Saturday, October 29, 2011

More on the Occupy Wall Street Movement


First they ignore you; 
then they ridicule you; 
then they attack with 
violence; 

Then you win.
                                     Gandhi
Do not doubt that a small committed group of people can change the world.  It is, in fact, the only thing that ever has changed the world.
                                                 Margaret Mead

§

T he Oregonian's Saturday editorial, Point Made, Occupy Portland, is a perfect example of far right fear and trembling.  No doubt police violence is on the way despite Mayor Sam Adams courageous stand against the loud and obnoxious Tea Partiers' insistence that he use force to disband the protesters' encampment.  And they want it NOW!  This tells us 2 things.

  • One, Those far right wing extremists are really terrified of the Occupy movement. OWS brings the TP right to face with reality.  It threatens to tear the veil of illusion they wear over their eyes in their hatred of Truth. And... 
  • Two that the Mayor is a humane, reasonable, man of honor who does not respond to the badgering of his enemies.  I watched a clip on KATU in which the reporter badgered the mayor to the point where he was disrespectful.  Adams gave him clear answers but the man refused to accept them. And kept at it.  Myself I would have clipped the asshole in the face and hope that I'd broken some bones.  But a mayor can't do that.      
Bravo, Your Honor!

Bravissimo!

Whether the far right wishes to acknowledge it or not, and one can be certain that they don't, the Oakland police department, as well as the Atlanta Police, and the Chicago police department, have lost the moral imperative.  This innocuous sounding phrase, this moral imperative, is the central foundation of what Kant called the Categorical Imperative, the ultimate morality, of any culture at any time, any where, as Kant showed in his milestone of philosophical writings, The Critique of Pure Reason, (that's the one where Kant's mentor, the professor who was overseeing the writing of his dissertation,  after 2 weeks returned his manuscript, wherein he found on page 16, a red line drawn across the page; and under that was written, "This is as far as I can read.  I think I am going insane.")

That one.

(If you have ever skimmed the pages of The Critique Of Pure Reason then you know that Kant dismantles reality, creating his own neo-linguistic argument that   existence itself  is void of  properties.  Then he puts it back together again, not merely as it is, but by creating the Categorical Imperative, as it ought to be, if we are to have a civilization at all.  Otherwise, we are back to the jungle.) 


When you have lost the moral imperative, you have lost the argument, the contest, the battle, the war; everything.  That is how Gandhi defeated the British.  The Brits finally could not bear to gaze upon their own moral failure; but finally, had to come face to face with the fact that they, the greatest rulers of the most glorious empire since Rome, were morally unfit to rule what they deemed a backward people.  At least in their eyes, India was inhabited by a people fit only to serve the Whitehall officers and their wives.

So it is with this moment in History.

The police and the oligarchs with them, have lost the moral imperative.  So it appears that the aggressors are the losers not the "unwashed" hippies.  

Even if somehow the protesters had stepped over the line of their First Amendment Rights, which guarantees the right to peaceably assemble the cops are still thugs. They used ordnance, weaponry on unarmed citizens.  That's as immoral as it gets.

Even if the protesters had stepped over the imaginary line, the police department's violent assault on unarmed citizens transformed the cops work, in a heartbeat, from being protectors of the peace--- to criminal thuggery.  No ideology on earth can support such baldfaced thuggery.  This is the law of the jungle so well beloved by the Tea Party folks.  Of course, the Mad Tea Party people, seem always to be in need of a reflection of their own hatred.  So now they have an object to hate: namely, the horribly inconvenient and "unwashed" dissidents who are peacefully gathered to inspire and encourage a change of heart, which would signal an awakening of the Wall Street banksters who have consistently stolen taxpayer money and homes from the poor and middle class.  

But this is not new.  The cops act with impunity because they know one thing:  the media, and the general public will forget it within days.  So brutality and murder is easily tolerated in America as long as the perp wears a navy blue uniform and sports a metal badge.  Don't believe me?  Take a look at the footage of police beating up the unarmed demonstrators of the 1920s and 30s.  These were people peacefully protesting the corporate bosses' actions to destroy unions.  We see the same thing in an earlier time when Women protested for the right to vote.  The media portrayed such women as immoral, subversive and traitorous.  They handcuffed and jailed the women. And worse. Some were wounded and some were killed.

§



§

In their rebuttal to the unarmed protesters, the OWS people in NYC and across the globe (more than 2000 Occupy camps,) the far right is whining that the oligarchy is being unfairly attacked, demonized by losers who are merely envious of the oligarch's success in accumulating their riches.  Whew!  That sort of thinking, if you can call it so, is so breathtakingly simplistic, one blushes for them.  Such an argument is disingenuous; and smacks of a staggering intellectual dishonesty that begs one to wonder at the dismal level of intelligence of those who spout this sort of drivel.  It's as if they did not get it--- that the Bush administration and the eight years of Republican total control of Congress, every move of which was dictated by the corporations and banksters through their lobbyists--- removed protections designed to protect the public from unethical exploitation by corporate interests.  

