New York Times — by Frank Rich — 6 February 2010 — The debate could blow up in the Republicans’ faces. A protracted battle or filibuster in which they oppose civil rights will end up exposing the deep prejudice at the root of their arguments. That’s not where a party trying to expand beyond its white Dixie base and woo independents wants to be in 2010.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED AFTER ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN CALLED FOR GAY MEN AND LESBIANS TO SERVE OPENLY in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.

John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the press focus on McCain, the crazy man in Washington’s attic, was misleading. His yapping was an exception, not the rule.

Many of his Republican colleagues said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés. Michael O’Hanlon, an “expert” from the Brookings Institution, speculated that “18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden” soldiers who are “tough guys” might object to those practicing “alternative forms of lifestyle,” which he apparently views as weak and testosterone-deficient. His only prominent ally was the Family Research Council, which issued an inevitable “action alert” demanding a stop to “the sexualization of our military.”

• Kiss him and get it over with •
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The occasional outliers notwithstanding, why did such a hush greet Mullen on Capitol Hill? The answer begins with the simple fact that a large majority of voters — between 61 percent and 75 percent depending on the poll — now share his point of view. Most Americans recognize that being gay is not a “lifestyle” but an immutable identity, and that outlawing discrimination against gay people who want to serve their country is, as the admiral said, “the right thing to do.”

Mullen’s heartfelt, plain-spoken testimony gave perfect expression to the nation’s own slow but inexorable progress on the issue. He said he had “served with homosexuals since 1968” and that his views had evolved “cumulatively” and “personally” ever since. So it has gone for many other Americans in all walks of life. As more gay people have come out — a process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love.

But that’s not the whole explanation for the scant pushback in Washington to Mullen and his partner in change, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. There is also a potent political subtext. To a degree unimaginable as recently as 2004 — when Karl Rove and George W. Bush ran a national campaign exploiting fear of gay people — there is now little political advantage to spewing homophobia. Indeed, anti-gay animus is far more likely to repel voters than attract them. This equation was visibly eating at Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, as he vamped nervously with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC last week, trying to duck any discernible stand on Mullen’s testimony. On only one point was he crystal clear: “I just plain do not believe in prejudice of any kind.”

• TO HELL WITH DON’T TELL •
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Now that explicit anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil rights are driven to invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights, whether in the military or in marriage. Hatch, for instance, limply suggested to Mitchell that a repeal of “don’t ask” would lead to gay demands for “special rights.” Such arguments, both preposterous and disingenuous, are mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that can no longer dare speak its name. If gay Americans are to be granted full equality, the flimsy rhetorical camouflage must be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies beneath.

The arguments for preserving “don’t ask” have long been blatantly groundless. McCain — who said in 2006 that he would favor repealing the law if military leaders ever did — didn’t even bother to offer a logical explanation for his mortifying flip-flop last week. He instead huffed that the 1993 “don’t ask” law should remain unchanged as long as any war is going on (which would be in perpetuity, given Afghanistan). Colin Powell strafed him just hours later, when he announced that changed “attitudes and circumstances” over the past 17 years have led him to agree with Mullen. McCain is even out of step with his own family’s values. Both his wife, Cindy, and his daughter Meghan have posed for the current California ad campaign explicitly labeling opposition to same-sex marriage as hate.

McCain aside, the most common last-ditch argument for preserving “don’t ask” heard last week, largely from Southern senators, is to protect “troop morale and cohesion.” Every known study says this argument is a canard, as do the real-life examples of the many armies with openly gay troops, including those of Canada, Britain and Israel. But the argument does carry a telling historical pedigree. When Harry Truman ordered the racial integration of the American military in 1948, Congressional opponents (then mainly Southern Democrats) embraced an antediluvian Army prediction from 1940 stating that such a change would threaten national defense by producing “situations destructive to morale.” History will sweep this bogus argument away now as it did then.

Those opposing same-sex marriage are just as eager to mask their bigotry. The big arena on that issue is now in California, where the legal showdown over Proposition 8 is becoming a Scopes trial of sorts, with the unlikely bipartisan legal team of David Boies and Ted Olson in the Clarence Darrow role. The opposing lawyer, Charles Cooper, insisted to the court that he bore neither “ill will nor animosity for gays and lesbians.” Given the history of the anti-same-sex marriage camp, it’s hard to make that case with a straight face (so to speak). In trying to do so, Cooper moved that graphic evidence of his side’s ill will and animosity be disallowed — including that notorious, fear-mongering television ad, “The Gathering Storm.”

