— from Truthout

When the history of this age is written - if there are people left to write it, and if there is technology left to hold it - it will speak of a generation on the brink. Financial calamity combined with economic collapse combined with endless warfare and bottomless greed united to create a beast with hot breath and blood-red eyes that stares us dead in the face. It is an age on the edge of doom, and yet we persist in the suicidal madness of deliberate ignorance. If that history is written, the first line will be, "They were fools."

That history will remember Occupy, and a year when a chance was held forth to seize on the idea that this looming collective calamity can be sidestepped. History will remember Occupy as having offered one last, best chance to be more than we are, to see the beast for what it is, and to slay it once and for all.

Pollsters keep telling us that the public wants action on jobs, a higher tax rate for millionaires, and protection for Social Security and Medicare. Our best economists keep reminding us that job creation should be government's top priority.

So why is the Administration talking about replacing Treasury Secretary Geither with a wealthy banker who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, would lower taxes on his fellow rich people, and is trying to impose European-style job-destroying austerity on this country?

It’s not all that surprising – given that they had no other place to go – that after months and months of “soul-searching,” Mitt Romney finally has received his official acceptance letter from conservative Christian leaders. And although the letter, which was delivered Friday September 7, is focused on support for the Republican Party’s platform (titled “We Believe in America”), it should also be read as an overt endorsement of Romney’s candidacy.

A week or so after the Republican Party Convention, more than two-dozen top-shelf Christian conservative evangelical leaders, putting aside whatever theological differences they might have with Romney’s Mormonism, sent him a letter congratulating him for a Republican platform “that most clearly defines your principles, and those of your party, on a wide range of topics.”

With the November elections right around the corner, the millions of unemployed and under-employed have little reason to care. Aside from some sparse rhetoric, neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered a solution to job creation. Most politicians seem purposefully myopic about the jobs crisis, as if a healthy dose of denial might get them through the electoral season unscathed.

In reality, the jobs crisis continues unaddressed, and threatens to get worse after the election. The post-election "fiscal cliff" of social cuts — "triggered" by Obama's debt commission —will pull the economy below the current treading-water phase, drowning millions more workers in America in unemployment and hopelessness. In addition, two million more long-term unemployed — those lucky enough to still receive benefits — face the very likely possibility of having their benefits ended due to the trigger cuts.

That is a pretty simple and important question. Unfortunately most voters are likely to go to the polls this fall without knowing the answer.

If the backdrop to this question is not immediately clear, then you should be very angry at the reporters who cover the campaign. One of the items that continuously comes up in reference to the budget deficit is President Obama's support for the plan put forward by the co-chairs of his deficit commission, Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson. On numerous occasions President Obama has indicated his support for this plan.

“This is the first time in American history when we have used our military power to prop up and possibly put in power a group of people we literally do not know.”
-- Nicholas Burns, Bush-era undersecretary of state, writing in March 2011 about U.S. support for anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya

“It could be a very big surprise when Qaddafi leaves and we find out who we are really dealing with.”
-- Paul Sullivan, professor of political science at Georgetown University specializing in Libya, March 2011

Well surprise, surprise, everybody! Especially you warmongers, neocons, “liberal interventionists,” congressional cowards, and slavish press! Your efforts to shape and exploit the Arab Spring have stirred up hornets’ nests.

— from TomDispatch

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her condemnation. “We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria,” she said in remarks earlier this year. “They have, from time to time, said that we shouldn’t worry; everything they’re shipping is unrelated to their actions internally. That’s patently untrue.”

In the wake of brutal attacks on civilians and the torture of activists in the Assad regime’s prisons, Clinton called on the Russians to suspend their military sales to their key Middle Eastern ally and, a month later, Russia pledged to do so. It was an American act that Syrian rebels were no doubt pleased about. It’s a pity that Clinton’s counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, didn’t look out for Bahrain’s protesters in a similar fashion.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement is being negotiated in secret. Well, not exactly secret -- our trade negotiators know what is being negotiated, other countries know, heads of the huge multinational corporations get to know, but members of our Congress and We, the People don't get to know. We don't get to know because if we did know it would make us sick.

The TPP is a trade agreement between the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It is meant to be a “docking agreement” that other Pacific Rim countries including Japan, Korea and China can enter into later. When completed and enacted the TPP would be the largest Free Trade Agreement in U.S. history.

As the Coalition Against Nukes prepares for a series of events in Washington, D.C., September 20-22, including a Capitol Hill rally, a Congressional briefing, a fundraiser at Busboys and Poets, a ceremony at the Museum of the American Indian, a rally at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a film screening, and a strategy session, the time seems ideal to take in the wisdom of Gar Smith's new book, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth.

