As the worlds strongmen jockey to stay in power to fight Bush's Forever War the key to starting it war with Iran just got much closer!
First I just want to quickly say that Benazir Bhutto's fear of future foreign military intervention will happen and by Bush
Now the meat and potatoes of the developments as we head to an increasingly unavoidable World War three in Bush's created Forever war. Russia and Venezuela will hold key elections with major implications for two rivals of U.S. influence and interests abroad who seek to strengthen their grip on internal power.
Russians voted Sunday in a parliamentary election so dominated by President Vladimir Putin's party that the only question was whether it would win a strong majority of seats or a gargantuan, crushing share. they have certainly stacked the deck to do so. Also Venezuelans will head to the polls to vote on a package of constitutional reforms that would allow '21 Century Socialist' President Hugo Chavez to run for re-election in South America's leading oil exporter past his current 2012 term limit. Russia's election follows months of increasingly acidic rhetoric aimed against the West and efforts, by law and by truncheon, to stifle opponents.
A huge win for Putin's United Russia party could pave the way for him to stay at the country's helm once his presidential term expires in the spring. Putin is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term as president in March. But he clearly wants to keep his hand on Russia's levers of power, and has raised the prospect of becoming prime minister; many supporters have suggested his becoming a "national leader," though what duties and powers that would entail are unclear.
Putin is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term as president in March. But he clearly wants to keep his hand on Russia's levers of power, and has raised the prospect of becoming prime minister; many supporters have suggested his becoming a "national leader," though what duties and powers that would entail are unclear. Read about this setup
It would be laughable if all of this was so serious. If Bush wants more power he simply takes it or steals his power. He secretly passes another power grabbing law in our so called Democracy while others are forced to play by the rules. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his opposition pledged to accept the results of today's referendum on his bid for a new constitution as voters lined up at polling stations across the county. ``We have to accept it, the results, whatever they may be,'' Chavez, 53, said after casting his ballot in the neighborhood of 23 de Enero, in downtown Caracas, dressed in a red shirt and carrying a baby. ``I expect all of us, the opposition, us, to accept the results in a democratic manner.''
Chavez stepped up attacks against the U.S., foreign investors and the media in his final speeches before the vote. He told tens of thousands of supporters at a Nov. 30 rally that he's prepared to cut off exports of oil to the U.S., Venezuela's biggest trading partner, should the U.S. government try to stir up violence in the country after the referendum. He also said he may nationalize Spanish banks operating in the country to defend the ``dignity'' of Venezuela, prompting cheers from the crowd.
Chavez said last week that if voters approve his plan, he's prepared to stay in power until 2050. ``It's still too early for me to go,'' said the former army lieutenant colonel. ``I'll give my life for Venezuela until the last day.'' Chavez wants power till 2050
As those against Bush lobby to get themselves into permanent control and Bush being the decider simply wrests more control over us as they prepare for this Forever War the excuse to get it going, war with Iran just got another step closer as Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has taken command of Iranian naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. military has revealed.
That means U.S. naval forces are operating in the same waters as an organization the United States considers a major supporter of terrorist activity. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the disclosure Wednesday at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was answering questions from military students.
The move is of concern to the U.S. Navy, which has long viewed the IRGC's forces as more antagonistic than Iran's regular navy. Mullen said Iran made a "strategic decision" in recent months to "essentially give the entire Gulf to the IRGC over the next four or five years." "That's a big deal, because I think part of the leading-edge challenge with Iran is the IRGC specifically," Mullen said. In recent years, the Iranian military has recognized that, in a toe-to-toe fight with the U.S. military, "they'd get squashed," Samii said.
In response, it has been focusing more on alternative tactics, in which the Revolutionary Guards excel, such as setting mine fields and using large numbers of small boats either packed with explosives or manned by personnel carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The thinking is that at least one would be able to get close enough to a large enemy military vessel to attack it, Samii said. "Iran is trying to send a signal that it is ready for any military eventuality and that it is prepared to defend itself aggressively," he said.
But the move could backfire by driving Iran's Gulf neighbors into the arms of the United States, which has guaranteed the security of Arab states in the Gulf for decades, Samii said. US shares Gulf with Iranian terrorists
Bush is already supplying Iran's neighbors with $Billions in advanced weaponry. Iran's plan will merely serve to further the excuse for war between Iran and the US. I am afraid too that the IRGC will create a lot more damage than we think and they will only be the smallest part of what we will be facing as Russia and China join Iran and the 135 non aligned Nations to defeat Bush. World war Three is getting closer and will not be avoided.
James Joiner
Gardner Ma
www.anaveragepatriot.com
First I just want to quickly say that Benazir Bhutto's fear of future foreign military intervention will happen and by Bush
Now the meat and potatoes of the developments as we head to an increasingly unavoidable World War three in Bush's created Forever war. Russia and Venezuela will hold key elections with major implications for two rivals of U.S. influence and interests abroad who seek to strengthen their grip on internal power.
Russians voted Sunday in a parliamentary election so dominated by President Vladimir Putin's party that the only question was whether it would win a strong majority of seats or a gargantuan, crushing share. they have certainly stacked the deck to do so. Also Venezuelans will head to the polls to vote on a package of constitutional reforms that would allow '21 Century Socialist' President Hugo Chavez to run for re-election in South America's leading oil exporter past his current 2012 term limit. Russia's election follows months of increasingly acidic rhetoric aimed against the West and efforts, by law and by truncheon, to stifle opponents.