The Republican Party in exercising their ideology, at last unencumbered by federal law, virtually burned the house down.  Instead of a country which moved forward as a result, we saw instead the loss of tens of millions of homes to fraudulent foreclosure,  banksters who offered triple A rated bundles of liars loans then turned around and bet on the failure of that product, and made billions as the product turned to dust in the hands of their Main Street clients; not to mention the bail out of failed corporations, with taxpayer dollars.  And last, but far from least, the trillions of dollars given as a gift to the banks in a benevolent under the table, backroom style by the Federal Reserve.  And all of this, ALL OF IT, was done on the backs of the poor.

Corporations privatizing profit and socializing losses.  Business as usual in this climate of crony capitalism has become a criminal enterprise.  Business as usual must stop. 

It is proof positive that crony capitalism does not and can not work with out regular gifts from government; i.e. Main Street.  It is a fact that the far right, those who love to quote from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, wherein he promises that the Free Market will bestow happiness on all due to the magic invisible hand which will guide all enterprise surely, that they, not a one of them, have actually read the entire work.  After describing the benefits of Free Markets, Smith then warns that it can only work when all citizens are equal.  You won't hear that phrase fall from the lips of a far right-winger.   

My fondest hope and wish is that the good folks of the Occupy Wall Street movement will not go home until at least the Banksters responsible for the mess in which America now finds itself, go to jail for a long, long, time.  

If I were less respectful of the moral imperative, and possessed of a deeply religious nature, as a result of being brought up in the Catholic Church, I would demand that such people be flayed alive and then burnt at the stake.     

Unfortunately, this police violence did not begin in a vacuum.  Violent reprisals against the OWS people began with the Federal Government.  How dare the 99% talk back to their betters?  They must be put down, contained.  And to this end the Feds offered a $15, 000 grant to police departments around the country which had but one stipulation. Disband and dismantle the movement with violence.  But some refused to play patty cake.

The District Attorney in Syracuse, NY, showed himself to be a man, or, as is said in Yiddish, a mensch.  (I had a Jewish room mate for years.  His mother was a second generation yenta. After six years I spoke Yiddish as fluently as they did.)

Back to our Syracuse DA.  Bless him!  In a stunning act of absolute integrity, he returned a $15 million dollar grant the Federal government had offered the city. It seems that, very quietly, the Feds are offering that much money in taxpayer dollars to cities where there is an Occupy movement.

There's just one little catch.

The Federal Agency which is so generously spreading this manna throughout America, stipulates that whichever city accepts the money, that city's police department must use violence to dismantle the protesters camps.

This is America today.  Right?

Right...?

 

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Oakland corrupt assault on protesters




Things are beginning to get out of hand.  Police in Oakland dressed to the teeth in riot gear have elected to subdue peaceful protesters.  To this end they've made the next move in the overture to the WAR ON AMERICANS.

Interesting to me, is the fact that not all police departments have taken the bait, namely the $15 million grants which the feds have offered to other police departments.  But apparently greed got the better of the corrupt Oakland officials.

The one stipulation which went with the grant is that the feds want the police to employ brutality in dealing with their fellow citizens.  More than one police department has returned or refused the grant as long as such conditions are attached.  One can only applaud such integrity.  And condemn the corruption of Oakland.

  • In other words the fascist feds have come out of the woodwork at last and identified themselves as traitors.    
  • Do they really want us to believe that Bernie Madoff was the only person on Wall Street engaged in fraud?

  • Just how stupid do they imagine the public is?  Well, granted there's an awful lot of cows and sheep out there.  

  • But ultimately we must see to it that no one is above the law.  Goldman Sachs is looking mighty like a target ripe for a grand jury.

  • Where this really began is with the Republican infestation of both the White House and the Congress during the Bush years.  But then Obama came to office and, first thing, denied the U.S. Attorney General's office the authority to prosecute Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfy, and so on.  He also prevented the CIA torturers from being prosecuted.  Sociopaths who were all too eager to torture their fellow man.       


  • Interesting to me, is the fact that not all police departments have taken the bait, namely the $15 million grants which the feds have offered to other police departments.  But apparently greed got the better of the corrupt Oakland officials.

    The one stipulation which went with the grant is that the feds want the police to employ brutality in dealing with their fellow citizens.  More than one police department has returned or refused the grant as long as such conditions are attached.  One can only applaud such integrity.  And condemn the corruption of Oakland.

    In other words the fascist feds have come out of the woodwork at last and identified themselves as traitors.  

    §



    §

    We can see plainly the cowardice of the police in the above video clip.  And cowardice is all it is.  It's outrageous that they would wear heavy riot gear and use lethal weaponry on unarmed and peaceful demonstrators.  But when the Tea Baggin' Partiers showed up with their loaded guns, that was just fine with the police.  No problem.

