Committed to the publication of articles and editorials that promote peaceful solutions to international disputes, the attainment of economic justice, and the protection of individual

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For example, I found this quote on http://www.evanfleischer.com:

“ It was incredible. Unification of so many different types of people from all over Italy and the world. Almost the entire protest was very peaceful, music, signs, dancing. There were the violent few, I saw windows crashed in and shot into. Anarchy symbols painting everywhere. And paint that read “FUCK BIG BROTHER” everywhere. I saw cars on fire, and cop cars crashed into one another. But that wasn’t what most of the protest was about. I walked for over 8 hours and most of that time I saw people coming together for each and everyones different causes. Many signs read “noi siamo il 99%” and other creative things. I think the insane feeling of unification among 100,000+ people was the most incredible thing. ”
— planetsurferr — after I asked her what today’s #OccupyRome protests were like.

But the following video is so important, so cleverly done, that you can show it to kids, or to people who have no clue, and maybe they will get the point through this gentle cartoon. Take a look:

Show it to others who are not so progressive, still lulled by mainstream assurances. Maybe you can get a conversation going. Maybe you can break through the ingrained propaganda that keeps them ignorant.

If you do, please leave a comment relating your experiences. Inquiring bunnies want to know.

A former Wall Street manager turned muckraking journalist gets inside how the banks looted the Treasury, stole the bailout, and continued with business as usualWe all watched as packs of former Big Financiers commandeered posts in Washington and lavished trillions in bailouts to “save” big Wall Street firms that used that money for anything and everything except to fill in Main Street’s potholes. We all watched as Wall Street heavyweights fought tooth and nail to declaw financial reform and

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From an acclaimed, original observer of media and culture: how we can draw upon popular fantasies to create an alternative politics through imagination and spectacle—a twenty-first-century manifesto for the left.What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald’s commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much. And, as Stephen Duncombe brilliantly argues, this is part of what’s wrong with progressive politics. According to Duncombe, culture—and popular

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Image by elycefeliz via Flickr

So now GOP Senator Orrin Hatch is proposing a law to mandate drug testing all unemployed workers. You would have to test negative for drugs to receive unemployment compensation.

Small, minor detail: Such a law would be unconstitutional. It would be a major violation of rights.

OK, we all know that the Republican claim to be fiscally conservative is a joke (a lie, actually). They take over the government when there are large surpluses accumulated by Democratic presidents, create or increase tax giveways for the rich, and then spend the U.S. into major deficits.

Like Reagan, who created the hugest deficit up till then and greatly increased the size of the government. Like Bush-Cheney who took over a surplus created by Clinton-Gore through some very painful cuts in government and in social services—and turned it into a huge deficit through huge tax cuts and reckless spending. So we expect double-talk and chicanery from the GOP. They lie.

Can you imagine how much it would cost to test every single worker who applies for unemployment benefits? The expense would be stunning!

Maybe Hatch’s delusion is that instituting such an (illegal) law would keep many people from applying for benefits, thereby making the unemployment figures smaller. Pulease!

Maybe instead, we should use the money to institute a sanity test for senators and representatives. Those who turn out to be sociopaths, psychopaths, empathy-impaired, dishonest or pathological liars would be disqualified from serving and forced to resign—and ineligible to ever run for any public office again.

Now that would be a worthwhile law. And since the U.S. is the employer, and the GOP advocates unlimited rights for employers, how could they object?

Oh, right, that hypocrisy thing…

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Haiti is an amazing country. Sure, it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But that is not the fault of the brave and generous Haitian people.

Haiti was formerly one of the most brutal French plantation colonies. Some of the planters there were monsters of sadism and depravity. Read the history.

The rum and sugar trade was so lucrative that it was much cheaper to buy more slaves than to take care of the current batch of Africans. So the plantation owners/managers just worked them to death and bought more.

Besides the obvious cruelty and inhumanity of that practice, there was another drawback. Eventually all the relatively docile peasant farmers who had made the plantations such a success were all used up. In West Africa the European slavers then fomented wars among the tribes and bought the resulting captives as slaves.

These later slaves were mostly highly trained and experienced warriors and sometimes shamans or other spiritual leaders, adept in magic, martial arts, espionage, and other practices. Those were valuable leaders and valuable skills for, say, a revolution.

They escaped by the dozens off the crowded docks of Port au Prince and disappeared into the rugged mountains of Haiti. There they joined forces with former enemies from West Africa and a few tough remnants of the indigenous Indians and formed a formidable fighting force.

They were able to infiltrate the plantations to pass information and coordinate a successful revolution in 1791 against the brutal plantation system in Haiti that was so very profitable for France.

Napoleon sent troops. The Haitians defeated them.

The Spanish sent troops. Ditto.

The successful revolution in Haiti is said to be one reason that Napoleon sold the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.

When Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America, lost his first revolution, the Haitians took him in. They outfitted a new army for him. The only obligation? He must abolish slavery in every country he freed.

The U.S. was still 60 years from even nominally abolishing slavery. A black democracy only a short sail from U.S. shores? Unthinkable! Not to be tolerated.

In (I think) the 1830s France sent an armada of powerful gunboats to blockade the coastal cities of Haiti, threatening to destroy all the coastal towns (at great loss of life) if the government of the fledgling democracy did not agree to pay “reparations” to France for freeing themselves from slavery.