A huge win for Putin's United Russia party could pave the way for him to stay at the country's helm once his presidential term expires in the spring. Putin is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term as president in March. But he clearly wants to keep his hand on Russia's levers of power, and has raised the prospect of becoming prime minister; many supporters have suggested his becoming a "national leader," though what duties and powers that would entail are unclear.
Putin is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term as president in March. But he clearly wants to keep his hand on Russia's levers of power, and has raised the prospect of becoming prime minister; many supporters have suggested his becoming a "national leader," though what duties and powers that would entail are unclear. Read about this setup
It would be laughable if all of this was so serious. If Bush wants more power he simply takes it or steals his power. He secretly passes another power grabbing law in our so called Democracy while others are forced to play by the rules. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his opposition pledged to accept the results of today's referendum on his bid for a new constitution as voters lined up at polling stations across the county. ``We have to accept it, the results, whatever they may be,'' Chavez, 53, said after casting his ballot in the neighborhood of 23 de Enero, in downtown Caracas, dressed in a red shirt and carrying a baby. ``I expect all of us, the opposition, us, to accept the results in a democratic manner.''
Chavez stepped up attacks against the U.S., foreign investors and the media in his final speeches before the vote. He told tens of thousands of supporters at a Nov. 30 rally that he's prepared to cut off exports of oil to the U.S., Venezuela's biggest trading partner, should the U.S. government try to stir up violence in the country after the referendum. He also said he may nationalize Spanish banks operating in the country to defend the ``dignity'' of Venezuela, prompting cheers from the crowd.
Chavez said last week that if voters approve his plan, he's prepared to stay in power until 2050. ``It's still too early for me to go,'' said the former army lieutenant colonel. ``I'll give my life for Venezuela until the last day.'' Chavez wants power till 2050
As those against Bush lobby to get themselves into permanent control and Bush being the decider simply wrests more control over us as they prepare for this Forever War the excuse to get it going, war with Iran just got another step closer as Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has taken command of Iranian naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. military has revealed.
That means U.S. naval forces are operating in the same waters as an organization the United States considers a major supporter of terrorist activity. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the disclosure Wednesday at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was answering questions from military students.
The move is of concern to the U.S. Navy, which has long viewed the IRGC's forces as more antagonistic than Iran's regular navy. Mullen said Iran made a "strategic decision" in recent months to "essentially give the entire Gulf to the IRGC over the next four or five years." "That's a big deal, because I think part of the leading-edge challenge with Iran is the IRGC specifically," Mullen said. In recent years, the Iranian military has recognized that, in a toe-to-toe fight with the U.S. military, "they'd get squashed," Samii said.
In response, it has been focusing more on alternative tactics, in which the Revolutionary Guards excel, such as setting mine fields and using large numbers of small boats either packed with explosives or manned by personnel carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The thinking is that at least one would be able to get close enough to a large enemy military vessel to attack it, Samii said. "Iran is trying to send a signal that it is ready for any military eventuality and that it is prepared to defend itself aggressively," he said.
But the move could backfire by driving Iran's Gulf neighbors into the arms of the United States, which has guaranteed the security of Arab states in the Gulf for decades, Samii said. US shares Gulf with Iranian terrorists
Bush is already supplying Iran's neighbors with $Billions in advanced weaponry. Iran's plan will merely serve to further the excuse for war between Iran and the US. I am afraid too that the IRGC will create a lot more damage than we think and they will only be the smallest part of what we will be facing as Russia and China join Iran and the 135 non aligned Nations to defeat Bush. World war Three is getting closer and will not be avoided.
James Joiner
Gardner Ma
www.anaveragepatriot.com
7 comments:
The Bush Depression is coming:
Vulture restructuring is a purging cure for a malignant debt cancer. The reckoning of systemic debt presents regulators with a choice of facing the cancer frontally and honestly by excising the invasive malignancy immediately or let it metastasize through the entire financial system over the painful course of several quarters or even years and decades by feeding it with more dilapidating debt.
Henry Liu, “The Pathology Of Debt”
For more years than I can count I’ve heard Danny Schechter’s name bandied about in progressive circles, but for all his tireless activism, he did not fully capture my attention until I saw his stunning documentary “In Debt We Trust.” By that time I had forsaken my myopic focus on imperialism, the Iraq War, the Democratic Party, and of course, Bush-bashing. It was becoming painfully and increasingly clear to me that history was repeating itself, and being an historian, I was well aware that it never does so in exactly the same manner but often with enough mirroring of earlier eras that it behooves human beings to sit up and pay attention.
About the same time that “In Debt We Trust” appeared on my radar screen, Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis was released, hammering home the inescapable similarities between the fall of the Roman Empire and the demise of the United States. Despite the divergence of focus between Schechter’s documentary and Johnson’s Nemesis, both ultimately reveal that the American empire is descending into catastrophic financial collapse, already bankrupt, which will eventually result in the abject impoverishment of all but a very few of its privileged inhabitants.
After purchasing “In Debt We Trust” I showed it regularly to a particularly endangered species in the empire’s economic war on its own citizens, students. As a result, many “come to Jesus meetings” and “true confession sessions” ensued in my classes as they unburdened their souls regarding the gargantuan student loan debt with which they would leave college and their accelerating awareness that glamorous, cushy, lucrative jobs with which they might pay off their debts would not exactly be falling at their feet.
Then came Danny’s new e-book Squeezed and his request that I review it. After reading it, the above description “a diary of the onset of the Greater Depression” came to mind. Let me explain.