    And to those same police I would leave this word of warning:  you messed with the wrong guy when you severely injured an ex-Iraqi G.I.  That was not only cruel and craven but it was a tactical error for your side that will have real consequences.  You just helped to engage another few million citizens in the cause of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  To the officials who ordered this appalling violation of Americans doing their Constitutional imperative:  Your days of corruption, bribery, fraud, and masturbatory fantasies of Police State triumph are coming to an end.  If not with the Wall Street protests then it will take another less peaceful revolution.  And it will be you against your fellow American.  And if the police lose, and they will, there will be reprisals.  That is guaranteed. You will wish you lived in Russia.      


    Tuesday, October 25, 2011

    Animal Kingdom, Everything Evolving




    E
    volution is still going on in nature.  Even as absurdly conservative,
    actually literalist, Christian Creationists loudly and belligerently proclaim that God created man.  And since his imperfect creation, man, the Disobedient Sinner, needed somebody to lord it over, God made animals.

    Very considerate of God.

    And animals, from the beginning were spoken of as stupid, and since they were stupid, we could kill them and eat them with impunity.

    The Native Americans had no such illusions.

    They recognized that the animals were sentient beings, and worthy of respect.  So they told stories and sang songs illustrating agreements they had made with animals.  And they gave the animals human and even super-human qualities.  They understood the fox.  And how deceptive was the fox.  When  Fox wanted to be nice he would do that.  But sometimes Fox was a deceiver.

    §  
         


    §

    Animals, for their part, lived by those agreements, animals like the spirit of the great Buffalo---and pretended to be stupid, and offered themselves as food and clothing for the Native American.  The pale face hunter/trader, had no such vision or sensitivity, or even plain old friendliness, for that matter.   The white man was and is as cold, cruel and stupid as they imagine the wild beast to be.  Because of this egocentric and basically hostile nature of the white man, he lost all meaningful contact with the rest of Mother Earth's population. The result is that animals are ascending the evolutionary scale faster than we homo sapiens are.

    In the Jataka Tales, which relate the many previous incarnations of the Buddha as He evolved from animal form to human, to Bodhisattva, and finally, to the Perfectly Enlightened Buddha, there is a story of a tiger standing on the edge of cliff, and down below he sees a starving mother and her children.  Out of great Compassion, the tiger throws himself off of the cliff to his death, so that the mother and her babes could eat him.

    You don't have to be a Buddhist to understand that, of all the emotions Compassion is the greatest attribute of sentient beings.  The old standard translation of the New Testament speaks of it as "love," or "Charity."  But if we look closely, we see that that translation has been an ongoing project since the King James was published.  When I was a teenager, going regularly to Saint Joseph's Cathedral in Buffalo NY, (needless to say, my parents were Catholic and wanted us kids to grow up as good Roman Catholics.) the priests would ascend the great marble pulpit, and reading from the Gospel, read the phrase as "...Faith Hope and Charity, but the greatest of these is Charity..."  The priests were always careful to define Charity as great love, and compassion for one's fellow human.  Not necessarily limited to merely handing a bum a dime, nor donating that old sweater to St. Vincent de Paul, but so much bigger, wider in scope. Indeed some of the priests constructed elaborate sermons based on elucidating this quality of  "Charity."

    Recent translations of this New Testament passage, now use the word Compassion.
    Compassion is a word which Republicans scorn.  "Bleeding heart," they call it.  Well, let's face it.  The Bleeding Heart is what Jesus was.  And a bleeding heart is what everyone who calls himself Christian must be. Bleeding Heart is a much higher emotion than Conservative Obstructionism.  Sacrificing the well being of millions of one's fellow humans in order to destroy one man because you are racist, and just plain don't like the man.  And you cannot live with the idea of a man of color being in charge of the Oval Office.

    How very far away from the image of this little guy in the video rescuing another of his kind.  He certainly won't be given a treat for doing this.  This is an act of pure compassion.

    Monday, October 24, 2011

    Government Fraud Is Exposed...Again



    There are conservatives, many of whom vote with seriously deficient IQ's, and who  hate --- really hate,--- the Occupy Wall Street movement. These tend to be the very same people who thoroughly approved G W Bush's lies about WMD's as a pretext for invading Iraq; and his rendition and torture, despite the fact that the CIA in more than a few instances rendered and imprisoned innocent citizens.  All of which makes these deluded people, voters, right wingers, guilty of collusion.  Bush and Cheney, were credibly charged with Crimes Against Humanity.  

    In this video, Joshua Blakeney eloquently discusses some of the injustices which occur whenever any member of the plutocracy is found guilty of crime regardless of how heinous. The media immediately goes into blackout mode: "Huh, I don't know nuthin' Dude," the editors and publishers say. "And don't you believe nuthin' that you read on the Internet!  We of the mainstream are the only real and reliable source of news and information. Trust us."

    Right.

    Un huh.

    The other thing that occurs with remarkable alacrity is that police arrest and detain anyone who attempts to obtain real justice.  For example, a man by the name of Splitting the Sky, (STS,) a Native American, upon the advice of expert lawyers attempted to make a citizen's arrest of George W Bush when he was in Calgary.  But instead, the Calgary police in an ironic twist, wrongfully arrested STS.  George W of course smiling his idiotic grin as he simply side stepped STS and the police moved in.   

                §




    §