Monday, June 20, 2005

Interesting Catholic site with extraordinary videos


>
> http://www.catholicwebcast.com/
>
> I just finished reading a book entitled "Psychic
> Children," in which
> there was a long chapter devoted to the four young
> girls of Garabandal,
> Spain who in the years between 1961-65 saw over
> 2,000 visions of angels
> and the blessed virgin Mary. I remembered having
> seen a documentary on
> television once about this case, with actual movies
> of the girls in
> ecstasy and performing body movements that seemed
> impossible. During
> their ecstasies the girls were pricked with pins,
> pinched, had bright
> lights shown into their eyes, and they never
> flinched or blinked--or
> were even aware of what was being done to them.
> While they were
> experiencing the visions, their bodies sometimes
> bent backwards slowly,
> as they were lowered to the ground with their legs
> straight out in front
> of them until they were lying down, and then their
> bodies would slowly
> rise up in the same way till they were standing once
> again--and all the
> time they were staring upward in ecstasy, having
> conversations with
> someone who was invisible to the witnesses. They
> were able to walk/run
> backward and forward with great speed, all the while
> staring upward with
> their heads bent backward to such a degree that it
> looked as though they
> should be in pain.
>
> I searched online to see if that video I remembered
> were available. And
> I found this site on which all the videos are free
> for watching. A book
> about the case is also available, which can be
> downloaded for free.
> It's quite an interesting site, to say the least.
>
> I have just watched one of the videos called "The
> Eyewitnesses" and plan
> to watch the others. I watched it on Windows Media
> 225 --- excellent
> quality.
>
> I have a theory about this and other miracles of the
> Catholic
> Church....but will not mention it now. If you are
> interested, just
> watch these videos...the things that happened to
> these girls is truly
> remarkable. They obviously saw some kind of vision
> that put them in
> ecstasy and allowed their bodies to do things that
> are not allowed in
> our physical world (such as floating/walking in air,
> etc.) I
> particularly found interesting that the girls were
> told "many of your
> cardinals, bishops, and priests are bound to
> perdition" and that many
> priests were following evil ways. This was before
> anything ever came
> out about the clergys' abuse of children. At the
> same time, the girls
> were told to obey the priests and honor them...and
> always follow what
> they tell you. Quite interesting..and my theory
> about all of this makes
> some sense of that, I think.
>
> Anyway, I pass this along to whoever may be
> interested. I think that,
> no matter what your belief or religion, you will
> find this story and
> these videos fascinating.
>
>
>


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Friday, June 17, 2005

Politics - 'Downing Street memo' spotlighted in Congress - sacbee.com


> This article was in the Sacramento Bee today...It's
> an online article,
> so I don't know how prominently it was featured in
> the paper edition,
> but it definitely was not front page headlines.
> Note also the demeaning
> adjectives put in to lessen the story's
> impact...."in a tiny room in the
> Capitol" "to a small audience"... etc., etc. Their
> way of saying, "Pay
> no attention to this, folks...it's not worthy of
> note."
>
>
> Can you imagine the NY Times bureau chief saying,
> "the revelations did
> not seem like a bolt from the blue"? And the
> Washington Post
> spokesperson saying he "didn't really see there was
> anything new in
> it."?!!! A smoking gun that proves the war was
> engineered by Bush and
> agreed to by Blair....and this isn't important
> news?!!! Yes, we knew
> about it before...it was obvious to all but the
> enthusiastic flag wavers
> (and there were millions of them--"Hey, a good
> war--that's what we
> need! How exciting!!! Bring out the bands!!!) that
> BushCo was attacking
> Iraq on neocon plans made far before 9/11 and was
> selling the American
> people a terrible bill of goods. That bill of goods
> was suspected by
> many of our senators and representatives, but, like
> all politicians,
> they feared for their images (and votes) if they
> were to protest a war
> supposedly being fought against the terrorists of
> 9/11. The up-in-arms
> and naively unaware people of our country had been
> sold that deception
> by BushCo, and there was no convincing them
> otherwise...so many of the
> politicians, although knowing better, went along to
> get along. More's
> the pity, but that is the consciousness of the
> breed.
>
>
> But here is documented PROOF that we were all lied
> to! At the very
> least, an investigation should be called!!! This is
> an impeachable high
> crime!!! But no...all is silent...it seems the
> journalists of today
> only get excited if a President lies about an affair
> with an
> intern....and pursue and hound him to the ends of
> the earth about it.
> But taking our country to a seemingly endless war on
> lies....hey, that's
> not anything to get excited about.
>
>
> More fun and games coming to you from the Alice in
> Wonderland Upside
> Down World of Bush-run America.
>
>
> EXCERPT: At the panel in the Capitol, House
> Democrats asked why the
> memo had gotten so little attention from the U.S.
> news media.
>
> Though many major U.S. newspapers and broadcast
> outlets were fully aware
> of the British memo, few reported on it at any
> length. Some editors have
> subsequently offered explanations.
>
> Philip Taubman, Washington bureau chief for the New
> York Times, said in
> an account written by the newspaper's public editor
> that "given what has
> been reported about war planning in Washington, the
> revelations about
> the Downing Street meeting did not seem like a bolt
> from the blue."
>
> Glenn Frankel, London bureau chief for the
> Washington Post, said,
> according to an account published in the Post, that
> he "could not
> initially confirm the memo's authenticity and
> 'didn't really see that
> there was anything new in it.' "
>
> The Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, wrote that he
> had been "deluged"
> with e-mails prompted by liberal groups and said he
> was "amazed" that it
> took the Post two weeks to follow up on the London
> Times report,
> according to a story in the Post.
>
> The Associated Press, which many U.S. newspapers
> rely upon heavily for
> foreign coverage, virtually ignored the memo after
> its London
> publication. Deborah Stewart, AP's international
> editor, said in a
> reported statement: "There is no question AP dropped
> the ball in not
> picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner."
>
>
>
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/13079696p-13924833c.html

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Sunday, June 12, 2005

A letter I just sent to the Democratic Natl. Committee along with a small donation