I had recently read Doug Casey’s “What’s About To Hit Us Will Be Far Bigger Than The Great Depression” in which he uses the term “The Greater Depression” to describe the economic tsunami dead-ahead. Then after reading Squeezed, I realized that Danny has given us an extraordinary diary explaining exquisitely how we arrived on this path. “Great Depression” and “diary” are words that automatically hook most historians, and clearly, I’m no exception, particularly since I have acquired some financial literacy in recent years and have come to understand the quintessential role of economics in world, national, and local events.
Early in the book the following quote from the National Association For Business Economics appears, and I find it absolutely stunning:
The combined threat of subprime loan defaults and excessive indebtedness has supplanted terrorism and the Middle East as the biggest short-term threat to the U.S. economy.
Some sleight of hand the ruling elite have accomplished since 9/11, namely, that while Americans were pondering the color of the government’s daily terrorist threat assessments, that government and its corporate cronies was taking them to the cleaners, picking their pockets, swindling, cheating, extorting, defrauding, hustling, ripping-off, double-dealing, conning, hornswoggling, hoodwinking, fudging, gouging, bamboozling, scamming, screwing, shafting, and let’s not forget bilking the American middle and working classes. Hey, look over there-see the Italian spider climbing up the wall-or Osama hiding under your bed? And while you look, we’ll steal you deaf, dumb, and blind!
Schechter succinctly informs the reader early-on of the book’s contents stating that:
•• *It discusses how debt has restructured our economy and put our people under a burden that many will never crawl out of. It shows how access to credit has, for many, gone, in Steven Green’s phrase “from a luxury to a necessity to a noose.” It identifies the profiteers and calls for an investigation and the prosecution of those behind this shrewdly engineered Ponzi scheme.
*It offers the critique of a media critic who has monitored flawed and superficial reporting on the subject and who is trying to challenge the news media to improve its coverage of the problem and it also monitors some of what it has done. It discusses the making of my own new film intended to fill part of the void. The story of In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts discusses its impact and the battle to get it seen.
* It advocates a debt relief movement in America and argues that such a movement would have tremendous resonance across the spectrum of political life. It urges citizens to get involved and politicians to respond.
On each topic, Squeezed superbly elucidates the key issues and documents the twists and turns of the odyssey that has resulted in the early stages of the Greater Depression which we have now entered.
Near the end of the book appears a Q & A section with Schechter and Gregory Paschal Zachary of Alternet from a 2006 interview entitled “Young Borrowers Face A Life Of Debt”. The portion of the dialog I found most illuminating was the interviewer’s question:
Paschal Zachary: You suggest at times that there is a conspiracy to trap as many Americans as possible into crushing debt, simply in order for banks to boost profits. Is it really that bad?
Schechter: The card companies are a cartel. They collaborate as much as they compete. They use the same techniques. There are people who see techniques, and the companies who use them, as evil. I don’t personally like those terms. But I think the card companies are insensitive. They are chasing revenue and they don’t care how they get it. They go over the top.
While I agree with Danny’s answer, what really intrigues me is the interviewer’s question, again echoing that dreaded word that sends progressives screaming into the night as if their hair is on fire: conspiracy. You see, in progressive circles we can say anything about anything as long as we don’t imply that anything was a conspiracy. It all just sort of happened because stuff just happens, and it’s “irrational” and a bit wacky to imply otherwise.
Earlier in the book, Schechter offers a blistering paragraph that probably did set Zachary’s hair on fire if he’s read the e-book and if he really is as terrified of “conspiracy theory” as he sounds:
Driving this change is a growing concentration of power in the financial and banking sector. That, in turn, unleashed a process called FINANCIALIZATION with the economy dominated by a
vast CREDIT AND LOAN COMPLEX every bit as insidious as the Military Industrial Complex. This Complex is shadowy and omnipresent, active in funding our politicians and lobbying for laws
that benefit their businesses. At the same time, it is invisible to most of us. It operates through a fog of shadowy lobbyists, interconnected institutions and highly legalized (and hence poorly understood) rules, laws and procedures underpinning the market system and the high-speed computers that move money and buy/sell orders around the world in seconds.(xxii)
A powerful explanation indeed, but not quite specific enough in my opinion.
Within the past few days, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Catherine Austin Fitts, also formerly an investment banker on Wall St. with Dillon Read, has posted on her blog a section entitled “Who’s Who In The Housing And Mortgage Bubble” in which she catalogs the major players in the housing bubble/mortgage crisis in terms of banking giants, government agencies, credit rating agencies, the nation’s top four auditors, and various industry associations. Given the dearth of this kind of clarity regarding the mortgage mess, Fitts’s posting is priceless.
Schechter devotes one section of the book to mis-information and bogus reporting on the part of mainstream media’s coverage of the current economic meltdown. In it he correctly exposes the fallacies behind rosy economic forecasts but does not address another chimera, that is, the ostensible “losses” being suffered by Goldman Sachs, Citibank, AIG, and others. I documented the transparency of these so-called losses in my September article “Bush’s Bogus Bailout”, and Fitts has superbly documented them on her Solari website and on her blog. In addition, she has researched more thoroughly than anyone I know, in all of her writings and particularly at her Aristocracy Of Stock Profits website, the prodigious criminality of the American political and corporate capitalist systems.
The question that few have asked is: Who are the losers? When we see CEO’s like Charles Prince leaving Citgroup with a $42 million severance package and $53 million in stock options, can we respond with anything but bemused scorn at the simplistic reportage that financial institutions involved in the mortgage crisis are “losing” anything? And when Citigroup is bolstered with a $7.5 billion infusion of cash from an Abu Dhabi investor in what has become the “great American fire sale” conducted by the same corporate pimps who created the housing bubble, can we feel anything but rage at their criminality, enabled by their media accomplices? Even more egregious than media complicity is that of politicians who wallow in the spoils of the debt industry.
