Gore Vidal: The only regime change that need concern [us] is in Washington.

i've been waiting for the right quote to mark the passing of gore vidal... it's in the post title taken from the following excerpt of an essay he wrote for the nation magazine in july 2002...

from common dreams...

[N]o matter how corrupt our system became over the last century--and I lived through three-quarters of it--we still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nation--of we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peace--demonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.

[...]

Despotism is now securely in the saddle. The old Republic is a shadow of itself, and we now stand in the glare of a nuclear world empire with a government that sees as its true enemy "we the people," deprived of our electoral franchise.

he will be sorely missed...

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Obama's duplicitous foreign policy

yeah, no shit...

jeremy scahill via the nation...

On the campaign trail, Obama promised an end to torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons. But since taking office he has in fact doubled-down on some of the more insidious policies he inherited from the Bush administration. As Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill explains, Obama has surrounded himself with war hawks, relied on targeted killing and acted unilaterally to defend US interests. Instead of drawing down the two major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has shifted combat to special operations units, prolonging US engagement and fighting a "dirty" war.

and to think how much i railed against george bush...

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The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things

thoughtful perspective from william greider writing in the nation...

In Occupy Wall Street, we are witnessing a rare event—the birth of a social movement. Ordinary people are engaging in sustained grassroots protest against the political order and against citizens’ exclusion from the decision-making that governs their lives. They seek to rearrange the distribution of power, and they are doing so by injecting a creative, often playful vitality that has been missing in our decayed democracy. The protesters have slipped around the soul-deadening, high-gloss marketing of mass-communication culture. Instead, they insist that politics starts with citizens talking to one another and listening—agreeing and disagreeing with mutual respect. The open-door, non hierarchical membership commits people to engage in what historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls “democratic conversation.”

The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things. Their ambition reflects a core mystery of American democracy—the fact that humble people can acquire power when they convince themselves they can. Warmhearted and broad-minded, these citizens audaciously claim to speak for the 99 percent—and despite initial ridicule and dismissal of them by much of the press, polls show they have strong public support. The Occupiers have even managed to make uptight reporters write about corporate greed.

[...]

But will it last? Skeptics are entitled to their doubts, but for important reasons I am confident this movement will endure. First, because it is very unlikely the establishment will respond substantively to OWS’s grievances—and that will only make the protesters more determined. OWS has brilliantly focused its many complaints on the very sector—the megabankers and financiers—on whom the politicians are dependent. In different ways, Republicans and Democrats are aligned with the greedheads and are thus unwilling to punish their crimes or cut them down to size.

[...]

In any case, this movement is not about electoral politics—not yet, anyway. It is about saving the country, an objective bigger than politics and politicians. Its vision is nothing less than halting the degradation and fostering the rebirth of the nation’s original democratic promise. It is the nature of authentic movements to seek large and majestic goals that seem impossible to pedestrian politicians—and, at first, to most citizens. Standing up requires both uncommon courage and severe provocation.

[...]

[R]adical reform will originate only from ordinary citizens—not policy experts and their Wall Street supporters, who led the nation into ruin. The movement can inspire the people to become creative citizens again. Are we up to it? Let us find out. Let the democratic conversations begin.

i'm more than happy to bask in greider's optimism... i sincerely hope it's justified...

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Protect the occupations: what the rest of the 99 percent can do

as a close observer of the occupy movement and seeing the need for evolution beyond merely "occupying," i think it's critical to find ways to effectively communicate with and potentially bring in the vast numbers of other people who share the concerns of the those who have chosen to be active in the effort...

jeremy brecher in the nation...

According to the Albany Times-Union, Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, under pressure from the administration of Governor Andrew Cuomo, thereupon directed city police to arrest several hundred Occupy Albany protesters. The police refused. The Times-Union reported that “State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany police leaders to hold off making arrests for the low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.” According to the official, “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.” Meanwhile, Albany County District Attorney David Soares informed the mayor and police officials that, “Unless there is property damage or injuries to law enforcement we don’t prosecute people for protesting.”

[...]

Here are some ways 99 percenters might want to think about organizing with their own real and virtual communities:

• Bring a speaker from your local Occupy group to a meeting in your living room or to whatever organizations you belong to.
• Organize a General Assembly in your neighborhood to discuss the issues of the 99 percent. Discuss what is upsetting people and decide on some concrete action to address it.
• If your PTA supports teachers’ jobs and programs for low-income students, get them to visit their political representatives and also do a joint action with your local Occupy group.
• If your church’s food pantry or homeless shelter needs money, hold an action at your local bank offices demanding that they feed the homeless in “their” community. If they won’t, ask your elected officials to take a look at the benefits they receive from “their” community. (Remember, according to Mayor Bloomberg it was the threat of city council officials to look into benefits received by the owners of Zuccotti Park that led them to back off their efforts to shut down OWS.)
• Create a Facebook page for your own equivalent of “Knitters for the 99 Percent.”
• Create a group to monitor local media and to protest when they favor the concerns of the 1 percent over those of the 99 percent.
• Organize public hearings in your town about what’s really happening to the 99 percent and how the 1 percent’s power is affecting them.
• Create your own temporary occupations in your own milieu addressing concerns about housing, jobs, media or whatever else concerns you and your fellow 99 percenters.