> If we all do this, as suggested by Thom Hartmann,
> http://www.thomhartmann.com/commondreams.shtml, we
> may be able to shake
> up the Democratic party and actually bring some life
> and gumption back
> into it! I honestly think this is our only hope if
> we are to win any
> more seats in Congress in 2006. If the Committee
> sees that Democrats
> everywhere are backing up the straight talk of Dean,
> maybe they will get
> a backbone, too....and we'll start to see some
> changes in the way they
> speak in public. It only takes a few minutes to
> make your opinions
> known to the Democrats--perhaps we could make a
> difference. If we don't
> try, we'll never know! By enclosing a small
> donation (mine is $10, as
> was Thom Hartmann's when he wrote them), you can
> make sure your opinion
> will at least be noticed (we can only
> hope!).....(~.~).
>
>
> 258 Waugh Avenue
> Santa Cruz, CA 95065
> June 12, 2005
>
> Democratic National Committee
> Membership Division
> 430 S Capitol St. SE
> Washington, DC 20003
>
> To the Committee:
>
> CONGRATULATIONS TO HOWARD DEAN!!! Thank you, Mr.
> Dean, for speaking up
> for us disenfranchised citizens of this country.
> Until you came on the
> scene, we had no voice. You are telling it like it
> is, and those who
> are too afraid to tell the truth are mincing words
> all over the place,
> backing away from you and the truth. I am sorry
> about this.
>
> I AM SO GLAD to have you speaking out for us!!!! I
> am a very
> disillusioned Democrat who supported Dennis Kucinich
> in 2004 until it
> was obvious he was not going to make it. There are
> not enough conscious
> people in our country to support his approach, which
> is very sad--but we
> have to work with what we have.
>
> When Kerry/Edwards refused to fight for their votes
> in the vote frauds
> of Florida and Ohio, I wiped my hands of the
> mealy-mouthed wimps of the
> party. It's time for the truth to be spoken--loud
> and clear! Our
> country has been taken over by would-be fascists who
> call themselves
> neocons. If any one ever had any doubts about that,
> they should read
> Ron Suskind's NY Times article describing his
> conversation with a Bush
> aide. According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that
> guys like me were
> 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which
> he defined as
> people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your
> judicious study of
> discernible reality.' " The aide told Mr. Suskind,
> "That's not the way
> the world really works anymore. We're an empire now,
> and when we act we
> create our own reality. And while you're studying
> that reality --
> judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again,
> creating other new
> realities, which you can study too, and that's how
> things will sort out.
> We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will
> be left to just
> study what we do." '
>
> I don't know about you, but this stuff just chills
> my spine. I've read
> Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which spurred
> me on to read about
> the various totalitarian regimes in history (Soviet,
> Robespierre, and
> others) that sprung out of for-the-people movements.
> The Bush people
> sound exactly like them. In a society where the
> ends always justify the
> means there are no ethical boundaries and truth
> exists only in relative
> terms. This is exactly the kind of society that Bush
> and the neocons are
> creating...their own "reality," which the rest of us
> are supposed to
> accept with flag-waving enthusiasm, or be labeled
> "traitors." I believe
> that, by our Democratic leaders' silence, they are
> enabling the neocons
> in their goals.
>
> What I've basically concluded is that any entity
> will eventually
> degenerate into totalitariansim if they believe:
> 1) major changes need to be made
> 2) they alone know how it "should" be done
> 3) all other ways are dismissed out of hand
> 4) the ends justify any and all means
>
> Bush/Cheney and Company are definitely an
> entity/regime of this
> nature!!! Let Howard Dean speak out about them--and
> support him in this
> effort! Being prissy and wimpy and gentlemanly has
> not worked for the
> Democrats. Follow Dean's and Nancy Pelosi's and
> Barbara Boxer's and
> Harry Reid's lead! Speak up! Tell the Truth!!! Our
> nation has become
> extremely polarized because of BushCo and his
> "elite" neocon base and
> the fundamentalist-type sheep who follow
> unthinkingly behind them. I
> have become convinced we cannot "un-polarize" it
> with mincing words.
> Much of our major media have been bought up by
> corporate buddies of
> Bush, so we the people no longer have the voice
> through the fourth
> estate that we used to count on. The journalists
> who work for these
> corporations no longer dare to ask delving,
> important questions. Many of
> them are bought puppets that speak the lines the
> (Rove) White House
> gives them. Our courts are being stacked with
> judges (i.e., Janice
> Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owens) who follow
> fundamentalist beliefs and
> impose them on the citizens. The separation of
> church and state is
> blurring--and quickly disappearing. Bush appearances
> are monitored and
> controlled to make sure only his supporters are in
> the audience. We are
> heading down a very dangerous road to fascism, and
> very few are speaking
> up about it!
>
> Do you want our country to become like Nazi Germany?
> If not, then let
> Howard Dean speak up--and BACK HIM UP!!! The Joe
> Bidens and Ted
> Kennedys and John Edwards voices are needed in
> support of the truth--not
> in mealy-mouthed backsteps away from Dean.
>
> I am a 69-year-old woman who has lived long enough
> to see world regimes
> come and go, rise and fall. I am not willing to
> stand by and see my
> children and grandchildren be forced to live under a
> fascist government
> with an empirical goal to rule the world!!! I am
> concerned about the
> environment, about the right to vote and have our
> votes counted fairly,
> about the Iraq war and where it is taking us, about
> the lies Bush told
> us to get us into it, about what really happened on
> 9/11, and about all
> of the issues that BushCo wants to undermine or
> ignore.
>
> Damn it! Speak up for ME! Speak up for my family!
> Speak up for
> yourselves--and for your families!!! We are all in
> this together--and
> from where I sit, it looks like we are going to have
> to go through a
> very dark period in history unless you speak up NOW,
> as Howard Dean is
> doing!!! He is the best thing the Democrats have
> going for them!!!
> PLEASE FOLLOW HIS LEAD!
>

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Thursday, June 09, 2005

The ONE Campaign | A Way to Help--sent with love

The ONE Campaign | A Way to Help--sent with
> love
>
> This page is the home site of the humanitarian
> organization ONE, which
> aims to help the poor and AIDS-diseased people of
> third-world
> countries. Brad Pitt was talking about this last
> night in his interview
> on Primetime Live. It reaches across all party lines
> and is being joined
> by liberals and conservatives of all religions and
> beliefs, all across
> the world. It calls for allocating an additional
> ONE percent of the
> U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like
> health, education, clean
> water and food, which would transform the futures
> and hopes of an entire
> generation of the poorest countries. The goal is for
> the US to continue
> to increase effective assistance until it meets the
> international
> commitment to give 0.7% of the national wealth.
>
> If you would like to join, you can sign your name to
> the Declaration (by
> clicking on the designated URL on the ONE home page)
> and also purchase
> 10 white ONE bracelets for $10.00. Wearing this
> bracelet can help to
> spread the word about this worldwide effort. And
> you can pass the other
> bracelets along to friends. If each one tells one
> (or more), the word
> will spread quickly. This organization is showing
> that when our
> governments don't respond to these needs, then WE,
> THE PEOPLE can and
> will take up the cause. Thank God for famous people
> with consciences
> like Bono, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, etc. who are
> using their fame and
> fortune to help others. Here is an opportunity to
> join them and really
> make a difference in the world.

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Charles Schultz Philosophy


> This is so true....Lots of Love to you!!!
>
>
>
> Charles Schultz Philosophy
>
> The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz,
> the creator of the
> "Peanuts" comic strip. You don't have to actually
> answer the questions.
> Just read the e-mail straight through, and you'll
> get the point.
>
> 1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
>
> 2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
>
> 3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America.
>
> 4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or
> Pulitzer Prize.
>
> 5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winner for
> best actor and
> actress.
>
> 6. Name the last decade's worth of World Series
> winners.
>
>
>
> How did you do?
>
> The point is, none of us remember the headliners of
> yesterday. These are
> no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their
> fields. But the
> applause dies. Awards tarnish. Acheivements are
> forgotten. Accolades and
> certificates are buried with their owners.
>
> Here's another quiz. See how you do on this one:
>
> 1. List a few teachers who aided your journey
> through school.
>
> 2. Name three friends who have helped you through a
> difficult time.
>
> 3. Name five people who have taught you something
> worthwhile.
>
> 4. Think of a few people who have made you feel
> appreciated and special.
>
> 5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time
> with.
>
> Easier?
>
> The lesson: The people who make a difference in your
> life are not the
> ones with the most credentials, the most money, or
> the most awards. They
> are the ones that care.
>
> Pass this on to those people who have made a
> difference in your life.
> "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.
> It's already
> tomorrow in Australia." (Charles Schultz)
>
>


