Speakers at the rally called for increased rights for blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, and other minorities. They decried the US military's use of torture and indefinite imprisonment of suspected "terrorists" with no legitimate trial. They decried the excessive power of US corporations here and abroad, and called for renewed government restraints to squelch their excesses and abuses. Several made strident demands to end the blatant racism and US government neglect of the poor highlighted by events in Katrina. They called for support of Hugo Chavez and Castro. Bush may not have been listening, but his constituents were talking to him in large numbers, and will continue to do so. If he and the US aristocracy continue to ignore the will of We the People, things will not end well for them. In the non-violent tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, We the People will take our government back from the plutocracy. The wealthiest nation in the world has moral obligations to be a world leader (rather than a bully) and to care for its poor, and if the incumbent administration is not willing to fulfill these obligations, it needs to be replaced.
Frequently throughout the march, I heard and read the slogan "power of the people". The unfortunate reality is that for now, the ultimate power in the US rests in the hands of a select few aristocrats, and has in varying degrees since our nation's founding. I saw ample evidence of that fact as my wife and I toured the Smithsonian's American History Museum the day before the march. The decadence in which many of the presidents and first ladies engaged was truly disgusting to see. I saw the outrageously expensive clothing, china, jewelry, art, and White House furnishings and realized that I was witnessing evidence that the US is as much an aristocracy as the monarchy from which our founding fathers severed themselves. Further fueling my nausea, I saw that Barbara and Laura Bush were enshrined in the section of First Ladies who have made significant contributions to social justice in the United States. The Bush wives honored alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, a giant in the pantheon of those who have advanced social justice? The Smithsonian curators have a very sick sense of humor.
Mr. Bush, good luck selling your fairy tale of democracy and equality to the victims of Katrina, to many others in America, and to the rest of the world. Your criminal neglect of New Orleans and the poor in general, your lies, your theft of the 2000 election, your numerous violations of the public trust, your cronyism leading to incompetents like Michael Brown causing thousands to suffer or die, and your war profiteering combine to make you the biggest felon to serve as President of the United States (Note to Bush: as an "elected" official, you are merely a public servant, not a monarch. You belong in one of the many penitentiaries which are a part of the prison industrial complex).
So What?
In skimming my 120 emails I received while I was away for the weekend, I discovered that ANSWER, one of the demonstration's organizers, has apparently been accused of being Maoist Communists who are virulently anti-US and who advocate supporting any group which opposes the US government (i.e. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Khmer Rouge). My response to that is that I do not care. United for Peace also sponsored the event, and to my knowledge, they have not been targeted as "anti-American". I am not a member of either group and regardless of how extreme their positions may be, this event served a valuable purpose. It demonstrated the strength of the movement in the United States for peace and social justice, and the depth of the desire amongst Americans to remove the avaricious, tyrannical, and criminal Bush regime from power.
"Terrorism" Cuts Both Ways and Imperialist Acts Have Consequences
Going out on a limb (as I usually do), I am going to state that while I do not condone terrorism (which I am defining as the act of killing innocent civilians to achieve a political purpose), I understand the viewpoint of some of the groups whom the US mainstream media and the Bush regime have labeled as terrorists. Bush and his ilk, and many of their predecessors (including Clinton via Kosovo, Bush I via Iraq, Reagan via Central America, and Nixon and Johnson via Vietnam.) have engaged in the most lethal state terrorism imaginable, killing millions they label (and labeled) as "collateral damage". The US government also has a nasty habit of supporting ruthless dictators (when they support US corporate interests) who kill tens of thousands of their own people. I do not support violent acts committed by either side, but the US government is no nobler than those they have labeled as "terrorists" because they have dared to resist US supremacy by fighting back.
On the plane trip home from DC, I started reading Tariq Ali's Bush in Babylon: the Recolonization of Iraq, and started to see the Arab point of view more clearly. I discovered that Iraq is a nation/region which has been subservient to foreign powers in some fashion since the 13th Century. Coupling the predatory intentions of the US government with Iraq's history, I can fully appreciate the front cover picture on Ali's book which shows an Iraqi child urinating on one of his US occupiers. To the Iraqis, the US is another in a long line of tyrants, no better than the British, Turks, or their predecessors.