Schechter cites David Sirota’s October, 2007 blogpost (48):
Donations plentiful to candidates in midst of possible predatory lending regulation … Payday lenders have given nearly $64,000 to the 2008 candidates for president, with a vast majority of that going to Democrats, many of whom have accused the industry of unfair lending practices … Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson each has received more than $22,000 from payday lending sources, more than any other candidates during the campaign.
As Squeezed notes, these Democrats and many more also caved in on the 2005 bankruptcy bill written by and for the credit card industry.
Pam Martens in her fabulous November 28 article “Crony-Capitalists Fiddle While Main Street Burns” states that “The saga of how the top minds in Washington and on Wall Street have dealt with the deepening financial crisis in the U.S. would make a great Hollywood screenplay, except for this: It’s absurdly unbelievable.” Comparing the “sinking” of Citigroup to the doomed Titanic, Martens opens the article with a largely unknown fact, namely that:
The largest bank in the United States (by assets), Citigroup, is discovered to have stashed away over $80 Billion of Byzantine securities off its balance sheet in secretive Cayman Islands vehicles with an impenetrable curtain around them. Citigroup calls this black hole a Structured Investment Vehicle or SIV. Wall Street insiders call it a “sieve” that is linked to the breakdown in trading of debt instruments around the globe and the erosion of wealth in assets as diverse as stock prices to home values. Additionally, tens of billions of dollars in short term commercial paper backed by these and similar Alice in Wonderland assets are sitting in Mom and Pop money market funds at the largest financial institutions in America, with a AAA rating from our renown credit rating agencies.
While over time, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and other subprime players have managed to maintain sterling personas in the eyes of outsiders, those who dig deeply such as Fitts, Martens, and Schechter have discovered a very different reality behind the smoke and mirrors. The magnitude of that horror movie reveals itself almost daily in ever-new disclosures regarding the venality at the core of the housing bubble disaster.
Indeed, there are victims of massive corporate fraudulent inducement, but they are not members of upper-level management of Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, or Lehman Brothers. They are millions of former homeowners soaking in financial bloodbaths of foreclosure and bankruptcy, as well as the hoards of employees that have been and will be laid off as a result of the carefully-crafted housing bubble train wreck. As if all of this were not egregious enough, Bethany McLean, Fortune Magazine Editor and co-producer of “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room” comments on the a pending lawsuit by what’s left of Enron against Citibank which claims that Citi helped the now defunct firm manufacture financial statements. Well, we all know what happened to the pensions and retirement funds of former Enron employees.
Worse yet, as Squeezed points out, “The dollar may be in a free fall. Hold on to your hats and your homes.” Freefall? Yes indeed, said Gerald Celente, Director of Trends Research Institute in a story reported on November 19 by United Press International which stated that a financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce. Celente, forecasting a “Panic of 2008″ asserted that “We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen.”
Sunday Telegraph reporter Liam Halligan stated in “Dollar’s Fall Is Now A Bigger Political Issue Than An Economic One” that “The importance of ‘dollar divestment’ cannot be overstated. At the very least it means the greenback has much further to fall — plunging the US into recession. But it begs a bigger, more alarming, question: How will Washington react to the end of the US hegemony?”
Astutely, Schechter picks up on the “Shock Doctrine” nature of the crisis as perceived by Naomi Klein through the lens of “disaster capitalism” and concludes:
One analyst in the New York Times called it “shock therapy,” the very term writer Naomi Klein explores in her new book on “disaster” capitalism showing the link between the shock therapy once doled out in mental hospitals, shock and awe bombing, shock interrogation techniques whose aim is to “disorient” prisoners and shock strategies used in economic policy that has devastated so many countries in which it was tried. Now it has come home to the US - the country that has been exporting it overseas.
On a recent Democracy Now show, Klein explained:
“The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks…. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms.”
The only difference here is that, so far, there have been no serious reforms proposed and the market is anything but free. With its interest cut, the Fed bails out and rewards the very institutions that were profiting on ill gain profits from predatory lending. (70)
And now for the part that is really American-you know-all of the “So what do we do about it?” questions. Danny would answer:
The first step is raising awareness. People don’t usually talk about this problem. It’s a point of embarrassment to be overwhelmed by debt. When you give people permission to talk about this, they pour out. We also need grassroots political action to promote responsible lending. We have to roll back the bankruptcy law changes. We have to fund counseling and advice. We need to make financial literacy part of our educational system.
Fundamentally, I agree with him, but as he already knows, I no longer believe in any intact political system that could make any of this happen. When I talk about debt, I almost always speak of it in relation to the Greater Depression we have entered and take these realities much further by illustrating how they are an integral part of the collapse not only of the American empire, but of civilization itself.
For years I have been referring to the Terminal Triangle: Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic meltdown, the latter explained in Danny’s book in terms of the international ramifications of the Greater Depression. And of course, there are “other horsemen” of the apocalypse, as enumerated by Sally Erickson in her recent blog, so I find it impossible to discuss the mortgage crisis without connecting it with the additional impending global catastrophes that spell the end of the world as we have known it. Just as we have entered the Greater Depression, we are engulfed by collapsing institutions-especially the American political system, which are in an abject state of dissolution and therefore incapable of affecting change at requisite levels, for all the reasons Danny has so thoroughly documented in his book.