• Let The Truth Be Loud And Proud •
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• U.S.A. Incorporated? • NUTS! •

In These Times — by Noam Chomsky — 3 February 2010 — In manufacturing, one in six is out of work — unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.

• IN THESE TIMES • USA’s Best Magazine • InTheseTimes.org ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

JANUARY 21st, 2010, WILL GO DOWN AS A DARK DAY IN THE HISTORY OF U.S. DEMOCRACY, and its decline.

On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections — a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.

The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.

To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”

The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.

Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.

Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.

The January 21st decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.

The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment” — the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.

In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations — these “collectivist legal entities” — have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.

This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”

Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”) — quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”

In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government's masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.

• Yup • An Actual Capitalist PIG •

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There was more to admire in Obama’s performance as well. He did not retreat into the bite-size initiatives — V-chips, school uniforms — embraced by an emasculated Bill Clinton after his midterm pummeling of 1994. The president’s big original goals — health care, economic recovery, financial reform — remained nominally intact, as did his sense of humor. In a rhetorical touch William Safire would have relished, Obama had the wit to rush the ritualistic “our union is strong” so it would not prompt the usual jingoistic ovation.

Good thing, too, since our union is not strong. It is paralyzed. Many Americans were more eagerly anticipating Steve Jobs’s address in San Francisco on Wednesday morning than the president’s that night because they have far more confidence in Apple than Washington to produce concrete change. One year into Obama’s term we still don’t know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward.

The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit.

In Obama’s speech, he kept circling back to a Senate where both parties are dysfunctional. The obstructionist Republicans, he observed, will say no to every single bill “just because they can.” But no less culpable are the Democrats, who maintain “the largest majority in decades” even after losing Teddy Kennedy’s seat — and yet would rather “run for the hills” than accomplish anything.

What does strong Senate leadership look like? That would be L.B.J. in the pre-Kennedy era. Operating with the narrowest of majorities and under an opposition president, he was able to transform a sleepy, seniority-hobbled, regionally polarized debating society into an often-progressive legislative factory. As Robert Caro tells the story in his book “Master of the Senate,” this Senate leader had determination, “a gift for grand strategy,” and a sixth sense for grabbing opportunities for action before they vanished for good. He could recognize “the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away” and turn it quickly. The horse trading with recalcitrant senators was often crude and cynical, but the job got done. L.B.J. knew how to reward — and how to punish.

We keep hearing that they just don’t make legislative giants like that anymore. In truth, the long drought has led us to forget what they look like and to define senatorial leadership down. L.B.J.’s current successor, Harry Reid, could be found yawning on camera Wednesday night. He might as well have just taken the whole nap. Here was this leader’s pronouncement last week on the future of the president and his party’s No. 1 priority: “We’re not on health care now. We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” Yes, a lot of talk — a year’s worth, in fact — with nothing to show for it. [Editor’s Note: See also Here, Here, and Here.]

• Come to our RECRUITMENT EDUCATION & PROSECUTE THEM NOW MEETING 7:30 FEBRUARY 8th •

Be sure to print our beautiful new opt out brochure to help families from military predators. Print front and back on a page, fold it in half and you’re good to go! Contact us at info@impeachthem.com for help in building counter-recruitment in your town. Click BROCHURE!

USMilitary.com — 24 October 2009 — “This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps.”

— THIS HAS BEEN QUITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT FOR THE MILITARY, which has seen a decline in enrollments in the last few years, since the beginning of the current Iraqi war. The Army alone recruited close to 5,000 people in the month of October, which was over two percent of their originated goal. For the Marine Corps, there were close to 3,000 recruitments that were eager to sign up to join the military. This amount for the Marine Corps was well a little over one percent of their target as well.

The figures for meeting the military quota have been highly pleasurable for all companies that are involved, as they eagerly await the new troops from the registered enrollment. The numbers do not lie — there is now a higher interest for the joining the military’s forces from the civilian end. This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps, who both saw substantial numbers increase in their recruitments. Many of the civilians that are signing up are high school graduates that have preferred to enroll in the military to proudly serve our country. There is a great number of these recruitments that have claimed that they will continue their education while in the military, which is often paid for.
Copyright © 24 October 2009 USMilitary.com

See also Pentagon Invades Our Schools

Mother Jones — September/October 2009 — by David Goodman — How the No Child Left Behind Act allowed military recruiters to collect info on millions of unsuspecting teens.

