisville to challenge the independence and legitimacy of the court system, calling the courts “out of control”. As the NY Times put it 4/16/05: "The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.” [See article links at end of message.]

Bold opposition to Frist and these moves could galvanize much wider opposition. We are witnessing here moves to destroy the whole system of checks and balances, to destroy the separation between church and state, and to cement in place one-party, theocratic rule. See the Family Research Council website (http://www.frc.org/ ) for information on Sunday’s event. Contact Not In Our Name (NION@cloud9.net ) for information on counter protests in Louisville. Join in if you possibly can.

If you can’t get to Louisville, there are other avenues to speak out on this issue:
-- Send this e-mail out to family, friends. Post it to bulletin boards and blogs.
-- Pass out the Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience (NION SOC) at churches, synagogues, temples and mosques; work places, union halls, organization meetings. Pass the statement out at a church in your area that will be part of the simulcast. (download the whole statement at http://www.nion.us/NSOC/NewNIONflyer.pdf ).
 --Write to the editorial page of your local newspaper (and send a copy to us for posting, NION@cloud9.net) and to post on the internet.

And especially,

-- Contribute generously to the NION SOC and encourage friends, family, co-workers and everyone you meet to do so too. The cost of "free speech" in this country is very high and as e-mails we have received testify, people need to and want to see this statement. There’s nowhere else that people are finding what is in their heads and their hearts. The suggested contribution is $200, but all contributions are very welcome. Because there are thousands of signers, not all names can appear in the printed ads, but the names of all signers are posted on the web site. Contribute on line at http://www.nion.us/READ_AND_SIGN.htm  or  make a check payable to Not In Our Name and mail to: Not In Our Name,  305 West Broadway, #199,  NY, NY 10013.

We are continuing to raise money to publish the NION SOC in Colorado, Florida and in the Columbia University newspaper, the Columbia Spectator. The publication of the NION statement in Colorado, Florida and at Columbia University will bring powerful voices of conscience and hope to those areas where progressive academics have been threatened by campus crusades led by right-wing groups.  Many people have written to us about the need to reach out to different audiences with this statement. Here is a chance to do just that and in places where the need to see this statement is great. We encourage you to contribute generously to make this happen.

With warm regards and urgency,

Janet Yip
janet@nion.us
From the Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience Staff

posted by: Whitebeard at 07:47 | link | comments |

With Wolfowitz
Have we forgotten what the World Bank is for?

The World Bank and the IMF were conceived by the US economist Harry Dexter White. Appointed by the US Treasury to lead the negotiations on post-war economic reconstruction, White spent most of 1943 banging the heads of the other allied nations together.(3) They were appalled by his proposals. He insisted that his institutions would place the burden of stabilising the world economy on the countries suffering from debt and trade deficits rather than on the creditors. ...

Both the undemocratic voting arrangement and the US veto remain to this day. The result is that the body which works mostly in poor countries is entirely controlled by rich ones. White demanded that national debts be redeemable for gold, that gold be convertible into dollars, and that all exchange rates be fixed against the dollar. The result was to lay the ground for what was to become the dollar's global hegemony. White also decided that both the Fund and the Bank would be sited in Washington.

No one was in any doubt at the time that these two bodies were designed as instruments of US economic policy. But somehow all this has been airbrushed from history. Even the admirable Joe Stiglitz believes that the World Bank was the brainchild of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (Keynes was, in fact, its most prominent opponent).(6) ...

From the perspective of the world's poor, there has never been a good president of the World Bank. In seeking contrasts with Wolfowitz, it has become fashionable to look back to the reign of that other Pentagon hawk, Robert McNamara. He is supposed to have become, in the words of an Observer leader, "one of the most admired and effective of World Bank presidents".(8) Admired in Washington perhaps. Robert McNamara was the man who concentrated almost all the Bank's lending on vast prestige projects - dams, highways, ports - while freezing out less glamorous causes such as health and education and sanitation. Most of the major projects he backed have, in economic or social terms or both, failed catastrophically.(9)

It was he who argued that the Bank should not fund land reform because it "would affect the power base of the traditional elite groups".(10) Instead, as Catherine Caufield shows in her book Masters of Illusion, it should "open new land by cutting down forests, draining wetlands, and building roads to previously isolated areas."(11) He bankrolled Mobutu and Suharto, deforested Nepal,(12) trashed the Amazon (13) and promoted genocide in Indonesia (14). The countries in which he worked were left with unpayable debts, wrecked environments, grinding poverty and unshakeable pro-US dictators.

The article 

posted by: Whitebeard at 17:54 | link | comments |

Fun

Push bush

 In italian

posted by: Whitebeard at 08:45 | link | comments |

The reverse side of the coin

The Pope has blood on his hands

The Pope did great damage to the church, and to countless Catholics.
John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 60s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 70s began to bite, the western world made a decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop from Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II was part of this wider transition.

...On a visit to the Vatican before he became Pope, the authoritarian Wojtyla was horrified at the sight of bickering theologians. This was not the way they did things in Warsaw. The conservative wing of the Vatican, which had detested the Vatican Council from the outset and done its utmost to derail it, thus looked to the Poles for salvation. When the throne of Peter fell empty, the conservatives managed to swallow their aversion to a non-Italian pontiff and elected one for the first time since 1522.

Terry Eagleton
Monday April 4, 2005
The Guardian
Cast a look here

posted by: Whitebeard at 14:14 | link | comments |

Remember him so,

with Michael Moore
 
 

 
 
1920-2005
"Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create."
-- July 3, 1980
"This determination is based on the solid conviction that what is hindering full development is that desire for profit and that thirst for power already mentioned. These attitudes and 'structures of sin' are only conquered - presupposing the help of divine grace - by a diametrically opposed attitude: a commitment to the good of one's neighbor with the readiness, in the gospel sense, to 'lose oneself' for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to 'serve him' instead of oppressing him for one's own advantage."
-- December 30, 1987
"We cannot pretend that the use of arms, and especially of today's highly sophisticated weaponry, would not give rise, in addition to suffering and destruction, to new and perhaps worse injustices."
-- Message to George H.W. Bush, January 15, 1991
"A disconcerting conclusion about the most recent period should serve to enlighten us: side-by-side with the miseries of underdevelopment, themselves unacceptable, we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissible. because like the former it is contrary to what is good and to true happiness. This superdevelopment, which consists in an excessive availability of every kind of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups, easily makes people slaves of 'possession' and of immediate gratification..."
-- March 13, 1998
"Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform. I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary."
-- January 27, 1999
"The Holy See has always recognized that the Palestinian people have the natural right to a homeland, and the right to be able to live in peace and tranquillity with the other peoples of this area."
-- March 22, 2000
"NO TO WAR! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity."
-- January 13, 2003
"When war threatens humanity's destiny, as it does today in Iraq, it is even more urgent for us to proclaim with a loud and decisive voice that peace is the only way to build a more just and caring society. Violence and arms can never solve human problems."
-- March 22, 2003

 

posted by: Whitebeard at 09:34 | link | comments (2) |