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Nixon's Empire Strikes Back

Nixon's Empire Strikes Back
>
> Excerpt: With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney
> remarked in 1976:
> "Principle is OK up to a certain point, but
> principle doesn't do any
> good if you lose." During the Iran-contrascandal
> Cheney, a Republican
> leader in the House of Representatives, argued that
> the congressional
> report denouncing "secrecy, deception and disdain
> for the law" was an
> encroachment on executive authority.
>
> One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise
> was the necessity
> of muzzling the press. The Bush White House has
> neutralised the press
> corps and even turned some reporters into its own
> assets. The
> disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq,
> funnelled into the news
> pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic
> case in point. By
> manipulation and intimidation, encouraging
> atmosphere of
> self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced
> the press from
> dissenting professionals inside the government.
>
> (I think almost the whole of the Bush
> administration's philosophy is
> contained in Cheney's telling quote above. They
> certainly don't want to
> be hampered by anything as unnecessary as principle.
> (!)
>
> And then, of course, we have the rest of their
> philosophy as revealed in
> an article
>
<http://cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/sloth/2004-10-16b.html>
>
> by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind
> that appeared in the
> October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine and that
> deserves to be better
> known because of the light it sheds on the extent to
> which the current
> administration is ideologically driven. His article
> has this chilling
> anecdote:
>
> "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an
> article in Esquire
> that the White House didn't like about Bush's
> former communications
> director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a
> senior adviser to
> Bush. He expressed the White House's
> displeasure, and then he told
> me something that at the time I didn't fully
> comprehend - but which
> I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush
> presidency.
>
> "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what
> we call the
> reality-based community,' which he defined as
> people who 'believe
> that solutions emerge from your judicious study
> of discernible
> reality.' I nodded and murmured something about
> enlightenment
> principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
> 'That's not the way the
> world really works anymore,' he continued.
> 'We're an empire now, and
> when we act, we create our own reality. And
> while you're studying
> that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll
> act again, creating
> other new realities, which you can study too,
> and that's how things
> will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and
> you, all of you,
> will be left to just study what we do.'"
>
> What you have here is a world-view so arrogant that
> it believes that it
> has the power to create its own realities--and we,
> the people are "left
> to just study it." Goodbye, Constitution and Bill
> of Rights. Goodbye
> government of the people, by the people, for the
> people. We'll certainly
> miss you!)
>
> Nixon's empire strikes back
>
> Bush's imperial project has succeeded by learning
> the chief lesson of
> Watergate - muzzle the press.
>
> Sidney Blumenthal
> Thursday June 9, 2005
> The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>
>
> The unveiling of the identity of Deep Throat - Mark
> Felt, the former
> deputy director of the FBI - seemed affirm the story
> of Watergate as the
> triumph of the lone journalist supported from the
> shadows by a magically
> appearing secret source. Shazam! The outlines of the
> fuller story we now
> know, thanks not only to Felt's selfunmasking but to
> disclosures the
> Albany Times Union of upstate New York, unreported
> so far by any major
> outlet. Felt was not working as "a disgruntled
> maverick ... but rather
> as the leader of a clandestine group" of three other
> high-level agents
> to control the story by collecting intelligence and
> leaking it. For more
> than 30 years the secrecy around Deep Throat
> diverted attention to who
> Deep Throat was rather than what Deep Throat was - a
> covertFBI operation
> in which Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was
> almost certainly an
> unwitting asset.
>
> When FBI director J Edgar Hoover died on May 2 1972,
> Felt, who believed
> he should be his replacement, was passed over. The
> Watergate break-in
> took place a month later. As President Nixon sought
> to coerce the CIA
> and FBI to participate in his increasingly frantic
> efforts to obstruct
> justice, Felt, who had access to raw intelligence
> files, organised a
> band of his most trusted lieutenants and began
> strategic leaking. The
> Felt op, in fact, was part of a widespread revolt of
> professionals
> throughout the federal government against Nixon's
> threats to their
> bureaucratic integrity.
>
> Nixon's grand plan was to concentrate executive
> power in an imperial
> presidency, politicise the bureaucracyand crush its
> independence, and
> invoke national security to wage partisan warfare.
> He intended to
> "reconstitute the Republican party", staging a
> "purge" to foster "a new
> majority", as his aide William Safire wrote in his
> memoir. Nixon himself
> declared in his own memoir that to achieve his ends
> the "institutions"
> of government had to be "reformed, replaced or
> circumvented. In my
> second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of
> these three methods -
> or whichever combination of them - was necessary."
>
> But now George Bush is building a leviathan beyond
> Nixon's imagining.
> The Bush presidency is the highest stage of
> Nixonism. The
> commander-in-chief has declared himself by executive
> order above
> international law, the CIA is being purged, the
> justice department
> deploying its resources to break down thewall of
> separation between
> church and state, the Environmental Protection
> Agency being ordered to
> suppress scientific studies and the Pentagon
> subsuming intelligence and
> diplomacy, leaving the US with blunt military force
> as its chief foreign
> policy.
>
> The three main architects of Bush's imperial
> presidency gained their
> formative experience amid Nixon's downfall. Donald
> Rumsfeld, Nixon's
> counsellor, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, one after
> the other, served as
> chief of staff to Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford,
> both opposing
> congressional efforts for more transparency in the
> executive.
>
> With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney remarked in
> 1976: "Principle is OK
> up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any
> good if you lose."
> During the Iran-contrascandal Cheney, a republican
> leader in the House
> of Representatives, argued that the congressional
> report denouncing
> "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law" was an
> encroachment on
> executive authority.
>
> The other architect, Karl Rove, Bush's senior
> political aide, began his
> career as an agent of Nixon's dirty trickster Donald
> Segretti -
> "ratfuckers" as Segretti called his boys. At the
> height of the Watergate
> scandal, Rove operated through a phoney front group
> to denounce the
> lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the
> Washington Post and
> other parts of the Nixon-hating media".
>
> Under Bush, the Republican Congress has abdicated
> its responsibilities
> of executive oversight and investigation. When
> Republican senator John
> Warner, chairman of the armed services committee,
> held hearings on
> Bush's torture policy in the aftermath of the Abu
> Ghraib revelations,
> the White House set rabid House Republicans to
> attack him. There have
> been no more such hearings. Meanwhile, Bush insists
> that the Senate
> votes to confirm John Bolton as US ambassador to the
> UN while refusing
> to release essential information requested by the
> Senate foreign
> relations committee.
>
> One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise
> was the necessity
> of muzzling the press. The Bush WhiteHouse has
> neutralised the press
> corps and even turned some reporters into its own
> assets. The
> disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq,
> funnelled into the news
> pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic
> case in point. By
> manipulation and intimidation, encouraging
> atmosphere of
> self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced
> the press from
> dissenting professionals inside the government.
>
> Mark Felt's sudden emergence from behind the curtain
> of history evoked
> the glory days of the press corps and its modern
> creation myth. It was a
> warm bath of nostalgia and cold comfort.
>
> · Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to
> President Clinton and
> author of The Clinton Wars
>
>


