"Solidarity Forever" - Read it and think about it.

I looked up the Wikipedia article about the song. "Solidarity Forever" which was written by Ralph Chaplin in 1915 and sung to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I expected that it would be a dated, embarrassing bit of historical anachronism with little application to our modern situation. Well, guess what. It's pretty damn timely. Especially the line, "They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn / But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn."

Kind of makes you think about the rich getting richer and everyone else getting poorer... about derivatives, subprime mortgages, bailouts, and broken promises to help distressed homeowners in the midst of a staggering unemployment rate caused by Wall Street greed and maintained by browbeating our lawmakers to avoid reform.

Reform is Big Government. We can't have that. That's Communism, you know. It "kills jobs" (as if making thousands of federal and state employees lose their jobs is all right).

Meanwhile the consumer is blamed for the sluggish economy. We need to get our "confidence" back. Well, recall that "confidence" is the basis of the word "con."

Maybe we ought to add a few more verses to cover our current situation. I'll suggest a line: "They tell us it's our job to spend to keep us all afloat, while they take the wealth to buy themselves another fancy boat."

Bradley Manning...

Much digital ink is being spent on the topic of Bradley Manning, but let me just put in my two cents.

1. Bradley Manning is a political prisoner, that much is pretty clear to me. Of course, that's just, like, my opinion, man.
2. From what we've been told, he did not give any help to the "enemy," except to the extent that the enemy is us. Let's assume he did give classified military information to Wikileaks. The stated mission of Wikileaks is to expose the truth, not to give anyone a military advantage. (in fact, quite the opposite. They believe that information needs to be shared in order to prevent abuses). It may be that someone in the military was put at increased risk by some of the information that Manning transferred. Then again, that may be purely guesswork. The most striking thing we did learn was that the US military was revealed to be killing civilans and laughing about it.
3. Any assumption that Manning's actions gave someone (some "enemy", which we haven't yet defined in a way that satisfactorily justifies all the loss of life and expense of two wars) a military advantage over us therefore contains the further assumption that the US military should be able to kill civilians and keep it hidden. What that says to me is that he mainly embarrassed the brass and let the American people know that we're not always noble, ethical, humane, or right. As if Abu Ghraib didn't tell us that already.
4. His treatment in detention had better conform to the Geneva Conventions, or else we're sending a pretty bad message to the rest of the world.
5. His reported treatment in detention sounds like torture to me. At least psychologically. If he was suicidal, this kind of treatment certainly doesn't appear to serve the purpose of making him less so.
6. Obama's acquiescence on this is instructive, in that it indicates the extent to which the military still wields a big stick in this government.
7. All of this is extremely unsettling when it comes to our country and its conduct. And it should make us extremely ashamed. Especially when a State Department official has the courage to call it what it is, and then has to be fired for it. Although I suppose we should be glad he wasn't "disappeared" instead.

All of this is just my armchair opinionating. But I would like to think I'm not stupid, and I've seen enough in my years on this planet to think I'm not likely to be too far off the mark.

A comment I placed on a Mother Jones article

I was reading a great piece by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones online, about the long and dreary rise of the plutocracy (and the decline of the labor movement) in America. It draws from another piece ("It's the Inequality, Stupid") about the growing and almost ludicrous disparity between the ever-smaller few people controlling the ever-larger share of wealth in America.

So I was prompted to write the following comment, which I feel bears repeating on its own:
Old doc 15 minutes ago


The funny thing is how the conservatives use a false fear of "government" to influence people to allow them to have their way with us. But hey... Government is us. Didn't they teach us that in grammar school?

People in this country have the numbers. The AARP showed how a group with a huge footprint can exert huge influence, whether you always agree with their positions or not. We need something similar for working Americans. The AFL-CIO affilaited group (workingamerica.org) that's set out to do that doesn't seem to have gained any steam, possibly because it's so tarnished by its connection with organized labor. But we need to give people hope that the system is NOT rigged for evermore against them.

Sure. The hippie movement didn't play well with organized labor, and that's too bad in hindsight, but now those people are grown up and the old union folks are retired. Let's pool our wisdom, figure out our goals, and start to build some unshakeable alliances that can stand up to lies and pessimism. We're smart people, and our kids and grandkids expect and deserve better from us than sitting passively while the wealth stagnates like bad blood, the power is left to the people with personality disorders, and we watch "Survivor."

We need to reform the way we elect our politicians at all levels, and to stop accepting the excuse that we can't change anything, because it's politics as usual and they're all the same. We had a false populism with the Tea Party; how about a real populism? A decent fair shake for working people would be a very attainable goal. We must get people to feel a sense of self-efficacy again, and we can do that, if we can start to let the wealthy know that we will hold them to their side of the social contract of a civilized society. And we need to mean it, and we need to make it clear that won't be intimidated, lied to, pacified with big screen TV's and Angry Birds, or turned against each other. Esepcially not turned against each other.