JOHN TRAVERS WAS STRIDING PURPOSEFULLY into the Westfield mall in Wheaton, Maryland, for some back-to-school shopping before starting his junior year at Bowling Green State University. When I asked him whether he’d ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. “To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters,” he said. “It was overwhelming.” Then he added, “I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number.”

Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students’ GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid’s habits than do his own parents.

The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush’s signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form — but not all school districts let them know about it.

Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as “arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country.” The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the Pentagon’s initial failure to disclose the collection of the information likely violated the Privacy Act. In 2007, the Pentagon settled a lawsuit (filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union) by agreeing to stop collecting the names and Social Security numbers of anyone younger than 17 and promising not to share its database records with other government agencies. Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.

The Pentagon also spends about $600,000 a year on commercial data brokers, notably the Student Marketing Group and the American Student List, which boasts that it has records for 8 million high school students. Both companies have been accused of using deceptive practices to gather information: In 2002, New York’s attorney general sued SMG for telling high schools it was surveying students for scholarship and financial aid opportunities yet selling the info to telemarketers; the Federal Trade Commission charged ASL with similar tactics. Both companies eventually settled.

The Pentagon is also gathering data from unsuspecting Web surfers. This year, the Army spent $1.2 million on the website March2Success.com, which provides free standardized test-taking tips devised by prep firms such as Peterson's, Kaplan, and Princeton Review. The only indications that the Army runs the site, which registers an average of 17,000 new users each month, are a tiny tagline and a small logo that links to the main recruitment website, GoArmy.com. Yet visitors’ contact information can be sent to recruiters unless they opt out, and students also have the option of having a recruiter monitor their practice test scores. Terry Backstrom, who runs March2Success.com for the US Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, insists that it is about “good will,” not recruiting. “We are providing a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”

Recruiters are also data mining the classroom. More than 12,000 high schools administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a three-hour multiple-choice test originally created in 1968 to match conscripts with military assignments. Rebranded in the mid-1990s as the “ASVAB Career Exploration Program,” the test has a cheerful home page that makes no reference to its military applications, instead declaring that it “is designed to help students learn more about themselves and the world of work”" A student who takes the test is asked to divulge his or her Social Security number, GPA, ethnicity, and career interests — all of which is then logged into the JAMRS database. In 2008, more than 641,000 high school students took the ASVAB; 90 percent had their scores sent to recruiters. Tony Castillo of the Army’s Houston Recruiting Battalion says that ASVAB is “much more than a test to join the military. It is really a gift to public education.”


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Concerns about the ASVAB’s links to recruiting have led to a nearly 20 percent decline in the number of test takers between 2003 and 2008. But the test is mandatory at approximately 1,000 high schools. Last February, three North Carolina students were sent to detention for refusing to take it. One, a junior named Dakota Ling, told the local paper, “I just really don’t want the military to have all the info it can on me.” Last year, the California Legislature barred schools from sending ASVAB results to military recruiters, though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. The Los Angeles and Washington, DC, school districts have tried to protect students’ information by releasing their scores only on request.

To put all its data to use, the military has enlisted the help of Nielsen Claritas, a research and marketing firm whose clients include BMW, AOL, and Starbucks. Last year, it rolled out a “custom segmentation” program that allows a recruiter armed with the address, age, race, and gender of a potential “lead” to call up a wealth of information about young people in the immediate area, including recreation and consumption patterns. The program even suggests pitches that might work while cold-calling teenagers. “It’s just a foot in the door for a recruiter to start a relevant conversation with a young person,” says Donna Dorminey of the US Army Center for Accessions Research.

Still, no amount of data slicing can fix the challenge of recruiting during wartime. Last year, a JAMRS survey identified recruiters’ single biggest obstacle: Only 5 percent of parents would recommend military service to their kids, a situation blamed on “a constant barrage of negative media coverage on the War in Iraq.” Not surprisingly, more and more kids are opting out of having their information shared with recruiters under No Child Left Behind; in New York City, the number of students opting out has doubled in the past five years, to 45,000 in 2008. At some schools, 90 percent of students have opted out. In 2007, JAMRS awarded a $50 million contract to Mullen Advertising to continue its marketing campaign to target “influencers” such as parents, coaches, and guidance counselors. The result: print ads that declare, “Your son wants to join the military. The question isn’t whether he’s prepared enough, but whether you are.”