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Tuesday, June 07, 2005

the mugging of the American Dream


> Bill Moyers is right on the money on this one!!!
> Literally!!!
>
>
> 'The mugging of the American dream'
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Washington is a divided city -- not between north
> and south as in
> Lincoln's time, but between those who can buy all
> the government they
> want and those who can't even afford a seat in the
> bleachers.
>
> By Bill Moyers, AlterNet
> <http://www.alternet.org/story/22163/>
>
> Editor's Note: This is an edited transcript of Bill
> Moyer's speech,
> delivered June 3 at the Take Back America conference
> in Washington, D.C.
>
> Thirty-five years ago, almost to the day, I set out
> on a three-month
> trip of over 10,000 miles to write a book called
> Listening to America. I
> completed the book, but I never finished the trip,
> was never able to
> stay off the road, couldn't stop listening. My
> worldview has been a
> work-in-progress, molded by the stories I've heard
> from the people I've
> met. And I want to tell you about some of those
> people. They reveal
> what's at stake.
>
> I began with two families in Milwaukee. The
> breadwinners in both
> households lost their jobs in that great wave of
> downsizing in 1991, as
> corporations began moving jobs out of the city and
> then out of the
> country. In a series of documentaries over the next
> decade, my wife and
> partner Judith Davidson Moyers and our colleagues
> chronicled their
> efforts to cope with the wrenching changes in their
> lives and to find a
> place for themselves in the new global order.
>
> I grew up with people like these. They're the kind
> of people my mother
> would have called the salt of the earth. Takes one
> to know one. They
> love their children, care about their neighborhoods,
> go to church every
> Sunday, and work hard all week. But like millions of
> Americans, these
> two families in Milwaukee were playing by the rules
> and losing. By the
> end of the decade, they were running harder, but
> slipping behind, and
> the gap between them and prosperous America had
> reached Grand Canyon
> proportions.
>
>
>
> I want to show you a very brief excerpt from that
> first documentary. It
> aired in January of 1992 with the title Minimum
> Wages: The New Economy.
> You'll see the father of one family as he looks for
> work after losing
> his machinist job at the big manufacturer, Briggs &
> Stanton. You'll meet
> his wife in their kitchen, as they make a desperate
> call to the bank
> that is threatening to foreclose on their home after
> failing to meet
> their mortgage payments. During our filming, the
> fathers in both
> families became seriously ill. One was hospitalized
> for two months,
> leaving the family $30,000 in debt. You'll hear the
> second family talk
> about what it's like when both parents lose their
> job, depriving them of
> health insurance and putting their kids' education
> up for grabs.
>
> Incidentally, Claudelle, one of the children in the
> Stanley family, went
> on to join the Navy, and he was in the Pentagon on
> 9/11. He escaped
> unharmed, but as usual, he had taken the route of
> the military to try to
> help the family grope with their financial situation
> and to get himself
> ahead as well. Seeing those people again, I was
> reminded of what turns
> their personal trauma into a political travesty.
> They are deeply
> patriotic. They love this country, but they no
> longer believe that they
> matter to the people who run this country.
>
> When our film opens in 1992, they are watching the
> inauguration of Bill
> Clinton on television. By the end of the decade,
> when the final film of
> the series aired under the title "Surviving the Good
> Times," they were
> paying little attention to politics. They simply
> didn't believe their
> concerns would ever be addressed by the governing
> elites. And remember,
> this was under the Clinton administration. They're
> not cynical, they're
> too deeply religious to have any capacity for
> cynicism. But they know
> the system is rigged against them and so do we.
>
> You know the story. For now, a relatively small
> fraction of American
> households have been garnering an extreme
> concentration of wealth and
> income, as large economic and financial institutions
> obtain
> unprecedented power over our daily lives. In 1960,
> in terms of wealth --
> the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20
> percent and the bottom 20
> percent was 30-fold. Four decades later, it is more
> than 75-fold. Now
> such concentrations of wealth would be far less of
> an issue if everyone
> were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the
> case and statistics
> tell the story. I know statistics can cause the eyes
> to glaze over, but
> as one of my mentors once reminded me, it is the
> mark of a truly
> educated man or woman to be deeply moved by
> statistics. Now, this is an
> educated audience with a few exceptions and I want
> to see if these
> statistics move you.
>
> While we've witnessed several periods of immense
> growth in recent
> decades, the average real income of the bottom 90
> percent of American
> taxpayers -- that's a mass of people -- fell by 7
> percent between 1973
> and 2000. During 2004 and the first couple of months
> of this year, wages
> failed to keep pace with inflation for the first
> time since the 1990
> recession. They were up somewhat in April, but it
> still means that
> working Americans effectively took an across the
> board pay cut at a time
> when the economy grew by a healthy 4 percent and
> corporate profits hit
> record high, as companies got more productivity out
> of workers while
> keeping pay raises down.
>
> Believe it or not, the United States now ranks the
> highest among the
> highly developed countries in each of the seven
> measures of inequality
> tracked by the index. While we enjoy the
> second-highest GDP in the
> world, excluding tiny Luxembourg, we rank dead-last
> among the 20
> most-developed countries in fighting poverty, and
> we're off the chart in
> terms of the number of Americans living on half the
> median income or less.
>
> And consider the prognosis -- on the eve of George
> W. Bush's second
> inauguration, The Economist -- not exactly a Marxist
> rag -- produced a
> sobering analysis of what is happening to the old
> notion that any
> American can get to the top. With income inequality
> not seen since the
> first Gilded Age -- and this is the editors of The
> Economist speaking,
> not a radical on PBS like me -- with "an education
> system increasingly
> stratified with fewer resources than those of their
> richer
> contemporaries and great universities increasingly
> reinforcing rather
> than reducing these educational inequalities," with
> corporate employees
> finding it harder "to start at the bottom and rise
> up the company
> hierarchy by den of hard work and self-improvement,"
> with the yawning
> gap between incomes at the top and the bottom, the
> editors of The
> Economist -- all friends of business and advocates
> of capitalism and
> free markets -- concluded that the United States
> "risks calcifying into
> a European-style class-based society."
>
> Let me run that by you again. The United States
> risks calcifying into a
> European-style class-based society. Or worse -- the
> Wall Street Journal
> is no Marxist sheet either, although its editorial
> page can be just as
> dogmatic as old Stalinist. The Journal's reporters,
> however, are among
> the best in the country. They are devoted to getting
> as close as
> possible to the verifiable truth and describing what
> they find with the
> varnish off. Two weeks ago, a front page leader in
> the Wall Street
> Journal concluded, "As the gap between rich and poor
> has widened since
> 1970, the odds that a child born in poverty will
> climb to wealth or that
> a rich child will fall into the middle class remains
> stuck despite the
> widespread belief that the United States remains a
> more mobile society
> than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in
> recent decades, the
> typical child starting out in poverty in continental
> Europe or in Canada
> has had a better chance at prosperity."
>
> That knocks the American dream flat on its back. But
> it should put fire
> in our bellies, because what's at stake is nothing
> less than the meaning
> of what it means to be an American. [Applause.] A
> few weeks ago, my
> friend and colleague, Charlie Rose, put a question
> to the new president
> of CNN, Jonathan Klein. He asked, could there ever
> be a successful,
> progressive version of Fox News Channel? Klein
> didn't think so. He said,
> Fox appeals to "mostly angry white men," while
> liberals, you know, they
> don't get too worked up about anything. [Chuckles.]
> Well, let's see if
> this is something to get worked up about.
>
> Under a headline stretching six columns across the
> page, the New York
> Times reported last year that tuition in the city's
> elite private
> schools -- kindergarten as well as high schools --
> would hit $26,000 for
> the coming school year. On the same page, under a
> two-column headline,
> the Times reported on a school in nearby Mount
> Vernon, just across the
> city line, with a student body that is 97 percent
> black. It is the
> poorest school in town. Nine out of 10 children
> qualify for free
> lunches. One out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter.
>
> During Black History Month that February, a sixth
> grader who wanted to
> write a report on the poet Langston Hughes could not
> find a single book
> about Hughes in the library -- not one. There's only
> one book in the
> library about Frederick Douglass, none on Rosa
> Parks, Josephine Baker,
> Leontyne Price, or other pathbreakers like them in
> the modern era.
> Except for a couple of Newberry Award books bought
> by the librarian with
> her own money, the books are largely from the 1950s
> and 1960s when all
> the students were white. A child's primer on work
> begins with a
> youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery
> boy. There's a 1967
> book about telephones with the instruction, "When
> you phone, you usually
> dial the number, but on some new phones, you can
> push buttons." There's
> no card catalog in this library and the newest
> encyclopedia dates from
> 1991 with two volumes missing. Something to get
> worked up about.
>
> How about this? Caroline Paine's face and gums are
> distorted because the
> Medicare/Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Her
> appearance has caused
> her to be continuously turned down for jobs.
> Caroline Paine is one of
> the people in David Shipler's recent book The
> Working Poor: Invisible in
> America. She was born poor. Although she once owned
> her home and earned
> a two-year college degree, Caroline Paine has
> bounced from one
> poverty-wage job to another all her life; equipped
> with the will to move
> up, but lacking the resources to deal with such
> unexpected and
> overlapping problems as a mentally handicapped
> daughter, a broken
> marriage and a sudden layoff that forced her to sell
> her few assets,
> pull up her roots and move on.
>
> In the house of the poor, Shipler writes, the walls
> are thin and fragile
> and troubles seep into one another. If you believe
> the Declaration of
> Independence means what it says that all of us are
> endowed by the
> creator with a love of life, a longing for liberty,
> a passion for
> happiness, and that Caroline Paine is included in
> that embrace, this is
> something to get worked up about.
>
> Or this, courtesy of the journalist Mark Shields. It
> seems workers in
> the American territory of the northern Mariana
> Islands were being forced
> to labor under sweatshop conditions, producing
> garments for Tommy
> Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, GAP and Liz Claiborne. The
> garments were then
> shipped tariff-free and quota-free to the American
> market where they
> were entitled to display the coveted Made in the
> U.S.A. label. When
> Senator Frank Murkowski heard that these people were
> being paid barely
> half the US minimum hourly wage and were forced to
> live behind barbed
> wire in squalid shacks without plumbing while
> working 12 hours a day,
> often seven days a week, with none of the legal
> protections US workers
> are guaranteed, he became enraged. He got the Senate
> to pass a bill
> unanimously that would extend the protection of our
> laws to the
> territory of the northern Marianas.
>
> But then the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff moved
> into action -- with
> an S.O.S. to his good friend Tom DeLay. The records
> show they met at
> least two dozen times. DeLay traveled to the
> Marianas with his family
> and staff on a scholarship provided by Abramoff's
> clients, where they
> played golf and went snorkeling not far -- you're
> not going to believe
> this -- not far from the sweatshops.
>
> Was DeLay offended by what he saw? To the contrary,
> he told the
> Washington Post that the sweatshops were a perfect
> petri dish of
> capitalism. ABC News recorded him praising
> Abramoff's clients by saying,
> "You are a shining light for what is happening to
> the Republican party
> and you represent everything that is good about what
> we are trying to do
> in America and leading the world in the free market
> system."
>
> And Tom DeLay, the right-wing radicals' revisionist
> reincarnation of St.
> Francis of Assisi; Tom DeLay, the Majority Leader of
> the House of
> Representatives of the United States of America
> killed the bill.
>
> If that doesn't get your dander up, maybe this will.
>
> As you heard this week, the minimum wage hasn't been
> raised since 1997.
> After the Republicans recently defeated an effort to
> increase it, Rick
> Wilson wrote for commondreams.org of the poverty
> level. Meanwhile, the
> base salary of the members of Congress who voted
> down the wage increase
> is $162,100. That single mom would have to work
> about 31,476 hours to
> earn what those members of Congress get in a year.
> And remember the
> minimum wage she is earning is actually worth less
> than it was 40 years ago.
>
> It wasn't supposed to be this way. America was not
> meant to be a country
> where the winner takes all. Through a system of
> checks and balances, we
> were going to maintain a decent equilibrium in how
> democracy works. If
> you don't believe me, I'll bring you my copy of the
> Federalist papers.
> Because equitable access to public resources is the
> lifeblood of any
> democracy, America made primary schooling free to
> all. Because everyone
> deserves a second chance, debtors -- especially the
> relatively poor --
> were protected by state laws against their rich
> creditors. Charters to
> establish corporations were open to most, if not
> all, white comers,
> rather than held for elites. Government encouraged
> Americans to own
> their own piece of land and even supported
> squatters' rights. That old
> hope for equal access to opportunity became a
> reality for millions,
> including yours truly.
>
> Ruby and Henry Moyers were knocked down and almost
> out when the system
> imploded into the Great Depression. They worked hard
> all their lives,
> but they were always poor. My father's last paycheck
> before he retired
> was $96 and change after taxes. We couldn't afford
> books at home, except
> for the Bible, but the public library in Marshall,
> Texas gave me a card
> when I was eight years old. I went to good public
> schools. My brother
> made it to college on the G.I. bill. And in my
> freshman year, I
> hitchhiked to college along public highways,
> stopping to rest in public
> parks. Like millions of us, I was an heir to what
> used to be called the
> commonwealth, the notion of America as a shared
> project. It's in our
> DNA. You know -- we the people, in order to create a
> more perfect union?
>
> You think about this at the Lincoln Memorial. Like
> you, I've been there