As for an educational system that will teach financial literacy instead of testing students five hours a day, four days a week-well, there’s just too much dumbing down to be done. After all, who prints those tests and the textbooks students can barely read even when they’re seniors in high school? Go to the head of the class if you answered: “Subsidiaries of all the scumbag corporations you just mentioned above.”
When I talk about collapse, my second paragraph usually goes something like, “Get out of debt, get out of debt, get out of debt-unless you plan to be an unincarcerated (or incarcerated) wage slave of corporate capitalism for the rest of your life.”
I could not agree more with Danny’s directive to talk about debt, become financially literate as individuals, avoid and liberate ourselves from debt, and watch and share with others “In Debt We Trust.” But I must add that all evidence points to the frightening reality not only of an economic depression dead-ahead, but an even more frightening scenario: a world in which it will be very difficult to obtain food, drinkable water, or healthcare-thanks again to the Terminal Triangle.
As I scour the blogosphere, I find almost no progressive voices discussing the dire economic realities of this moment. After all, it’s much easier to bash Bush, obsess about clueless, corporately-owned candidates, or blog about green products, green shopping, green living, and all manner of green-wash. Meanwhile, I continue to ask: What have you done to prepare for a post-petroleum world? As the Terminal Triangle becomes ever-more cataclysmic, how will you acquire food, drinkable water, and healthcare for yourself and your loved ones?
Feeling “squeezed” now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Check this out Jim:
As November 2007 draws to a close, it will be full three years since American forces razed the Iraqi city of Fallujah to ground. It was in November 2004 that George Bush’s forces played havoc with that city and its unfortunate inhabitants in the name of God. While the American media chose to remain blind to the utter horror of it all, busy as it was with keeping a close watch over the life and death of Terri Schindler Schiavo, Dr. Hafidh al-Dulaimi, the head of “the Commission for the Compensation of Fallujah citizens” reported the destruction that American troops inflicted on Fallujah.
According to the report, there were some 7000 totally destroyed, or nearly totally destroyed, homes in all districts of Fallujah. 8400 stores, workshops, clinics, warehouses, etc. were completely destroyed. 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries were demolished. 59 kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools and technical colleges were flattened. 13 government buildings leveled. Four libraries, that housed thousands of ancient Islamic manuscripts and books, were gutted completely. The number of human beings slaughtered in those buildings, of course, is any body’s guess.
Here once again is a reprint of the article that was one of the first to report the atrocities to the truth seekers in America, and to the world at large, amid a chorus of applause, accusations and denials. Lest we forget.
Anwaar Hussain
“I Am Become Death - The Destroyer of the Worlds”
By Anwaar Hussain
The crimson waters of the Euphrates are now emptying into the Persian Gulf the hopes and aspirations of innocent people whose lives were snuffed out on the orders of a man rewarded for his monumental crimes by his great nation.
Known as the “city of mosques” for its more than 200 mosques, Fallujah is also known for refusing to add Saddam’s name to the call for prayers from its ancient minarets. It is located on the banks of river Euphrates, the largest river in Southwest Asia. The 1700 miles long Euphrates is linked with some of the most important events in olden history.
The city of Ur, found at its mouth, was the birthplace of Abraham. On its banks stood the city of Babylon. In the past, the army of Necho was defeated on its banks by Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus the Younger and Crassus perished after crossing it. Alexander traversed it and continued his journey eastward. Presently, George Bush’s forces are crossing and re-crossing it making its waters redder each time with the blood of Fallujah’s citizens.
Fallujah has been laid waste. It has been bombed, re-bombed, its citizens gunned down, its structures devastated by powerful weapons. It is a hell on earth of crushed bodies, shattered buildings and the reek of death. In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, 70-ton Abrams Tanks and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunship that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers crisscrossing the entire town firing at will at whatever moved outside the buildings. For those inside, the US troops were equipped with thermal sights capable of detecting body heat. Any such detection was eagerly assumed to indicate the presence of “insurgents” inviting a deadly salvo.
Nobody has an accurate idea of how many Iraqis, combatants and noncombatants, have been killed by the thousands of tons of explosives and bullets let loose upon the city. Mortuary teams collecting the dead rotting in the city streets are fighting the wandering dogs that are busy devouring their former masters. The hundreds buried beneath the rubble and debris will be dug out later. A US marine spokesman, Colonel Mike Regner, estimated 1,000 and 2,000 Iraqis dead. The world is awaiting the toll from more reliable sources with a wincing anticipation.
Eyewitnesses report human corpses littering the city’s streets, nibbled at by starving canines. Parents have been forced to watch their wounded children die and then bury their bodies in their gardens. An Iraqi journalist, reporting in the city for the BBC and Reuters, said: “I have seen some strange things recently, such as stray dogs snatching bites out of bodies lying on the streets. Meanwhile, people forage in their gardens looking for something to eat. Those that have survived this far are looking gaunt. The opposite is happening to the dead, left where they fell, they are now bloated and rotting…”
Some images that did manage to filter through the layers of American censorship include scenes of the devastated landscape of the city; the bloodied and fly-covered corpses of young Iraqi men lying in the streets or heaped in rows amidst the debris; a headless body; women and children escaping with the few possessions they have left; mortuary teams collecting the dead; and Fallujah infants being treated for horrific injuries in Baghdad hospitals. US general John Sattler declared: “We have liberated the city of Fallujah.”