Not far from the mall in Maryland, I asked 21-year-old Marcelo Salazar, who'd been a cadet in his high school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, why he decided not to enlist after graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 2005. Now a community college student, he replied that his mother was firmly against it.

Then, as if on cue, his cell phone chirped: It was a recruiter who called him constantly. He ignored it. “War is cool,” he said, flipping on his aviator sunglasses. “But if you're dying, it's not.”
Copyright © September/October 2009 Mother Jones

NEW UPDATE

• Military Training Program for Teens Expands in USA •

Agence France Press — Posted 23 January 2010 — by Mira Oberman — The hallways are lined with prints depicting historic recruiting posters and great moments in military history, like the Battle of the Bulge. Teachers in uniform lead classes in military history, civics, health, and physical fitness.

Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day’s do’s and don’ts.

Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And wear your uniform with pride.

“Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I'm done for two or three weeks. WRONG,” Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.

“Young ladies. There's been no problem with your uniforms but there is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear your ties when you come to my class.”

One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes — including how to shoot a gun properly — from retired veterans.

That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.

Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.

But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society.

“To call these young people child soldiers might be technically inaccurate, but it does reveal the truth of it,” said Oscar Castro, a spokesman for the National Youth and Militarism Program, an advocacy group.

Military recruiters already have the right to give presentations in public schools and to access databases with the contact information of all public school students whose parents do not remove their children from the list.

But they don’t have nearly the same impact as daily interaction with teachers and students in uniform, Castro said.

While military officials say the junior reserve programs are not used as recruiting tools, about 30 to 50 percent of cadets eventually enlist, according to congressional testimony by the chiefs of staff of the various armed services in February 2000.

This is particularly troubling given that the programs are concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods, said Sheena Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Chicago branch of the American Friends Service Committee which lobbies against the programs.

— Click the pics to read the rest! —

• Does democracy exist anywhere any more? From our country to the the countries of Georgia, to Mexico, Iran and Afghanistan, the will of the people is ignored and elections are stolen. We work for a Voters’ Bill of Rights which protects democracy with a national standard of hand-counted paper balloting only. All electric voting machines can be manipulated and rigged. We must not permit their use.

• Two jet plans did not bring down 3 buildings in New York City on 11 September 2001. Thousands of engineers and architects have testified to that. All right, then what really happened and why? Those specifics have never come to light. It’s our right to complete, real investigations, and the prosecutions all who were responsible for 9-ll. We’re pleased to work with Voices of Safety International in this great work for truth and justice.

• Recruitment Education: Dealing with military indoctrination and the poverty draft in our public schools.

• We’re reviewing letters addressed to churches, school principals, superintendents, and to PTAs & PTOs with emphasis on gaining permissions to hand out our materials to students on school property and to accomplish equal time at every school which gives the armed services presentations to school assemblies. We want to get permissions to offer our program in the same amount of time and format that the recruiters get, so young people can see a different side, the real life of soldiers. We aim to get vets from Vietnam, the Iraq wars and the Afghanistan war, to be on call to speak at our events.

• We’ll have copies on hand of OUR NEW OPT OUT BROCHURE for all, and we’ll briefly discuss our plans for schools and other public hand-out events. Brochures were handed out on Halloween. We need to set dates and places to get the word out to families that they can “opt out” from military recruitment.

We support President Obama as much as we are able. But the plain fact is, Mr. Obama has back-tracked on many of his campaign pledges around the effort to restore justice, protect our constitution, and prosecute all who violated our laws. This is not limited to Republicans.

And speaking of promises made, then thrown away, be sure to check out what’s now a famous 15 second video of candidate Obama making a promise concerning Afghanistan that ends with him saying, “And you can take that to the bank.”

There are many Democrats who were complicit with the Bush gang in their efforts to destroy our freedoms and to convert our government into a theocratic corporate dictatorship.

That was five years ago; we have been separated since then and I can say that not a single day has passed during those long years (so brief, so dazzlingly swift for you!) without my remembering your remark. “You don’t love your country.” When I think of your words today, I feel a choking sensation.

No, I didn’t love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving. That was five years ago, and many men in France thought as I did. Some of them, however, have already been stood up against the wall facing the twelve little black eyes of German destiny. And these men, who in your opinion did not love their country, did more for it than you will ever do for yours, even if it were possible for you to give your life a hundred times.