> many times over the years. Back in 1954, when I was
> a summer employee in
> the Senate, I took the same hike every Sunday.
> Starting at the Capitol,
> I headed for the Washington Monument, briskly
> climbed its 898 stairs,
> came down almost as briskly -- remember I was only
> 20 then -- veered
> over to the Jefferson Memorial, and then doubled
> back to the Mall, down
> past the reflecting pool to where Lincoln gazes
> perpetually over the
> city, a city that because of him is the capital of
> the United States of
> America, and just the Northern States of America.
>
> When you go there nowadays, the temple of democracy
> where Lincoln broods
> seems as deeply steeped in melancholy as it was
> during the McCarthy
> Reign of Terror, the grief of Vietnam, or the crimes
> of Watergate. You
> stand there silently contemplating the words that
> gave voice to
> Lincoln's fierce determination to save the Union,
> his resolve that
> government of, by, and for the people shall not
> perish from the Earth.
> And then you turn, and you look out -- as he does --
> on a city where
> those words are daily mocked.
>
> This is no longer Lincoln's city and those people
> from all walks of
> life, making their way up those steps to pay their
> respect to this
> martyr for the Union, it's not their city either.
> This is an occupied
> town, a company town -- a wholly owned subsidiary of
> the powerful and
> privileged who have hired the influence industry to
> run it for them.
>
> It's impossible to know how many lobbyists there are
> in this town, so
> poorly are the records deliberately kept. But the
> Center for Public
> Integrity found their ranks include 240 former
> members of Congress and
> heads of federal agencies and over 2,000 senior
> officials who passed
> through the revolving door at warp speed. Lobbyists
> now spend $3 billion
> a year buying influence and access for their clients
> and, according to
> the New York Times, over the last six years, spent
> more than twice the
> amount spent by candidates for federal office.
>
> So, once again, this is a divided city -- not
> between north and south as
> in Lincoln's time, but between those who can buy all
> the government they
> want and those -- like the folks in Milwaukee -- who
> can't even afford a
> seat in the bleachers.
>
> So it is that huge financial institutions like MBNA,
> the credit card
> giant that is the biggest contributor to the
> president's two campaigns
> in the White House, prevail in getting Congress and
> George W. Bush to
> curtail personal bankruptcies, making it harder for
> those families in
> Milwaukee to get a fresh start and a second chance.
> So it is that
> Wal-Mart, with the third-largest political action
> committee in the
> country and pharmaceutical giants with more
> lobbyists in town than there
> are members of Congress join with gun manufacturers
> and asbestos makers
> and the White House to restrict the right of
> aggrieved citizens to take
> corporations to court for malfeasance.
>
> So it is that even as Exxon-Mobil accumulates more
> than $1 billion a
> month from escalating oil prices -- more than $1
> billion a month after
> allocating for dividends, share repurchases, and
> capital spending -- the
> oil and gas industry wrings huge tax breaks from a
> public already
> squeezed hard by high prices at the gas pumps.
>
> And so it is that on Sunday before George W. Bush's
> second inauguration,
> Nick Confessore, writing in the New York Times
> Magazine, describes how
> the president's first round of tax cuts has brought
> the United States
> tax code closer to a system under which income from
> savings and
> investments would not be taxed at all and revenues
> from public services
> would be raised exclusively from taxes on working
> men and women. And one
> of the most fervent right-wing class warriors in
> Washington is quoted as
> predicting no capital gains tax, no dividends tax,
> no estate tax, no tax
> on interest. One of the president's enduring
> legacies will be to have
> replaced estate taxes on the wealthy with a sweat
> tax on their gravediggers.
>
> You see these things, as a journalist, and then you
> read the report by
> the American Political Science Association, which
> says that increasing
> inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal
> citizenship and that
> progress toward real democracy may have stalled in
> this country and even
> reversed. You read in the same report that a quarter
> of all whites in
> this country have no financial assets. Then you read
> on and learn that
> the median white household has 62 percent more
> income and 12 times as
> much wealth as the median black household and that
> 61 percent of
> African-Americans in this country and half of all
> Latinos have no
> financial assets at all.
>
> Then you open Jared Diamond's new book on how
> societies choose to
> succeed or fail to find a description of an America
> where elites cocoon
> themselves in gated communities, guarded by private
> security guards, and
> filled with people who drink bottled water, depend
> on private pensions,
> and send their children to private schools.
> Gradually, they lose the
> motivation "to support the police force, the
> municipal water supply,
> Social Security, and public schools." Any society
> where the elite
> insulate themselves from the consequence of their
> action, Diamond
> writes, contains a built-in blueprint for failure.
>
> You read all this and you realize this is what
> you've been seeing with
> your own eyes. You're seeing the mugging of the
> American dream right in
> front of your face. Go with me. Go with me now to a
> small town in
> Pennsylvania. Two years ago for my weekly PBS
> series, NOW with Bill
> Moyers, we spent time there listening to regular
> people talk about
> what's happening in their lives. You'll see on
> camera my introduction to
> the report in the studio. But then you'll be
> eavesdropping on the hidden
> conversation of America, the conversation that the
> ruling powers of this
> country want to stay hidden. Take a look.
>
> [Video Segment]
>
> One of our sons says that coincidence is God's way
> of remaining
> anonymous and a young woman came up to me and said,
> Mr. Moyers, I'm from
> Tamaqua. What a coincidence. Patty Borger, come up
> here a minute. I want
> to ask you something. Come up here. I want to ask
> you -- now, we just
> met, I've never met you, didn't know you were going
> to be here -- do you
> think that was a fair -- that was a small excerpt
> from a long
> documentary, but do you think that was a fair
> depiction, what you saw of
> Tamaqua?
>
> Patty Borger: It is absolutely the depiction of
> Tamaqua, as I shared
> with some of the people that I had dinner with last
> evening. It is that
> and then some.
>
> Moyers: Thank you, because I want to tell you
> something, thank you very
> much.
>
> Borger: Thank you.
>
> I want to tell you something. When that broadcast
> aired, Kenneth
> Tomlinson was watching. Now some of you know that
> Kenneth Tomlinson is
> the chairman of the Corporation for Public
> Broadcasting. He's Karl
> Rove's ally and the right wing's point man on
> keeping tabs on public
> broadcasting. And I'm not making this up -- you've
> heard that he and I
> have been involved in a little dispute of late. I
> didn't know until I
> read it in the Washington Post a few days ago, but
> Mr. Tomlinson himself
> told a reporter that when that broadcast aired, he
> was watching and it
> was too much for him. Reaching into that well-worn
> book of mindless
> right wing clich&#233;s, he called it liberal
advocacy
> journalism and he
> decided, "right then and there" to bring some
> balance to the public TV
> and radio airwaves. In other words, to counter what
> real people were
> saying about their lives.
>
> So, what did he do? Well, apparently the sainted Tom
> DeLay was too busy
> snorkeling with lobbyist to take on his own PBS show
> informing the folks
> in Tamaqua that they are the petri dish of
> capitalism. But Mr. Tomlinson
> found kindred spirits at the right-wing editorial
> board of the Wall
> Street Journal, where the "animal spirits of
> business are routinely
> celebrated with nary a negative note about the
> casualties of their
> voracious appetites." So now on public television,
> every week you can
> get an alternative view of reality to life in
> Tamaqua.
>
> Here's the point. The last thing ideologues want is
> reporting about the
> facts on the ground. Facts on the ground subvert the
> party line. That's
> why if you live where right-wing radio and media
> monopolies dominate the
> airwaves, you're told 100 different ways why
> unregulated markets work
> better than democracy. That's a lie, of course, but
> because you're never
> the other side of the story, it works. Here was
> straightforward
> reporting about people who were in pain for reasons
> not of their own
> making and it was more than a right-wing apparatchik
> could take, because
> too much of the truth might set those people in
> Tamaqua free, might take
> them to the voting booths or even to the streets,
> shouting we're mad as
> hell and we're not going to take it anymore.
>
> I pause here to call on that old journalistic
> warhorse, Hal Crowther,
> who was a staple at Time and Newsweek and the
> Buffalo News, before going
> his own way with his independent column. Just this
> week, he writes that,
> "The first thing every reporter was taught, back
> when reporters were
> taught things, is that the best way to find the
> truth is to follow the
> money. If the media still hunted with live
> ammunition, Enron,
> Halliburton, and the energy industry's pornographic
> profits would be
> enough to force this oil-soaked, shake-beholden
> government to resign in
> disgrace."
>
> Remember -- and he goes on to thunder, "worse still
> than handouts to the
> wealthy is the reprehensible new legislation that
> blocks working
> Americans from climbing the hill where the money
> flows."
>
> Laws, like boulders, roll downhill to crush the
> scrambling underclass,
> the estimated 80 million Americans unable to pay
> their bills. Think
> about what it means to limit personal bankruptcies,
> inhibit class-action
> suits against toxic employers, protect chemical
> polluters from liability
> lawsuits, and cap settlements in personal injury
> cases. It means trying
> to eliminate what little protection of ordinary
> citizens retain against
> corporate leviathans that cheat, exploit, injure,
> empoison them, trap
> them in hopeless jobs, renege on their health care
> and default on their
> pensions. It means stripping leverage from the
> people who have no
> leverage to spare.
>
> Now, we did that kind of reporting on NOW with Bill
> Moyers and David
> Brancaccio is still doing that kind of reporting.
> Hal Crowther hunts
> with live ammunition. But if Kenneth Tomlinson and
> Karl Rove have their
> way, journalists on public broadcasting will be
> shooting with blanks.
>
> Let me tell you finally about those people in that
> little town. They
> don't want to get rich. They just want a decent
> paying job They want
> Social Security to be there in their old age for
> their own sake, and so
> their kids won't be burdened with their care. They
> want a simple,
> comprehensive health care system. They want their
> livelihoods and the
> vitality of their communities taken into account, as
> political and
> corporate elites measure profits, economic growth,
> and the GDP.
>
> And they want the political system cleaned up so the
> playing field is
> more level and their voices are not wholly drowned
> out by the deep
> pockets predators here in Washington DC. These are
> not radical views.
> They're not even liberal views. They're just plain
> American values and
> any reporter who spends any time in the field can
> discover that. You
> just have to get out of the Washington and New York
> studios, throw away
> the talking points sent to you by the Republican
> National Committee,
> stop yakking and start listening, leave the winners
> to their wine and
> buy the losers a beer, and you'll find that the
> actual experience of
> regular people is the missing link in a nation wired
> for everything but
> the truth. And let me tell you, these plain American
> values, the truth
> from an America that is barely holding on, scares
> the hell out of the
> powers that be.
>
> I'm going to skip over the heart of my speech.
> [Campaign for America's
> Future executive co-director] asked me to talk about
> the past and how
> progressives have always put themselves in front of
> a juggernaut of
> wealth and privilege that is always threatening,
> from the end of the
> civil war through the 1920s, always threatening to
> roll over the last
> vestiges of democracy in this country. And I had a
> wonderful section on
> that, which I'll get Bob to publish on his
> website.tompaine.com.
>
> But I want to say, they're back, my friends. They're
> back in full force
> with a lock on all the three branches of government
> and most of the
> media and their goal is to take America back -- back
> to their private
> garden of Eden in the first Gilded Age, when the
> strong took what they
> wanted and the weak suffer what they want. Look no
> further than today's
> news. Donaldson is out at the SEC. He was trying too
> hard to look out
> for the interests of shareholders in the public, so
> the president's big
> donors, the captains of industry and finance who
> manipulated the first
> Gilded Age cashed in their IOU's and Donaldson is
> out, replaced by a
> right-wing Congressman who takes a dim view of
> shareholder suits and
> supports eliminating the estate tax, the dividend
> tax, and other taxes
> on the idle rich. Once again, they've sold the
> chicken coop to the fox.
>
> So what do you do? What do you do? Well,
> progressives have to be like
> the Irishman who was walking down the street and saw
> a brawl and said,
> is this a private fight or can anybody get in it?
> Well, you've got to go
> home and jump in. You've got to tell the truth about
> the other side.
> You've got to fight the corruption of the system.
> But don't stop with
> reporting how bad they are. It's not enough to say
> how bad they are.
> Show us a new vision of globalization with a
> conscience. Stand up for
> working and middle-class people and those in the
> middle and those who
> can't stand alone. Don't be cowed, intimidated, or
> frightened. You may
> be on the losing side of the moment, but you're on
> the right side and
> winning side of history.
>
> And I remind you, history could come tomorrow. Have
> some fun while you
> fight. Americans are more likely to join the party
> that enjoys a party.
> Come to think of it, go out there and argue that
> working people should
> have more time off from the endless hours of tedious
> work that devours
> the soul and the long commutes that devastate
> families and community.
>
> And one last bit of advice, don't forget your
> homework. I'm giving you
> some summer reading as it used to be said. My book
> next week comes out,
> as Bob says. But, more important than my book, I
> want you to read this
> book. It comes out in late July. It's called Thomas
> Paine and the
> Promise of America, by a historian at the University
> of Wisconsin named
> Harvey J. Kaye.
>
> Thomas Paine was the journalist of the American
> revolution who called
> forth the better angels of our nature, who imbued us
> with our democratic
> impulse, and articulated our American identity with
> exceptional purpose
> and promise. It was Tom Paine who argued that
> America would afford an
> asylum for mankind, provide a model to the world,
> and support the global
> advance of republican democracy. This is tonic for
> flagging spirits
> facing great odds, for it is Thomas Paine who
> insists that it is too
> soon to write the history of the revolution. You,
> you, you, and you, and
> you, and you, and you Patty, and you, you're going
> to write the history
> of the revolution, and that is what's at stake.
>
> &#169; 2005 Independent Media Institute.
>