The assault on Fallujah is a pure and simple Nazi-style collective punishment, not liberation. The city has been razed to the ground because its political, spiritual and tribal leaders, motivated by Iraqi patriotism and opposition to the presence of foreign troops in their country, organized a guerilla resistance to the US invasion.
The aim of the US assault is to make Fallujah a model to the rest of Iraq of what will happen to those thinking on similar lines. It is the leading thrust of an orgy of killing intended to crush and drive underground every voice of dissent and ensure that elections this coming January will throw up a weak-willed, pro-US toady regime. The American military is rumored to be planning similar attacks on scores of other Iraqi cities and towns.
Not a single major voice has been raised in the American media against the ongoing destruction of Fallujah. While much of the world recognizes something dreadful has occurred, the US press does not even bat an eyelash over the organized leveling of a city of 300,000 people. In none of the US media commentaries is there a single phrase of unease about the moral, or legal, questions involved in the attack on Fallujah. None have dared say it in as many words that the American military operation in the city is an unlawful act of aggression in an equally illegal, criminal, aggressive war.
The opposite is true in fact. Ralph Peters, the author of “Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace.” a rabid Neocon mouthpiece, revered by the ruling Neocons, in his prominently placed November 4 New York Post article wrote: “We need to demonstrate that the US military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread destruction, we must accept the price. Most of Fallujah’s residents, those who wish to live in peace, have already fled. Those who remain have made their choice. We need to pursue the terrorists remorselessly……That means killing. While we strive to obey the internationally recognized laws of war (though our enemies do not), our goal should be to target the terrorists and insurgents so forcefully that few survive to raise their hands in surrender. We don’t need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement. We need terrorists dead in the dust. And the world needs to see their corpses…
…Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it. We need to demonstrate our strength of will to the world, to show that there is only one possible result when madmen take on America.”
Though the carnage carried out by Hitler’s regime was on a different scale than that now being committed by the Bush administration, there are striking parallels. For the first time since the Wehrmacht swept through Europe, the world is witnessing a major imperialist power launching an unjustifiable war, placing an entire people under military occupation and carrying out acts of collective and visible punishment against civilian populace. The US media’s wretched connivance in this deception is incredible, as incredible as the fact that this war, based on undeniable lies as it was, was sold to the American people as the gospel truth ordained by God.
To be honest, George Bush is not the first US president ordering the states machinery to pulverize nations and peoples abroad. Even a hurried analysis of the American government’s conduct in the last century makes for a most damning indictment. Out of the US’s past foreign policy woodwork, crawl out numerous invasions, bombings, overthrowing governments, suppressing movements for social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting elections, manipulating labor unions, manufacturing “news”, selling blatant lies, death squads, torture, biological warfare, depleted uranium, drug trafficking, mercenaries … you name it.
This terrorizing of nations and individuals by various US governments has been going on full bore since at least the late 1890s, when Americans obliterated hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to keep them safe from the Spanish. Millions of Native Americans, the children of a lesser God, were exterminated by the orders of earlier administrations throughout the 19th century. The difference with past is that George Bush does it in the name of his God, a God far superior to any other and sanctioned fully by his coterie. Ironically, both George Bush and his nemesis, Osama Bin Laden, refer to God almost equal number of times in their public pronouncements.
The United States went into Afghanistan to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden. They killed 10,000 innocent Afghans but could not find their man. They went into Iraq to discover and eliminate Saddam’s WMDs. They killed tens of thousands of Iraqis but found no WMD. They laid siege to the city of Fallujah to kill or capture Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. The city and its inhabitants have been blown to smithereens but there is no Zarqawi. Is it not only too convenient? Next when they want to attack Pakistan, or Iran, they simply have to say that Bin Laden is taking refuge there. Just like the next Iraqi city awaiting the fate of Fallujah will be the latest refuge of Zarqawi; the WMDs too could next fly to Syria or may be even Saudi Arabia. Is one imagining things here? Or is it that the US imperialism is indeed now riding full time on the back of gargantuan lies?
After granting George Bush a carte blanche to do what he likes the American citizens, of course, continue their daily lives oblivious to what is being done in their name. Between their work places and the nearest fast food joints, they just do not have enough time to check back on the activities of the man who is playing ‘The Terminator’ in the name of God and in their name.
Those who do get to know a little are in a constant state of denial. One thing is sure though. Just like in post-war Germany where some even denied the holocaust, “We didn’t know what was happening” is bound to become a cliché that will one day be used to ridicule Americans who claim ignorance of the atrocities committed by their administration in their name. Ironically, Khomeini died trying to get people to see America as “the great Satan”. It took George W. Bush and his cohorts just four years to do exactly that, and not just in the eyes of the Muslim world.
As America sinks deeper into the heart of darkness, its thinking citizens need to jolt each other out of their apathy. With each passing day their beloved America is scaling ever greater heights of hideous glories. The man in charge, George W. Bush, is actually living the throes of his apocalyptic dream of “I am become death-the destroyer of the worlds”. He codenamed his destruction of Fallujah as “Operation Phantom Fury”. But as the falsehood dies and gives way to truth, as all lies must one day, it will be the Iraqi dead that will form a legion of phantoms and would throng around Americans in a macabre dance to haunt them for decades. The fury of those phantoms will be hair raising.
Fallujah will enter history as the place where US imperialism carried out an offense of heinous proportions this November, a monstrous crime far beyond any possible forgiveness. The crimson waters of the Euphrates are now emptying into the Persian Gulf the hopes and aspirations of innocent people whose lives were snuffed out on the orders of a man rewarded for his monumental crimes by his great nation.