Most dangerous indeed, and most useless, most inefficient, most destructive, and dumbest. How does nuclear energy make the human species look like the stupidest concoction since the platypus? Let me count the ways:

A review of:
NOT THE ISRAEL MY PARENTS PROMISED ME
By Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman
With an epilogue by Joyce Brabner
Hill and Wang, 2012
$24.95. $14.67 on Amazon

Harvey Pekar, who died in 2010, was a major player in the elevation of comics into a respectable medium for telling human stories. His famous American Splendor comic featured Pekar as an existential everyman/curmudgeon finding stories in chance meetings in the grocery line, in his mundane, day-to-day life as a file clerk in a Cleveland VA office or in his celebrated appearances on the David Letterman show. His image has been drawn by dozens of cartoonists in a range of styles, most notably by the famous R. Crumb. A feature film was made about Pekar's life and work called American Splendor. The hybrid narrative/documentary film won an Oscar for its screenplay.

[click image to enlarge]

Obama’s attorney general announced that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone for the murders of CIA detainees during the Bush years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, despite this and Guantanamo, most Americans still think Obama is likeable -- a key factor in this year’s campaign.

photo: dctourism/flickr

This is a true account of wedding customs in a rural Missouri farming community prior to WWII, as told by Letty Owings, age 87. The account is limited to the small geographical area. Customs may have been different, twenty miles down the road.

The Shivaree and Farming Community Wedding Customs Prior to WWII

Most country weddings in our community took place in the home. The bride and groom dressed nicely, but there were no bridal shops or wedding dress makers. A preacher would come to the home to perform the wedding. Even if people were not churchgoers, the preacher would "marry and bury." At the wedding ceremony, someone, usually a couple, would stand up as witnesses for the couple being married.

It would be interesting to know if anyone on Capitol Hill ever takes time out from being seduced by lobbyists to wonder about what Americans think of their elected representatives. Congress has the lowest approval rating ever in public opinion polls and only one American in ten is gullible enough to think they are doing an adequate job. If Congress were a company, it would have gone out of business long ago.

The skepticism reflected in the public’s attitude is due in part to the partisan politics that has become the driving force in Washington. The national interest is routinely sacrificed for political gain and even economic recovery can be put on hold if it increases the chances for changing the occupant of the White House.

If you want to see the personification of how the Citizens United decision is playing out in this campaign, look no further than Karl Rove. Yes, that Karl Rove, the political strategist once known as Bush’s Brain.

Rove was a big winner in 2000, when the court’s conservative majority gave the presidency to his client, George W. Bush. Rove went with Bush to the White House as his political czar, but left seven years later as damaged goods. He was enmeshed in the president’s failures and in scandals of his own, including millions of missing emails, congressional hearings, and a near indictment over leaks that outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame and exposed her to danger.

But then the five conservatives on the Supreme Court – three of whom had been appointed by Rove’s two Bush patrons, Bush the First and Bush the Second – came down with the Citizens United decision, giving Karl Rove a second lease on life as a bagman – the biggest in town.

— from TomDispatch

Rebecca Solnit arrived at TomDispatch as a ray of light in a moment of darkness. It was May 2003. The largest anti-war demonstrations in history -- organized across the planet before an expected war had even broken out -- were so over. The Bush administration had done exactly what its top officials had long desired to do (certain as they were that unleashing American military power on Iraq was the key to a future Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and a future Pax Republicana at home). They had invaded Iraq, taken the capital, proclaimed “mission accomplished,” named the giant base they were setting up on the edge of Baghdad “Camp Victory,” and were in the midst of major self-celebrations. By then, they had no doubt that the sun would never dare set on the unique country they were leading, and that the imperial Romans and Brits had been pikers by comparison.

Sparked by a deliberate provocation put together by Christian extremists, riots by groups of Islamic extremists are spreading across the world -- a convenient symbiosis for both groups, as they use each other's actions to "justify" their hysterically constricted worldviews.

There is an added layer to the reaction in the Muslim countries, as the extremists there can draw on the seething resentments built up by the depredations and atrocities inflicted indiscriminately on Muslims by the Western powers in recent decades, particularly since the launch of Terror War.

As demonstrators from the Coalition Against Nukes prepare to descend on Washington DC and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the world's third-largest economy has taken a landmark step toward Solartopia.

A pro-nuclear Japanese government has announced it will phase out all commercial reactors by 2040.

It comes as atomic power continues to plummet and reactors go dark in Germany, France, Quebec, California and elsewhere.

President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor was about to wake him up in the middle of the night to inform the President that 220 Soviet nuclear missiles were headed our way, when he learned that someone had stuck a game tape into the computer by mistake.