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Monday, June 06, 2005

New Pope Condemns Practically Everything


> Well, well, what a BIG surprise!! (Not)
>
> Pope Benedict says: No condoms may be used by
> Catholics in third-world
> countries where AIDS is rampant. No condoms may be
> used by couples who
> already have many children and cannot afford to
> support more. No
> abortions are allowed (of course)--not even in rape
> cases. In case of
> confusion over his rules, for safety's sake, you may
> practice No sex at
> all. (It appears that is what he is suggesting for
> all
> Catholics--perhaps he should suggest the same thing
> for his pedophile
> priests whom he has protected so fiercely in the
> past.) No divorce (not
> even if your spouse is abusing you or threatening to
> kill you). No
> living together before marriage. No sex before
> marriage. And certainly
> no homosexual liaisons--ever! It doesn't matter if
> you were born a
> homosexual. It doesn't matter if you are unable to
> change your sexual
> orientation. If you are of the "wrong" sexual
> orientation ("wrong" as
> determined by Pope Benedict), you will have to live
> without sex or a
> partner or children for your entire life.
>
> Let's see....what else can he ban for "good"
> Catholics? (how many of
> those do you suppose will be left, practicing all of
> his edicts?) I
> know!....he could ban sexual thoughts and form a
> "Thought Police" corps
> composed of the pedophile priests who are not being
> allowed back into
> parish priesthood. They, above all others, would be
> sure to know what
> sexual thoughts consist of.
>
> Since he is such a purist (but who knows what
> happens behind the closed
> Papal doors?), he will probably live a long life.
> Just as we are stuck
> with Bush for 4 more years, the Catholics will be
> stuck with Benedict
> for as many more years as he can manage to hang on
> to earth life.
> Between Bush and Benedict, the pendulum has
> certainly swung us all the
> way back into a period of Victorian "morals" and
> "ethics." I hope all
> the Bush and Benedict supporters enjoy their heroes'
> reigns. The rest
> of us will have to endure them.
>
> However, I have a feeling there is going to be an
> even bigger depletion
> in the numbers of Catholics than we have already
> seen in the last decade
> or two. I suspect most Catholics are now living with
> their fingers
> crossed behind their backs as they try to stay
> within the ranks of the
> "holy" while practicing birth control, etc. I
> predict the number of
> church closings will increase....and within another
> generation (perhaps
> sooner) the Catholic Church will disappear
> altogether, for want of
> members. The way things are going, it seems the
> only alternative to
> that would be the disobedience of parish priests of
> their Rome master,
> in allowing gays, divorced people, women who have
> had abortions, and
> people living together "in sin" to be church members
> in good standing,
> notwithstanding the orders of the Pope. But why
> would anyone want to
> stay in a church with such harsh Draconian
> rules/dogmas that they will
> not obey or (in the case of priests) enforce?
> Either way, the Catholic
> Church hierarchy is losing its cult-like grip on its
> membership. Unless
> another humble and liberal pope like John XXIII
> appears soon on its
> horizon, its demise is assured. Perhaps that is the
> real meaning of the
> "Third Secret" of Fatima.??? Or the St. Malachy
> prophecies which allow
> for only one more pope after this one.???
>
> Just my own opinion, of course. You may or may not
> agree.
>
http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=8709268
>
>
<http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=8709268>
>
---------------------------------
Reuters News Article

Print this article Close This Window Pope
condemns gay marriages as 'anarchy'
Mon Jun 6, 2005 02:49 PM ET

ROME (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, in his first
clear pronouncement on gay marriages since his
election, on Monday condemned same-sex unions as fake
and expressions of "anarchic freedom" that threatened
the future of the family.
The Pope, who was elected in April, also
condemned divorce, artificial birth control, trial
marriages and free-style unions, saying all of these
practices were dangerous for the family.
"Today's various forms of dissolution of
marriage, free unions, trial marriages as well as the
pseudo-matrimonies between people of the same sex are
instead expressions of anarchic freedom which falsely
tries to pass itself off as the true liberation of
man," he said.
The Pope spoke to families at Rome's St. John's
Cathedral on an issue that has become highly
controversial around the world, particularly in
Europe and the United States.
In April, parliament in traditionally Catholic
Spain gave initial approval to a law legalizing gay
marriage. It is widely expected to be approved by the
Senate and to become law.
But just last week, California's Assembly
killed off a bill that would have allowed gay
marriage in the most populous U.S. state.
The Pope, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
headed the Vatican's doctrinal department for more
than two decades, said "pseudo freedoms" such as gay
marriages were based on what he called the
"banalisation of the human body" and of man himself