The French forced the Haitians to pay virtually their whole national income to France till the end of the 19th century. Do not criticize Haiti for being a backward country. All the money that should have been used to build roads, schools, universities, hospitals, and other infrastructure had to be paid to the French for generations.

But wait, there is more: The United States of America has invaded tiny Haiti 13 times!

Throughout the 20th century we repeatedly deposed democratically elected presidents of Haiti who stood up for the Haitian people against U.S. corporate interests. We imposed and supported brutal dictatorships.

Popular, democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted by the CIA under President Clinton and exiled from Haiti for 3 years. When he came back, he was reelected.

The U.S. kidnapped him at gunpoint under President Bush and held him incommunicado in Central Africa for weeks. The Bush government threatened the President of Jamaica with similar treatment for offering sanctuary to the Haitian president and his family.

So do not blame the Haitians for their predicament. The U.S. and France put them in the position they are currently in. Only Venezuela, Cuba, and a handful of other countries freed by Bolivar have ever stood up for them.

We owe the Haitians our support for the movement to insist that the French repay the so-called “reparations” they extorted from Haiti at gunpoint in the 19th Century.

America owes the Haitians help and monetary aid now to make up abusing them in the past. And because they need help as our fellow human beings and near neighbors in the New World.

When it gets right down too it, we also owe the Haitians for a huge chunk of middle America—from Louisiana to Idaho—known as the Louisiana Purchase.

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Coalition of Immokalee Workers protest. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

What is it with Florida? The reports just keep coming in about Immokalee County, where poor immigrant workers are lured with the promise of jobs and then trapped in brutally inhumane conditions and not allowed to escape.

Over and over we have been asked to boycott this or that fast food restaurant in the last few years. After awhile we hear that the restaurant has nobly given in and agreed to pay a whopping extra penny a ton for tomatoes or whatever. And so we go back to eating there, maybe.

But the truth is none of that money ever goes to the poor workers, slaving under that hot sun without water, abused by overseers, and forced to live in abysmal squalor. None of that money is ever passed along to them so that their children can quit working in the fields to help feed the family.

Instead, the money is kept by the growers association, which has been running this racket for decades and does not want anything to interfere with it. So poor workers continue  to be lured to Immokalee County with false promises, only to labor and live in conditions that would make most third-world countries look enticing.

For more information see the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Their stories will break your heart and turn your stomach. And make you angry–not only at what is being done to them, but that it is being done right here in the United States of America.

From election fixing to virtual slavery. There is a deep pattern of corruption here. When will someone clean up Florida?

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Four years after Hurricane Katrina, only 19 percent of residents have returned to the poorest neighborhoods. That is a disaster for them, but it is not an accident.

A wealthy New Orleans resident gave away the game in 2005, during the Katrina disaster. Referring to the poor, black population of the flooded areas, he told the Wall Street Journal “we do not want them back”.

Standing beside the swimming pool in the backyard of his New Orleans mansion, this latter day “Southern gentleman” said that the storm was a good opportunity to “clean up the city” by getting rid of “those people” (the poor and black who have still not been allowed to move back in to New Orleans). And so the New Orleans elite have managed to do since the storm.

Perfectly sound public housing and homes were torn down to ensure that the poorest people could not return to New Orleans. Naturally the land for the public housing units, only a fraction of which will be replaced (somewhere, sometime, supposedly), is being sold.

The land under the scarcely damaged, sturdily built old public housing projects just happens to be quite near some very expensive New Orleans real estate—and therefore highly valuable to developers.

For decades, everyone knew that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Yet the federal government (the only entity who could legally do so) did not rebuild or reinforce the levees.

In the interests of real estate developers and right-wing politics they simply waited for a major hurricane to free up valuable land—and vastly change the demographics of New Orleans by getting rid of many thousands of poor, black Democrats.

What happened and is still happening in New Orleans is a crime. People were put in harm’s way and deliberately allowed to die for the sake of politics, racism and greed. Then their homes, including houses that had been owned by families for generations, were taken away.

We must never forget the real meaning—and purpose—of the Katrina disaster.

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The insurance giants and big pharma feel really threatened by the prospect of healthcare reform. Insurance is spending $1.4 million each day to fight reform.

As part of that effort, the right-wing is organizing “unruly mobs” to disrupt healthcare town meetings across America.

Unfortunately for them, the behavior is so obvious, so obnoxious, and so antidemocratic that reporters have noticed and written about it all over the country. Here are a few samples of the media coverage of the carefully orchestrated disruptions of public discussions.

The Post-Standard

“‘It was like he was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail,’ [one of the protesters] said. ‘It was a beautiful thing.’ Actually, for anyone who treasures a functioning democracy, where ideas from all sides are respectfully debated, it’s a pretty ugly development.” [RIP, public discourse?, Post-Standard, 8/5/09]

Herald Times Reporter

“He’s absolutely right. There’s no place for mob behavior in these kinds of situations, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. We always can agree to disagree, but shouting down an adversary won’t accomplish anything.” [Editorial: No room for mobs, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, 8/5/09]

SalisburyPost.com

“The protesters jeer, heckle, wave placards, shout over the speaker and carry on much like the student radicals of yore. Memos that have cropped up on the Web show that these protests are not intended to be any kind of dialogue but purely disruptive, preferably ending with the member of Congress forced to retreat. Videos of the demonstrations almost immediately appear on the Internet. The idea is to make opposition to health-care reform seem more widespread than it really is.” [Beware of staged disruptions, Salisbury Post, 8/5/09]

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