Head Start revealed as hotbed of socialist indoctrination: Conservative activist

March 11, 2011 (New York): In the midst of a debate on continued federal funding of the Head Start program, conservative activist muckraker James O'Keefe has released an undercover video shot at a Head Start program in New York, in which teachers are heard allegedly teaching children "radical leftist thinking" and, in the words of former Rep. Newt Gingrich, "Running a socialist boot camp for preschoolers."

Gingrich added, "I can't see how the American people would sit still if they knew that their tax dollars were going to train kids in Un-American ways of thinking and acting. This is just another example of the nanny state run amok."

Added Speaker John Boehner, "You know what this is about... This is how they plan to get their voter base for 2028 - by starting when the kids are too young to know when they're being radicalized against the American Way."

In the video, a preschool teacher can be heard talking about how Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted all people treated as equals, leading the children in singing "This Land is Your Land," and talking about "Community helpers" like the mailman and the policeman.

"Have you read those verses to that song?!" demanded Gingrich. "They sang ALL the verses! It's all about disparaging free enterprise and private property, and leading kids to believe in redistribution of wealth." Added Boehner, "The mailman and the policeman - you can see where THAT's going, can't you? They're grooming their future public union base, and taking money from the rest of us to do it, when this country is BROKE!"

In response, President Obama has accepted the resignation of the national director of the Head Start program. A vote on defunding the program completely is expected in the House this week.

Death threats? Do you believe that? Never mind, just give 'em The Hook.

Spotted a story after Walker and his boys pulled their little frat prank on Wisconsin today; it says that now the Republicans are reporting getting "death threats."

Oh, and did that light up the rantosphere!! "Union thugocracy," "Obamites issue death threats," blah blah blah. Google "Death Threats Wisconsin" today, and you'll get at least 500 hits of right-wing news stories, punditry, posts and blogs by gleefully crowing righties and assorted fonkies sitting at home with nothing better to do than watch Fox News, drink beer, and post hate speech saying essentially, "See? We were right about these union thugs! They want to destroy our Gawd-given standard of living and our flat screen TV-lovin' lives. They're probably Muslim terrorists, too. And that Hussein Obama is behind it all."

First of all, these Republicans in Wisconsin lie, as they demonstrated when they claimed they were in "discussions" with Democrats while they plotted their closed-door trickery. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're either making this up, or (more likely knowing their high school bully tactics) found some poor mentally ill person and had one of their James O'Keefe types play-act righteous indignation to egg him (or her) on until they got something that sounded like a "death threat." Oh, must be those "Union thugs" again. You know. foreign agitators... like the ones that caused all the trouble in Libya and Egypt. According to the dictators, anyway.

But whatever the credibility of these reports (or lack of it), this story raises the larger question of how to frame the conversation about recalling those Republican state legislators who voted for this.

My advice: Be very careful to talk peacefully. No talk of "targeting" those officials or their districts. No bulls-eyes. No wartime metaphors or battle language.

Instead, let's treat this as the vaudeville show it is.

Give 'em "The Hook."

Another one comes crashing down...

NPR starts to implode. Well, it’s becoming another predictable sequence of events. All you need to do is read the headlines. First, Republican politicians demand that NPR lose its federal funding, on the basis that the government has no business subsidizing (left-wing socialist liberal) broadcasting (when Rupert Murdoch is doing such a great job of providing fair and balanced journalism to the citizens of this fine country).

Next, NPR pleads not to have the finding cut, arguing that if they were gone, Americans would not be able to freely support factual, intelligent journalism; and arguing that citizens need some help (a nanny state) to help protect their ability to really have a choice (yeah, like Michelle Obama wants to tell you what to eat).

Next, you know who shows up... That guy James O’Keefe, the anti-Michael Moore, the guy with the timeworn tactics of Allan Funt and the ethics of Bernie Madoff. He proceeds to set up another one of those absurdly improbable stings, in which some flunky of the target organization is cajoled (or "creatively" edited, as we found out later)into making embarrassing secretly recorded statements that allow the right-wing pundits to absolutely vilify the entire organization, thereby initiating the destruct sequence. They can fire the people involved, the CEO can resign, but you and I know when the writing is on the wall.

These guys do have talent, you have to admit. They seem to know exactly whom to pick on and when, to insure that the air is completely let out of an organization. They aren’t happy just pulling the funding plug. They are scorched earth warriors. They will disappear that organization.

And so another worthy but troubled public service organization bites the dust. Well, pledge drives can be so annoying anyway, right? At least Glenn Beck and “Celebrity Apprentice” should keep our thirst for enlightenment and diversion satisfied.

Next target, by my prediction: The AFL-CIO. Yeah! Americans don’t need some union thugs interfering with their Gawd-given right to spend their lives driving 60 miles each way on $5.00 gas, getting those great below-minimum-wage piecework jobs in the Wal-Mart warehouses in the far-flung suburbs.

These guys wouldn’t go after something like AFSCME; nah, that’s too small a target; and anyway Scott Walker is doing pretty well demonizing them without the Big Sting. These guys have bigger goals, like destroying the entire union presence in this country.

After that, privatizing Social Security will be a snap.

The Brawny Man and his friends

Let's take a break from killing the environment, and

Let's Go Bust Some Unions!!