It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization…

The French novelist, essayist, and playwright Albert Camus (1913-1960) was obsessed with the philosophical problems of the meaning of life and of man’s search for values in a world without God. His work is distinguished by lucidity, moderation, and tolerance.

Albert Camus may be grouped with two slightly older French writers, André Malraux and Jean Paul Sartre, in marking a break with the traditional bourgeois novel. Like them, he is less interested in psychological analysis than in philosophical problems in his books. Camus developed a conception of the "absurd," which provides the theme for much of his earlier work: the "absurd" is the gulf between, on the one hand, man’s desire for a world of happiness, governed by reason, justice, and order, a world which he can understand rationally and, on the other hand, the actual world, which is chaotic and irrational and inflicts suffering and a meaningless death on humanity.

The second stage in Camus's thought developed from the first — man should not simply accept the "absurd" universe, but should "revolt" against it. This revolt is not political but in the name of the traditional humane values. During World War II Camus was member of the French resistance.

The big bank “Masters of Money”, the big businesses and manufacturers “The Masters of War” as Dylan Defined them in 1963, “The Masters of Commerce,” “The Masters of Influence,” the lobby leeches of K Street and sycophant ego driven kiss ups hungry to be invited to be even seen with the prominent and powerful have nothing to fear as they are problem — our problem.

So much the instruments of change that we the people once commanded have been rendered impotent and devoured by the system and we have become a nation that dutifully consumes the opiates that pass for the nightly news that we are almost comatose in that sedation. The two political parties are of little value on the crucial issues of our times.

As surely as scouts gather and pile up kindling for a camp fire; we as a nation are amassing a mountain of kindling in the Middle East that with one mistaken spark can ignite a conflagration that will be known popularly as World War III. Oil burns and bombs and bullets ignite!

9/11 is not a justification for the lies that have embolden and fed the fanatic extremists of the region. We have permitted the hatreds of the region to be defined as a new Crusade, a Holy War against the infidels of the West. We had no business in invading Iraq other than to slake our oil thirst and to satisfy the agenda of Neocons with their vision of perpetuating a world vision long become a delusion. We have sought to endear ourselves to those in the Muslim world who are dissatisfied with elements, tenets, practices and traditions alien to western culture. In that simple act we have set ourselves in the cultural crosshairs of that world. Have we forgotten Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination?

In 1944 Douglas led the Saskatchewan CCF to a massive victory, winning 47 of 53 seats and achieving the first democratic socialist government elected in North America.

Tommy Douglas introduced universal hospitalization in Saskatchewan in 1949 and a Medicare plan for Saskatchewan in 1959.

The video is from a CBC Television production, “Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story.” In the dark times today, this brings much needed cheer over what we can achieve in the face of the insatiable greed that infects our country. CFC stands for Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; the organization became the New Democratic Party. Have a look and feel a warm smile for our future.

We will show our righteous outrage at U.S. militarism by showing our elected officials that “Peace means Business,” by clogging up government business. We want an end to Empire so we can build a new economy that is not drained by the costs of Empire and war. This Empire does not create jobs abroad and has the effect of destroying jobs here. This Empire builds the profits of transnational businesses while Americans go further into debt and fights wars for oil and resources. It’s time to stop using militarism as the PRIMARY tool of foreign policy. It’s time to start adhering to the U.S. Constitution and International Law.

IMPEACH BEACH

Bush Lies, Thousands Die: On March 19th, 2003, BUSH INVADED IRAQ. As of 14 November 2009, according to the reliable Iraq Coalition Casualties web site: 4,680 U.S. military people DEAD, includes 91 from New Jersey — We mourn the death of army sergeant Michael P. Scusa, 22, of Villas, N.J., died October 3rd, Kamdesh, Afghanistan.

See Highest troop levels EVER.
Includes 208 who died from self-inflicted wounds as of August 2008. As of 14 November, the official military tally of “non-hostile suicides” in the field — NOT accounting for suicides after returning home from the war — is 12 suicides in Iraq, and 2 suicides in Afganistan..

National Priorities “Cost of War” — 14 November 2009 — To date, $932 billion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national, state, and local numbers we provide are based on the total approved amounts through the end of Fiscal Year 2009.

In addition to this approved amount, the FY2010 budget shows a $130 billion request for more war spending. This would bring total war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan to more than $1 trillion. When all FY2010 war-related amounts are approved, we will adjust our counter so that it reaches the new total at the end of FY2010.