Gone is Suburbia:
By Stan Goff
The Safe-World is somewhere in the suburbs, ringed with layers of defense: lawns, fences, homeowners associations, bands of strip malls, interstate highways, contract security, cops, the oceans, the aircraft carriers and nuclear armed submarines….
Outside the layered defenses of Safe-World, surrounding it, are dark, unpredictable, primitive Others. Inside Safe-World, when stability reigns, men can provide and rest at the hearth. But the real rite of passage for Men is to leave the safety of the hearth to confront this Dark Otherness outside Safe-World. Having done their duty disciplining the teeming periphery, they can return to the hearth, where Woman stands by, waiting, appropriately grateful for her security to this bloodied Man. In exchange for his security (also against other men), she is dutiful…
…As our cultural distinctions have collapsed under the onslaught of megamerger monoculture, we have seen wholesale uniformity imposed on our constructed environment. All the distinct cultural meanings of past communities have gone under the wheels. But human beings cannot live without meaning.
Meaning-making is a distinctly human need. We are the only species that can see the cosmic abyss that surrounds our incandescent islets of awareness. With the enclosure of Middle AmericaTM into the constructed spaces of the work cubicle, the strip mall and the suburban living room, meaning-hunger is being answered in exactly the same commodified way as actual hunger: with Taylorized, mass-produced cultural meanings, disseminated as “entertainment.” Journalism has been swept up in this process, now obliged by The MarketTM to be “entertaining.” (Big-money journalism has always been generally obedient; it’s the adoption of glitz that has changed it.)
Life, at last, must imitate art. And with only one monocultural art, we will be truly one in our imitation…
…They [the media] teach us that Dark-World is real, and there we might be, but for the grace of God and our protectors: the cop, the soldier, the mercenary, the prison guard, the surveillance camera-the rat mentality that urges some of us to police others for conformity.
But suburbia is not safe. This is the central illusion.
While suburbia has had its eyes fixed on threatening images of Arabs and Persians and Latinos and deepest, darkest African America, the same establishment that makes war and builds prisons and gazes into our lives has picked suburban pockets with one hand and gripped the ‘burbs as loan sharks with the other.
Suburbia is not being protected; it is being saved for dessert.
It is this sector with its fragile, technological, disembodied living standard that will now come under attack. In the short term, that is already happening through financial manipulation and the further disappearance of living-wage jobs. The tremendous personal debt burden that is mounting in the American “middle class,” fueled by past low interest rates and cash-out equity loans, was the latest maneuver to prop up this sector’s role as global consumer-a time bomb that will explode directly under Suburbia’s feet.
The deepest fear in suburbia, never spoken aloud, is that when this epoch unravels, Suburbia’s citizens quite simply will not know how to survive. Even the veterans of war who withdraw back into these spaces are largely incapable of the most basic skills that will be required in a non-technocratic world: building healthy soil, making food, collecting potable water, basic medicine… seed-saving, canning, pickling and fermenting… all lost; and so Suburbia will fight tooth and nail for its “entitlement to the entropo-technocratic life-support system, even as that system withers away.
Instead, our masculinized version of any post-collapse - which we have compartmentalized into a “fantasy” that cannot be touched by our day-to-day - is what we have borrowed from direct and vicarious experience of the military… a Mad Maxish world of roaming armed conflict. This will never happen.
The real choice that Suburbia will face is one between fascism or self-sufficiency, which is a choice - as well - between spiritual death or spiritual renewal.
The political identity of Suburbia that grew out of the spatial re-coding of white supremacy as sui generis … class, itself re-coded as meritocracy… expressed as the strip mall, the homeowners association, and the PTA.
The gravitational pull of this new majority has proven irresistible to the institutional behemoths of the two main political parties. It is this mutual yet antagonistic orientation of the parties to this same “middle” demographic that homogenizes the commitment to our peculiar monetary-military neo-imperialism; for without control of both the global periphery and the other overdeveloped metropoles, the entropic inputs that are the oxygen of Suburbia would disappear. Terminal hypoxia. The dirtiest little secret of all. The American way of life will disappear without the hegemony of the dollar and the political black hole of the imperial armed forces… and neither of these can continue for very much longer.
The localized political identity of Suburbia did not ossify in its Cold War forms. There are now inner-ring suburbs, with many people of color, and outer, then outer-outer rings, and finally the gentrification of central-urban space, where the stratifications within the middle class are becoming bright-lined. The same institutions - homeowners associations and PTAs, for example - are subject to transformation, and their inhering localism is a real political strength. The moral paradox that this strength has been mobilized by the Right, whose ramp-up to the 1994 elections was the culmination of a decades-long engagement with these local “logics,” does not alter the fact of that strength.
Suburbia was never totally monolithic; and it has become less so as time passes. In Lassiter’s account, when Charlotte, NC was using at-large voting in 1970 to consolidate white upper-middle-class political power, there was a backlash by white former-busing opponents from the lower-strata suburbs who made tactical alliances with nearby Black communities that resulted in a local counter-hegemonic bloc… one that changed the perceptions and attitudes of the white suburbanites who never quite qualified for the gated communities of southeast Charlotte. Since then, the bi-racial formations that formed then have been engaged in a number of struggles that gravitated toward the environmental justice movement.
My own neighborhood, once a white enclave, is now peopled with a few African American families, as well as Dominican, Russian, Hungarian, Turk, Colombian, Indian, Chinese, and Nigerian. Our children and grandchildren play together at the homeowners-association-maintained playground.