Three years later a Soviet Lieutenant Colonel acted out the same scene, with the computer glitch on his side this time. Then in 1984 another U.S. computer glitch led to the quick decision to park an armored car on top of a missile silo to prevent the start of the apocalypse. And again in 1995, the Soviet Union almost responded to a U.S. nuclear attack that proved to be a real missile, but one with a weather satellite rather than a nuke. One Pentagon report documents 563 nuclear mistakes, malfunctions, and false alarms over the years -- so far.

I was innocently chilling at home the other day when my TV brutally assaulted me with yet another show about how bad America is. We’re number one in nothing, our schools suck, our health stinks, our politics toxic as salmonella. Then I endured a movie where our double-crossed hero spends two hours dodging bullets from corrupt CIA operatives.

I wasn’t surprised by the negative tone; we live in difficult times. What got to me was the joy with which the bad news was delivered. Everywhere I turned there was a talking head chortling with glee over the decline of our once-great nation.

Call it cynicism, call it disillusionment, call it the debunking of America, just don’t call it liberalism. Reciting the litany of woe has become a habit with liberals. It’s hard to fault them for it, but that should never be an end in itself. Liberalism is about hope and the future, even in the worst of times. Especially in the worst of times.

I am really surprised the white house asked Google to take out. the film clip on Muhammad. But I can see it as a responsibility of the state to protect her citizens, and if this is what it takes to save the lives of Americans elsewhere, it may be considered as a short measure.

I hope the rejection sends a clear message to other nations that even the President of America cannot meddle with the freedom of speech guaranteed in our constitution. So, it is not America, it was the individual who made the movie.

In behalf of the World Muslim Congress, a think tank and a discussion forum, I condemn the movie, a disgusting movie, and the killing of our Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi. This is not acceptable and the criminals must be hunted down and punished. The violence that has erupted from the trailer of the film Mohammad is abhorrent and condemned by Muslims without a reserve.

The British used to call it the “cost of Empire:” occasional attacks on Her majesty’s troops and legations by enraged, sword and spear-wielding natives.

Imperial troops would be rushed in and quickly put down the uprisings. In the 1920’s, Winston Churchill authorized the use of poison gas against “unruly” tribesmen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fast forward to the British Raj’s heir. This week’s attacks on US embassies in the Arab world were a deeply disturbing sign of the violent, anti-American fury boiling across the Muslim world.

The trigger for the latest spasm of violence was the tragic murder of Christopher Stevens, the new US ambassador to Libya, an Arabic-speaking career diplomat. He was just the kind of educated, experienced diplomat America so badly needs. Having myself almost joined the US Foreign Service many years ago, I feel particular sorrow.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's policies would degrade American life. If Romney had his way, the U.S. would follow the dysfunctional course of Wyoming, a state run by big oil and gas companies and governed by conservative Republicans. A state where pursuit of corporate profits trumps quality of life.

In Romney's acceptance speech he promised, "By 2020, North America will be energy independent by taking full advantage of our oil and coal and gas and nuclear and renewables." Reframing the Republican mantra "drill, baby, drill," Romney's energy plan would "open America's energy reserves for development" and "provide a rational and streamlined process to regulation." A Washington Post analysis of the plan concludes Romney would "open all federal lands and waters for drilling, including the entire Pacific and Atlantic coasts as well as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Currently, the Interior Department has the power to issue drilling permits for Federal lands and waters; "Romney would give that power to states." In addition, Romney would "approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil sands from Canada to the Texas gulf coast."

Last week the Federal Reserve announced another round of qualitative easing to increase employment. That's like stuffing rats down a python's throat and hoping it excretes enough white meat to feed everybody else. Sure, there'll be a little more food for a minute, but it won't be very appealing. And all you'll get in the end is a lot of fat pythons.

At least the Fed's trying, and it deserves credit for the that. It means that the only powerful people who showed an appropriate level of urgency toward the public's ongoing crisis were, ironically, the only ones who won't have to answer to the public this November. (If you want to know more about quantitative easing, here's a visual representation that should help.)

With just a couple of weeks left in September, members of the House and Senate hurried back to Washington after their August recess and the party conventions, ready to get some legislating done and impress their constituents before they head back home for the final stretch of their reelection campaigns.

Yes, I’m auditioning for a job at The Onion.

Members hustled back to the capital all right, not to get much accomplished for the good of the nation but to party down at events designed to scrape every last nickel of campaign contributions from the jam pots of cash held by K Street lobbyists and special interests.

A few weeks ago, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton published a revealing column in which he delved into the nettlesome question of why the Post rarely writes about Israel’s actual nuclear arsenal, even as it devotes intensive coverage to Iran’s nuclear program, which remains far short of producing a single bomb.

Pexton deemed concerns about this imbalance “a fair question” and dug back through a decade of Post articles without finding “any in-depth reporting on Israeli nuclear capabilities.” He then explored some reasons for this failure, including sympathy felt toward Israel because of the Holocaust and the difficulties that journalists confront in addressing the topic.