The US is attempting to implement "democracy-at gun-point" in a nation embroiled with ethnic and religious tensions. The Iraqi people know why the US government is killing their people and destroying their cities, which makes their resistance quite logical. They realize that a cruel and greedy imperialist government needed to assert its military might on what they anticipated would be a weak target so it could begin implementing the Bush Doctrine and the Project for the New American Century. Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, and many other cogs in the military industrial complex were itching to see their profits skyrocket, and Iraq appeared to be a ripe plum for the picking. Most importantly, oil was too valuable of a commodity for a self-respecting Twenty-First Century world power bent on global domination to leave in the hands of "mere Arabs". Why wouldn't the Iraqis feel enraged and resist invaders, plunderers, and thieves?
US troops in Iraq number over 140,000. The occupation started in March, 2003. The Bush tyranny continues to refuse to commit to an eventual withdrawal of US forces. Bush and his minions lied to Congress to launch the invasion, defied the UN and international law, and, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurities.org, are establishing 12 of what the Pentagon propagandists call "enduring bases" in Iraq. To translate from "Pentagonese" to English, an "enduring base" is a permanent base. Despite the hollow propaganda of spreading freedom and liberty, the US government's actions smack of those of a tyrant intent on colonizing the sovereign nation of Iraq.
Your True Colors are Showing
The disguise is slipping as the US government has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. Hurricane Katrina revealed the hypocrisy behind their "noble cause" of spreading freedom and liberty. Those abstract concepts exist in the US on a very limited basis. The US government has been, and is increasingly dominated by a select few plutocrats and aristocrats who are groomed for public office from birth. The elites of America place their carefully prepared candidates before an American voting public rendered apathetic by the mainstream media and years of government corruption. The Democratic/Republican Duopoly ensures that only two candidates have a real chance of winning public office in virtually every election, and each candidate is beholden to corporations and the US aristocracy. Sometimes decent people sneak into Congress and the Judiciary, but there are few real choices for middle and working class Americans, particularly when one factors in the stolen Presidential election of 2000. Jimmy Carter, one of the few former Presidents known for his honesty, recently publicly stated his certainty that Gore won the 2000 election.
For more, click on:
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/carter_says_gore_won_2000_el_0922.html
The flood-waters of Katrina unmasked the depraved engineers of the runaway train called the United States. Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been exposed to the world as malevolent profit seekers who regard humanity simply as a means to enhance their wealth and power. I need only look at the T-shirt I bought at the march on Saturday as a reminder. My shirt is emblazoned with a picture of a suffering, elderly Black American woman in New Orleans who has bundled herself in the American flag for warmth. Bush and his war-mongers have perverted the meaning of a once sacred symbol of the ideals of a true republic to one of hatred, criminality, brutality, and imperialism. I hope it served her well as a blanket. Some members of Congress want a Constitutional amendment to prevent flag desecration. Too late! The criminal acts of the Bush administration have already grossly defiled the American flag.
Resisting the Path of Violence
Many readers have emailed me with their opinions that non-violent movements are ineffective. I disagree. While non-violent movements generally involve significantly more time and will-power than violent revolutions, they can be effective. I cite the examples of Martin Luther King, whose peaceful movement significantly advanced civil rights in the US and of Gandhi's non-violent revolution, which led to India's freedom from its imperial oppressor, Great Britain.
Frequently throughout the march, I heard and read the slogan "power of the people". The unfortunate reality is that for now, the ultimate power in the US rests in the hands of a select few aristocrats, and has in varying degrees since our nation's founding. I saw ample evidence of that fact as my wife and I toured the Smithsonian's American History Museum the day before the march. The decadence in which many of the presidents and first ladies engaged was truly disgusting to see. I saw the outrageously expensive clothing, china, jewelry, art, and White House furnishings and realized that I was witnessing evidence that the US is as much an aristocracy as the monarchy from which our founding fathers severed themselves. Further fueling my nausea, I saw that Barbara and Laura Bush were enshrined in the section of First Ladies who have made significant contributions to social justice in the United States. The Bush wives honored alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, a giant in the pantheon of those who have advanced social justice? The Smithsonian curators have a very sick sense of humor.
Mr. Bush, good luck selling your fairy tale of democracy and equality to the victims of Katrina, to many others in America, and to the rest of the world. Your criminal neglect of New Orleans and the poor in general, your lies, your theft of the 2000 election, your numerous violations of the public trust, your cronyism leading to incompetents like Michael Brown causing thousands to suffer or die, and your war profiteering combine to make you the biggest felon to serve as President of the United States (Note to Bush: as an "elected" official, you are merely a public servant, not a monarch. You belong in one of the many penitentiaries which are a part of the prison industrial complex).
So What?