[...]

The occupations have been incredibly successful. But nothing can fail like success. Z magazine founder Michael Albert, just returned from conversations with protest veterans in Greece, Turkey, London, Dublin and Spain, reports he was told that their massive assemblies and occupations at first were invigorating and uplifting. “We were creating a new community. We were making new friends. We were hearing from new people.” But as days and weeks passed, “it got too familiar. And it wasn’t obvious what more they could do.”

there's a threshold to be crossed and a higher plateau to be achieved... how we do that is going to be a significant challenge...

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Jeremy Scahill on Bush administration torture tactics

and we still have a president who isn't the least bit interested in accountability...

jeremy scahill on olbermann's countdown...

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Social networking

a few observations on social networking...

despite my advanced age - 63 - i've generally been and continue to be pretty much up on the latest electronic media and related gadgets... i guess it's a necessity in my line of work where i regularly find myself based for weeks at a time in a wide variety of countries spread across several continents and both northern and southern hemispheres... if i wasn't up on the communication opportunities provided by the internet, i would essentially be up shit creek...

i started this weblog almost six years ago in 2005, a bit behind the pioneers but ahead of many, including most of my peers who, at that time, didn't know a blog from their left cheek...

i put the blog on twitter almost a year ago, so all my blog posts are automatically tweeted but, other than that, i haven't paid much attention to twitter... i've avoided facebook like the plague, i guess because it seems just a little bit too sorority/fraternity-esque for my taste and, at this particular point, i will probably continue to stay away... in truth, the whole notion of "social" in the "social networking" concept leaves me cold...

so, imagine my surprise when i, for no other reason than simple curiosity, started following my twitter home page in mid-january, just prior to leaving for my current assignment here in kosovo... just remembering to bring up my twitter home page required, as you can imagine, a shift in my ingrained web surfing habits, and, once i got into the habit of regularly bringing it up, i initially wasn't overly impressed... yeah, i added some interesting people to follow - glenn greenwald, emptywheel, greg mitchell, and the like - and was interested to see that their tweets often reinforced and amplified their longer pieces i was accustomed to reading in salon and the nation, but nothing in their various tweets struck me as significantly more valuable than what i was accustomed to following on the more traditional sites...

that all changed with the events in tunisia and egypt... what i am experiencing now is the full-blown immediacy of being on the front lines of a major world event in a way that the traditional news media or even the alternative internet news media couldn't possibly deliver... reading the tweets from sharifkouddous, a native egyptian who is tweeting and broadcasting live for democracy now from cairo adds a three-dimensionality to the goings-on that is breathtaking... i now see "social networking," at least the twitter variety, from a completely new perspective and i'm in awe of its power...

ok... i'm a convert...

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Punish the weak and vulnerable...? Absolutely...! The REAL crooks and criminals...? Not so much...

jeremy scahill in the nation via raw story and msnbc's rachel maddow...

Lawmakers’ defunding of community activist group ACORN “means there is no spine in Congress when it comes to standing up against the real crooks and criminals in this society,” military-affairs reporter Jeremy Scahill says.

Scahill, a writer for The Nation who this summer broke the story that Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, had been implicated in at least one murder, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that ACORN got “pennies” compared to military contractors who have been convicted of crimes but continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from US taxpayers.

Scahill suggested that it’s relatively easy to go after a grassroots community group like ACORN, while pursuing much worse allegations against defense contractors requires actual courage.

“This is political, this isn’t really about upholding the law,” Scahill said on the Rachel Maddow Show. “On the one hand, you have an organization that registered 1.3 million people to vote, 400,000 members, works with the poor and working class people of this nation, and they don’t have lobbying power in the form of massive campaign contributions.

O beautiful, for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America! God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

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Are Blackwater (a/k/a Xe Services LLC) and its founder Erik Prince going down...?

suggestion for the prosecutors... first, follow the money... second, make sure that when you do follow the money, you follow it UPSTREAM...

A former Blackwater [Xe Services LLC] employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

and while you're swimming upstream, be sure to check out cofer black...

Cofer Black, the company's current vice chairman, was director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (CTC) at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was the United States Department of State coordinator for counterterrorism with the rank of ambassador at large from December 2002 to November 2004. After leaving public service, Black became chairman of the privately owned intelligence gathering company Total Intelligence Solutions, Inc., as well as vice chairman for Xe. Robert Richer was vice president of intelligence until January 2007, when he formed Total Intelligence Solutions. He was formerly the head of the CIA's Near East Division.^[23][24] Black was senior advisor for counterterrorism and national security issues for the 2008 Presidential election bid of Mitt Romney.^[25]

swell folks, eh...?

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Neglected cities? Damaged cities? Who else but George Bush...

something i didn't realize, partially as a result of not watching any of the presidential candidate debates, but also because i am not focused at all on urban issues, is that those issues, to date, have not been addressed in any of the debates... the drum major institute in cooperation with the nation magazine, i found out thanks to alternet, has done a video survey of ten big-city mayors in an attempt to address that gap... here's salt lake city's rocky anderson, as posted on mayor.tv...



there's a full article about the project in the 14 december edition of the nyt...

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