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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Amazon.com: Books: Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat


> Sounds like a good book. Holland just borrowed it
> from the library and
> is bringing it down for me to see this weekend. I
> liked Deikman's The
> Long Way Home--it really helped us to see where we
> had gone wrong after
> we left the SAT cult. It's so obvious, when you
> have freed yourself
> from one cult, that cults are everywhere--in large
> and small form--in
> every venue of life....wherever people want power
> over others....and the
> "others" want safety/security of a Big Daddy taking
> care of them. What
> a mell of a hess (~.~)...
>
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/097200212X/qid=1117596341/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7121419-4059257?v=glance&s=books
>
>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/097200212X/qid=1117596341/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7121419-4059257?v=glance&s=books>
>

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Monday, May 30, 2005

The Fantastic Art of Illusion--Trompe l'oeil Murals

The Fantastic Art of Illusion--Trompe
> l'oeil Murals
>
>
>
> Subject: The Art of Illusion
>
> This does require time to load if you are using a
> modem, well worth the
> time, absolutely unbelievable, you must keep in mind
> that you are
> looking at flat surfaces, the people are not real.
> This guy is a
> remarkable artist!
> The Art of Illusion - Trompe l'oeil Murals
>
> Commission an artist for a large-scale life-like
> mural to turn walls
> into a panoramic setting which will add almost
> infinite depth to rooms.
> Here's an example of one of the best in the
> business, the artist Eric
> Grohe. The scale, realism and attention to detail
> are incredible.
>
>
>
>
> Before photo - typical concrete & stucco facade
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Preparing the wall surface
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Preparing the canvas - plastering the wall surface
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The wall starts to take on a 3-dimensional
> appearance
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Eric in his element, 30' off the ground. He does
> most of the artwork by
> himself & researches, paints and designs each
> project from scratch. His
> wife Kathy, also an artist, serves as project
> manager.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The German made (century old) Keim mineral paints
> are engineered for
> durability & longevity. Their liquid-mineral
> application bonds
> potassium silicate with the building's mineral
> substrate....they resist
> UV and moisture corrosion and remain color true for
> over 100 years.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> After photos of the 50x58' mural - it's hard to tell
> you're looking at a
> 2-dimensional flat wall
>
>
>
>
> Eric Grohe and his wife Kathy live in Marysville, WA
> . To view more of
> his work, I've posted some highlights below or you
> can visit his web
> site at http://www.ericgrohemurals.com
> <http://www.ericgrohemurals.com/>
> . For specific questions, you can contact Eric at
>
<mailto:info@ericgrohemurals.com>info@ericgrohemurals.com
>
> <mailto:info@ericgrohemurals.com> .
>
> ************************
> Here are some more examples of Eric's projects....
> ******************
>
>
>
> Great American Crossroad - Bucyrus, Ohio
>
>
>
>
> Before
>
>
>
>
> During
>
>
>
> After
>
>
>
> Liberty Remembers
>
> Before
>
>
> After - hard to believe you're looking at a flat
> 2-dimensional wall
>
>
>
>
> How to dress up a Shopping Mall - Niagara, NY
>
>
>
>
> Before
>
>
>
>
> After - wide view
>
>
>
>
> After - close ups (I wonder how many birds fly into
> this wall on a daily
> basis??)
>
> Indoor Murals - Miller Brewery
>
>
> When working indoors, the environment is typically
> not as harsh and one
> could conceivably use large format digital
> reproductions to create a
> life-like mural. However, if the indoor location is
> exposed to humidity,
> UV or airborne vapors/chemicals, digital
> reproductions will begin to
> deteriorate rather quickly. The murals below are
> painted in oil on a
> Dibond® aluminum com backing and are overcoated to
> protect from the
> chemical and physical abuse of day to day activity.
>
>
> Hallway Before - Miller Fermenting Rooms
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> After Photos - Past meets Present in the Miller
> Brewery Fermenting Rooms
> - hooks, clipboards and aprons were added to the
> surface of the murals
> to enhance the illusion. You're looking at flat
> walls!
>
>
>
>
>
> Detail view looking down the illusional hallway in
> the previous mural.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Brew Room Includes 22 smaller murals - various sizes
> depicting historic
> scenes of Miller's history going back to the 19th
> century.
>
>
>
>
>
> Check it out (www.computerstfw.com
> <http://www.computerstfw.com/>)
>
>

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Free people do bad things--an essay masterpiece