"Terrorism" Cuts Both Ways and Imperialist Acts Have Consequences
Going out on a limb (as I usually do), I am going to state that while I do not condone terrorism (which I am defining as the act of killing innocent civilians to achieve a political purpose), I understand the viewpoint of some of the groups whom the US mainstream media and the Bush regime have labeled as terrorists. Bush and his ilk, and many of their predecessors (including Clinton via Kosovo, Bush I via Iraq, Reagan via Central America, and Nixon and Johnson via Vietnam.) have engaged in the most lethal state terrorism imaginable, killing millions they label (and labeled) as "collateral damage". The US government also has a nasty habit of supporting ruthless dictators (when they support US corporate interests) who kill tens of thousands of their own people. I do not support violent acts committed by either side, but the US government is no nobler than those they have labeled as "terrorists" because they have dared to resist US supremacy by fighting back.
On the plane trip home from DC, I started reading Tariq Ali's Bush in Babylon: the Recolonization of Iraq, and started to see the Arab point of view more clearly. I discovered that Iraq is a nation/region which has been subservient to foreign powers in some fashion since the 13th Century. Coupling the predatory intentions of the US government with Iraq's history, I can fully appreciate the front cover picture on Ali's book which shows an Iraqi child urinating on one of his US occupiers. To the Iraqis, the US is another in a long line of tyrants, no better than the British, Turks, or their predecessors.
The US is attempting to implement "democracy-at gun-point" in a nation embroiled with ethnic and religious tensions. The Iraqi people know why the US government is killing their people and destroying their cities, which makes their resistance quite logical. They realize that a cruel and greedy imperialist government needed to assert its military might on what they anticipated would be a weak target so it could begin implementing the Bush Doctrine and the Project for the New American Century. Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, and many other cogs in the military industrial complex were itching to see their profits skyrocket, and Iraq appeared to be a ripe plum for the picking. Most importantly, oil was too valuable of a commodity for a self-respecting Twenty-First Century world power bent on global domination to leave in the hands of "mere Arabs". Why wouldn't the Iraqis feel enraged and resist invaders, plunderers, and thieves?
US troops in Iraq number over 140,000. The occupation started in March, 2003. The Bush tyranny continues to refuse to commit to an eventual withdrawal of US forces. Bush and his minions lied to Congress to launch the invasion, defied the UN and international law, and, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurities.org, are establishing 12 of what the Pentagon propagandists call "enduring bases" in Iraq. To translate from "Pentagonese" to English, an "enduring base" is a permanent base. Despite the hollow propaganda of spreading freedom and liberty, the US government's actions smack of those of a tyrant intent on colonizing the sovereign nation of Iraq.
Your True Colors are Showing
The disguise is slipping as the US government has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. Hurricane Katrina revealed the hypocrisy behind their "noble cause" of spreading freedom and liberty. Those abstract concepts exist in the US on a very limited basis. The US government has been, and is increasingly dominated by a select few plutocrats and aristocrats who are groomed for public office from birth. The elites of America place their carefully prepared candidates before an American voting public rendered apathetic by the mainstream media and years of government corruption. The Democratic/Republican Duopoly ensures that only two candidates have a real chance of winning public office in virtually every election, and each candidate is beholden to corporations and the US aristocracy. Sometimes decent people sneak into Congress and the Judiciary, but there are few real choices for middle and working class Americans, particularly when one factors in the stolen Presidential election of 2000. Jimmy Carter, one of the few former Presidents known for his honesty, recently publicly stated his certainty that Gore won the 2000 election.
For more, click on:
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/carter_says_gore_won_2000_el_0922.html
The flood-waters of Katrina unmasked the depraved engineers of the runaway train called the United States. Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been exposed to the world as malevolent profit seekers who regard humanity simply as a means to enhance their wealth and power. I need only look at the T-shirt I bought at the march on Saturday as a reminder. My shirt is emblazoned with a picture of a suffering, elderly Black American woman in New Orleans who has bundled herself in the American flag for warmth. Bush and his war-mongers have perverted the meaning of a once sacred symbol of the ideals of a true republic to one of hatred, criminality, brutality, and imperialism. I hope it served her well as a blanket. Some members of Congress want a Constitutional amendment to prevent flag desecration. Too late! The criminal acts of the Bush administration have already grossly defiled the American flag.
Resisting the Path of Violence
Many readers have emailed me with their opinions that non-violent movements are ineffective. I disagree. While non-violent movements generally involve significantly more time and will-power than violent revolutions, they can be effective. I cite the examples of Martin Luther King, whose peaceful movement significantly advanced civil rights in the US and of Gandhi's non-violent revolution, which led to India's freedom from its imperial oppressor, Great Britain.
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