• COST OF WAR • NationalPriorities.org•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Now we confirm more tragic news:
18 Vets kill themselves every day. There are now over one million Iraqis dead due to our war. As of now, the U.S. War On Iraq Costs over $915,000,000,000, give or take a billion. OUR WAR COST IS OVER ONE-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, on the way to a total cost of OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! See National Priorities.

AFGHANISTAN

920 Americans were killed in Afghanistan since Bush took office January 2001, including 13 New Jersey people.

• Suicides Increase Among Troops •
Bloomberg News — 13 November 2009 — There have been 133 suspected suicides among active-duty Army troops this year, putting the service within reach of a new annual high.
The suicides, between January and October and including the National Guard and Reserves, compared with 115 in the same period in 2008. That year the service recorded 140 by year’s end, an annual record, the Army said. The rate of suicide within the Army last year was 20.2 per 100,000 personnel, exceeding for the first time the age-adjusted rate in the civilian population, which was 19.2, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
See The Alarming Increase In Suicides and September Suicide Data — U.S. Labor Against War

— Now the tragic truth comes out: — New York Times — 9 November 2008 — by Associated Press — Army Will Investigate Recruiters’ Suicides — SAN ANTONIO — SEVENTEEN ARMY RECRUITERS NATIONWIDE HAVE COMMITTED SUICIDE SINCE 2001... There are 38 recruiting battalions nationwide, with 8,400 soldiers. The Army’s suicide rate has been climbing as the war in Iraq has increased deployments. Read New York Times — Suicide Rate for Soldiers Rose in ’07 — 30 May 2008 — by Associated Press —The 208 confirmed suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated amounted to a rate of 18.8 per 100,000 troops — the highest since the Army began keeping records in 1980. — WASHINGTON DC — At least 208 soldiers killed themselves in 2007-08 [and the rate of suicide among soldiers is rising], up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday. Nearly one-third of them died at the battlefront, 32 in Iraq and 4 in Afghanistan. But 26 percent had never been sent to either conflict.

Read WASHINGTON — 28 May 2008 — New York Times — Nearly 40,000 military personnel have been given diagnoses of post-tramatic stress disorder since 2003.

Read 126 War Vets Commit Suicide Every Week.
Read Suicide rate among soldiers in '06 was a record — Baltimore Sun.

And Veterans for Common Sense — CBS News — 13 November 2007 — by Laura Strickler, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Armen Keteyian and Katie Couric — Between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers. One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000. — Veterans for Common Sense was featured on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. On November 13, Armen Keteyian, the top CBS investigative reporter, reveals an enormous epidemic of suicides among our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

CBS News has three excellent videos: The CBS Evening News Broadcast, An Interview with Common Sense Vet Paul Sullivan, and Interviews with Veterans' Families. The Veteran Suicide Epidemic NEW YORK — CBS News — THEY ARE THE CASUALTIES OF WAR YOU DON'T OFTEN HEAR ABOUT — SOLDIERS WHO DIE OF SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military. A five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic, Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively. “I just felt like this silent scream inside of me,” said Jessica Harrell, the sister of a soldier who took his own life. — Click the beach to see the people and read the rest!

89% — 642,437 people — voted TO IMPEACH out of 721,839 votes cast as of noon New Jersey time, 20 January 2009. Only 9% — just 64,966 people — said Bush should not be impeached, with the rest unsure. 95% of the American people do not trust Bush to end the Iraq war successfully. And a recent Gallup Poll shows Opposition to Iraq War is at a New High — 63% of Americans Say the United States Made a Mistake in Sending Troops to Iraq.

See our story at http://www.ProsecuteThemNow.com/?q=node/1696 — Wexler Wants Hearings Movement Climbing Fast
and our story at http://www.ProsecuteThemNow.com/?q=node/1994 — The Impeach Bush organization

— See also the Official Petition to Impeach CLICK http://impeachment.kucinich.us/petition —

As of now, the U.S. War On Iraq Costs over $584,000,000,000, give or take a billion here and there. OUR WAR COST IS NOW OVER ONE-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, on the way to a total cost of OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! See also National Priorities

— Vote NOW — click on THE NATIONAL CHENEY IMPEACHMENT POLL! See a video and answer DENNIS KUCINICH STATEMENT
Now cast your vote: — DENNIS KUCINICH — E-Mail your thanks to him at Contact Dennis