Free people do bad things--an essay
> masterpiece
>
> The following article is written by a self-described
> "Virginia country
> boy who loves his country." A vet of the Vietnam
> era, his descriptions
> (warning: some of them contain crude language) in
> this essay brought
> tears to my eyes. The story of people he once lived
> near when he lived
> in a cabin in Idaho I think would bring tears to the
> eyes of anyone with
> a heart. I consider this essay to be a masterpiece,
> in spite of its
> crude language. The author's e-mail address is at
> the end, in case
> anyone would like to write him their thoughts or
> opinions...or send him
> a thank you for the essay because what he says needs
> to be said and
> heard by all Americans.
>
> EXCERPT: Things smell more ominous by the day, and
> to quote the late
> Dr. Thompson, "Big darkness, soon come." Feels like
> it's already here.
> Hunter also said "a man with a greed for the truth
> should expect no
> mercy and give none." Damned good advice, I would
> say. Because from this
> desk at the edge of Washington D.C., it looks like
> we are not about to
> get any at all.
>
> 'Free people do bad things'
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> By Joe Bageant
>
> A while back there was a wrestling promotion
> campaign in which young
> children were encouraged to attend local wrestling
> bringing weapons of
> their own creation. The weapons would later be used
> in the ring. One
> small boy returned with a baseball bat wrapped in
> barbed wire. Asked
> about the wisdom of encouraging the child to create
> such brutal weapons,
> the kid's father appeared dumbfounded: "This is just
> entertainment! It's
> fun!" World champion Wrestling's Vince McMahon's
> indignant response was,
> "This is still a free country. I will not let anyone
> stop me." The
> implication being, of course, "I am a great defender
> of freedom against
> evil liberal regulation." Then he looked into the
> camera to his fans and
> said: "DON'T LET ANYONE STOP YOU!"
>
> Well kick my ass and call me Henry! Spare us all
> from liberal sissies
> unable to see the good clean family fun in clubbing
> folks bloody with
> barbed wire wrapped baseball bats. About the only
> consolation here is
> that, were Vince McMahon to be pulverized by the
> very same bat on TV,
> the same people whose basest instincts he exploits
> for profit would LOVE
> IT. Hell, I'd love it. At any rate, McMahon is an
> example of true,
> unregulated "freedom-in-business." And to think that
> we once thought
> football was about as bad as America's bread and
> circuses would get.
>
> Why does it feel like the brutality of a Vince
> McMahon, football, the
> NRA, Wall Street, Republicans and America's
> far-flung network of secret
> prisons and desert wars all have something to do
> with one another?
> Connected in some way? Why this unnamable suspicion
> in the back of the
> mind, and darting sense of fear? Ah yes! Something
> is happening here,
> and we all know what it is, don't we Mr.
> Joooooones?! Things are bound
> to turn more ugly.
>
> For now, though, our attention is absorbed in the
> efforts of our armed
> and clueless youth who, rather like pit bulls, are
> turned loose on the
> rest of world. About 1,700 of them have been killed,
> but not before
> killing a hundred thousand or so Iraqis, nearly all
> of them civilians.
> The carnage in Iraq is not a problem. "Free people
> do bad things," said
> Donald Rumsfeld (referring to the murderous Iraqi
> clusterfuck
> masquerading as a government over there.) But at
> least we are returning
> to our violent roots. As any indigenous person can
> tell you, we are
> coming home to the values that made America great.
> Abu Ghraib was a
> fresh start at reestablishing our violent national
> heritage that began
> with Indian slaughter and seemed to stall out a bit
> after Vietnam. But
> we're baaaaaack! And we're as bad-assed as ever.
>
> Presiding over all at this critical but vulgar time
> in our history is,
> rather appropriately, a vulgar idiot whose second
> bogus inaugural was
> hosted by Trent Lott, a deliberate "fuck you"
> precisely equivalent to
> those Mississippi men groping themselves for the
> cameras of Life
> magazine back in the 1960s. Our esteemed president
> IS one of those men.
> Things smell more ominous by the day, and to quote
> the late Dr.
> Thompson, "Big darkness, soon come." Feels like it's
> already here.
> Hunter also said "a man with a greed for the truth
> should expect no
> mercy and give none." Damned good advice, I would
> say. Because from this
> desk at the edge of Washington D.C., it looks like
> we are not about to
> get any at all. (Bear with me; there is a theme in
> here somewhere. I
> promise to find it.)
>
> Speaking of bringing up America's brutal Reich
> tykes, there is Scott
> Hildreth of Pinellas Park, Florida who is grooming
> his 10-year-old son
> Joshua to do jail time. Josh is one of six children
> --- ages 10 to 14
> --- arrested for crossing a police line at the
> Woodside Hospice to take
> water to Terri Schiavo. Josh pestered his dad
> (himself arrested many
> times at abortion clinics) to drive him there from
> Kannapolis, N.C., so
> he could be arrested at the Schiavo circus.
> Meanwhile, other children
> stood by with duct-taped mouths labeled "JAIL" in
> black magic marker.
>
> God told Josh to do it. "My wife and I felt like God
> really put it on
> his heart, and that we should come down, to allow
> him to live out what
> God had put on his heart," says Scott Heldreth.
>
> So there goes little Joshie, doing his daddy proud,
> walking right up to
> the sheriff's deputies, carrying his plastic cup of
> water. After he
> refused two orders to halt, deputies cuffed his
> hands behind his back
> and loaded him into a van with 14-year-old twin
> girls. At the
> courthouse, the three youngsters were photographed,
> fingerprinted and
> released. Josh described the event with smarminess
> worthy of the most
> self-righteous fundamentalist: "We were smiling for
> Jesus and they
> didn't like that much," he said. Which proves that
> if you get to a kid
> early enough, you can probably have him throwing his
> first firebomb into
> a clinic before he even discovers masturbation. You
> can bet your sweet
> ass he will be combat ready for North Korean duty by
> age eighteen.
>
> My redneck psychotherapist friend Brad Blanton tells
> me that
> militarization and open democratic societies do not
> work together at all
> and produce pathologies at both the individual and
> collective levels.
> Thus we get such conflicted bullshit as the U.S.
> soldiers being kind to
> that Iraqi boy wiggling around in his pus stained
> bed like a bandaged
> grub because an America bomb took off his arms and
> legs. "Attention
> private first class Leroy Rodriquez Jackson! Stand
> forward and give that
> dusky little torso with a head a chocolate bar and a
> Wal-Mart teddy
> bear. And grin for the camera, for Christ sake! Hey
> let's airlift the
> kid to Germany, mount four metal claws on the
> stumps, and hang him on
> the playground monkey bars. Make a great PR shot!
> One thing for sure,
> that one won't ever be driving any suicide car bombs
> into the compound,
> right private?" (Heh, heh,heh!)
>
> But you have to feel sorry for Private Jackson. It
> is his ass that gets
> caught in the disconnect, as he tries to wrap his
> head around how to be
> "lethal and compassionate." As in "Kill the
> motherfuckers, but be loving
> and kind to children as you blow their parents' guts
> out onto the
> sidewalk." People who kill other people are
> desensitized. Humans are
> hardened to the face of suffering; the killing
> becomes reality,
> compassion an abstraction. Private Jackson is
> totally screwed. When he
> does his soldierly duty of causing misery, death and
> maiming, he must do
> it compassionately, according to some hallucination
> generated in the
> Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The
> hallucination is
> transferred through the chain of command until it
> reaches where the
> rubber meets the road---then five privates go on
> trial for hurting an
> enemy they were specifically trained to kill. Anyone
> who has ever been
> in the armed forces understands the certain
> hypocrisy of the proposition.
>
> For some reason though, civilians, smugly ensconced
> in their recliners
> and on barstools, cannot grasp why ignorant kid
> soldiers do horrible
> things during wars. I once defended Lynndie England
> in print and got
> hundreds of emails demonizing the poor Appalachian
> mutt girl, saying
> that she dishonored our "heroes" in Iraq. State
> generated garbage such
> as "Lethal and compassionate" works fine for these
> people, whose entire
> lives have been spent in the controlled environment
> of America's
> industrial military state marketing messages. All
> these post-teens in
> desert camo, the ones making the "good kills," as an
> appropriately
> conducted murder of an Iraqi is deemed military
> parlance, they are
> heroes on the TV news. Funny how you cannot see
> their Clearasil on TV. I
> have never seen as much acne medicine as when I was
> in the military
> during the Nam era, of which this war reminds me
> greatly.
>
> As James Carroll brilliantly put it in "A Nation
> Lost" (Boston Globe
> 4/22/03)
> http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0422-02.htm:
>
> "Photographic celebrations of our young
> warriors, glorifications of
> released American prisoners, heroic rituals of
> the war dead all take
> on the character of crass exploitation of the
> men and women in
> uniform. First they were forced into a dubious
> circumstance, and now
> they are themselves being mythologized as its
> main post-facto
> justification -- as if the United States went to
> Iraq not to seize
> Saddam (disappeared), or to dispose of weapons
> of mass destruction
> (missing), or to save the Iraqi people (chaos),
> but ''to support the
> troops.'' War thus becomes its own
> justification. Such confusion on
> this grave point, as on the others, signifies a
> nation lost."
>
> I just heard that Vern and Sherry's kid, Glen, got
> killed in Iraq. Vern
> and Sherry lived in a log cabin near me on the Coeur
> de Alene
> Reservation in Idaho a couple decades ago, back when
> many white people
> live on little plots inside the res. Vern had
> emphysema, Sherry weighed
> over 300 pounds, and they had a white malamute dog
> named Ike. The
> isolation bothered us older people sometimes, and
> Vern and I drank a lit
> of whiskey during the six winters I lived there.
> Hell it was two miles
> to the mailbox and seven miles to the main road,
> there was no
> electricity, and about the only fun available in
> winter was drinking,
> guitar picking and horse logging when the ground
> froze solid enough. But
> Glen was a little loner and never seemed to mind.
>
> Anyway, Glen, that skinny kid in the fatigues who
> loved to fish and hunt
> and damned near set my cabin on fire once while
> playing with matches, is
> dead. Killed by a roadside IED. And I cannot help
> but think about the
> road that led him to Baghdad. The one that started
> with the deepest love
> of his crippled up ole daddy and ended, right along
> with his chances in
> life, right after high school when there was no
> possibility of college
> and no work within a hundred miles of the
> reservation. The kid was quick
> as a whip, just like his daddy who could draw, do
> calc in his head and
> break horses on those days he had enough wind to
> tackle the job. And
> like his daddy, Glen was born into one of those
> corners of America where
> people are rooted in the earth they were born upon
> and grow up grounded
> enough not to care about making it in the big city
> or imitating what
> they see on television. They also grow up proud of
> their country,
> untroubled by the bitter truths borne by more
> educated people. Their
> notion of patriotism has to do with a sense of place
> and people, blood,
> kin and whatever higher power rustles the branches
> great red fir trees,
> animates both the chipmunk and the mountain lion,
> and stirs fish to leap
> in the rivers. Hard as it will be for urban readers
> to understand, Glen
> was a stone cold country boy of a kind mostly
> vanished from America. The
> real thing. Now he is dead and now the Iraq War has
> plucked the most
> sacred thing from the lives of a poor crippled up
> old man and his huge
> sad wife crying in their shabby little cabin on the
> range above the
> Minneloosa Valley in Idaho. People like Dick Cheney
> or Donald Rumsfeld
> could give a goddamn what I think. In fact, millions
> of fellow Americans
> who support the war could care less what a banged up
> old writer down in
> Virginia thinks. So I know I am yelling into the
> wind. But I think there
> is not one goddamned thing in the entire nation of
> Iraq worth the life
> of that boy.
>
> One wonders just how long the slaughter can be
> sanitized by the state. A
> quarter million young men and women will eventually
> return. At least a
> few of them will speak the truth, though our supine
> media will not hear
> them unless it is sweeps week and they need the
> ratings.
>
> But overall, we can expect more of the same.
> Thousands more dead, blood
> and treasure hemorrhaged on desert sand for the
> satisfaction of an elite
> cult of aging rich men obsessed with power.
> Americans seem not too
> worried. They knowingly reelected the men who
> orchestrated perhaps the
> bloodiest public hoodwinking in American history,
> one spawned in
> secrecy, hatched behind closed doors and launched
> upon the world amid a
> flurry of the most vulgar sort of lies. Lies so
> huge, so brazen that
> even now most Americans simply do not believe anyone
> would have that
> kind of balls. Dick Cheney has said that: "The
> American people will
> continue to support this ongoing effort to establish
> freedom and
> democracy in the world."
>
> Or to put it in the parlance of the dwarves of
> darkness behind the thick
> oval room curtain: "The dumb fucks will never see
> through it."
>
> Copyright 2005 by Joe Bageant
>
> Joe Bageant is a writer and magazine editor living
> in Winchester,
> Virginia. He may be contacted at
> bageantjb@netscape.net
> <mailto:bageantjb@netscape.net>.
>


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