My homeowners association forbids clotheslines and front-yard vegetable gardens… these are vestiges of the aversion to anything that smacks of Black or immigrant, the white status-seeking that says to the world, I am successfully on the grid. On the other hand, one year my HOA and its membership boosted a slow-growth mayor into office after an arrogant developer tried to open one of our cul-de-sacs into a through street. The parent political-identity kicked in, and the developer was taken to the woodshed.
Things sometimes turn into their opposites. Dialectics 101.
We have legislation in North Carolina now that forbids homeowners associations from forbidding clotheslines… the global warming argument has trumped the “taint” of the primitive and the natural. I’ll be starting a small campaign this winter to rid our by-laws of the garden-prohibition (using the greenhouse gas argument, and now the peak-oil issue which is being proven before our very eyes and in our very wallets).
Conditions change in the face of ideologies and delusions. And there is still that middle-class angst that confronts these big-brained primates in the ‘burbs. That spiritual poverty, that disembeddedness, that disenchantment, that separation and alienation that sits above us like a cluttered attic even as we sit in the disinfected barracks below and drink our superficial stories from the television…
There is one place - and one identity - that has heretofore been left out of this discussion, and that is the very place and identity where many residents of Suburbia now seek out once a week to try and fill this connective void and perpetual loss of meaning: church.
The problem of Suburbia is not soluble; and the residents of Suburbia are no more or less human than anyone else. I am going to discuss Christianity now, not because it is more or less important than other religions, but because it is the predominant religious tradition in this treacherous spatial phenomenon.
I am also going to recommend a book to other readers: The New Interpreter’s Study Bible (new revised edition with the apocrypha).
Why would I do that, me, a known socialist and pro-feminist?
I am recommending it because (1) Suburbia is here and it will not disappear (there is nowhere else left for all these people to go), (2) because until Suburbia gains direct experience of its material poverty, there is no other way to reach inside their material self-interest except to identify with their spiritual dislocation (spiritual poverty), and (3) the Bible is the most widely-read book in our society.
Rene Girard wrote about something called mimesis. Judith Arias writes:
Taking his cue from the Aristotelian dictum that what distinguishes the human being among animals is our greater capacity for imitation, Rene Girard proposes a reformulation of our understanding of “mimesis.” His definition goes beyond the representational dimension that has informed theoretical definitions of the term since the time of Plato. For Girard, mimesis is the force that makes humanity possible-that simultaneously assures both the distinctness of human beings as “social animals” and our relative individual autonomy vis a vis the social body. As such, he considers mimesis to be not only prior to consciousness, but also constitutive of consciousness.
This concept goes far deeper than mere imitation, deeper even than the scientific implications of mirror neurons (which confirm the least controversial aspect of Girard’s theory… that humans learn by imitation). Girard’s mimesis operates in that psychic space where stories (symbols, myths) fuse with our experience of self and others (psychoanalysis, for those who need a referential mooring).
Girard poses a problem called mimetic rivalry, in which a model plays a key role. Among the things we learn to do by imitation of a model is how and what to desire. This creates a dynamic that is destructive of community. The boy is taught to simultaneously objectify and desire the infantilized woman. He learns this by imitating the desire of other men (often represented in popular culture). But in imitating this desire, he sets himself up to see those very models (other men) as his rivals for the desired object.
Any of us, with a moment’s thought, can find other examples of this mimetic rivalry. Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Hartsock, and other feminists dealing with psychoanalysis have addressed this dynamic in the development of an identification of desire with domination, and its disruptions of human inter-subjectivity.
Rivalry itself then is cyclic and self-reproducing, and the method that Girard identified throughout the ages for breaking the cycle was sacrifice of a scapegoat… the sublimation of blame.
Perhaps the most memorable and horrendous examples of this in recent history was Hitler’s scapegoating of European Jewry. The most current examples are the scapegoating of Muslims and immigrants in the US psyche.
This is what my friend, Reverend Greg Moore, calls “the mimetic of empire.”
I don’t claim to know how valid the whole notion of mimetics may be; but then validation is itself part of someone’s agenda. What I know is that American Suburbia is the most dangerous place on the planet, more dangerous by orders of magnitude than the highway from Baghdad to the Green Zone. It is a cyborg that eats thousands of humans every day, and thousands of acres of habitat, and that spews thousands of tons of poisonous detritus, and that it requires the political blood-meal of its own alienated residents to survive… and nearly none of those residents is predisposed - given their enculturation - to accept the intellectual authority of Marx or Mies or Chomsky or Chodorow.
I appeal to you then; be imitators of me.
-1st Corinthians 4:16
Suburbia will remain, but it will not survive in its present form. The leaders of a changed suburbia will either be the fascists who will transform the ‘burbs into a kind of whelping barracks for imperial soldiers and gendarmes, or it will be led by those who transforms the backyards into bounty, and learn to break the dependency on a monetized technological grid.
There is already an ethical design philosophy that can demonstrates the practical how-to for this bounty, albeit only if there is a politics of resistance mobilized alongside it. We cannot have our homeowners associations telling us we can’t grow food; and we can’t have states telling us we cannot purchase raw milk or build graywater systems, with the specious (and suburban germophobic) claim that these are public health threats. The politics and the political struggle are inescapable. The rulers know exactly what is at stake.
But there has to be a new mimetic, a new way of being that builds the community and with it a new human individual. It has to be the opposite of the fascist mimetic, the mimetic of empire. There can be no scapegoats, or the community will be shattered in recurring cycles, and power will be regenerated through each sacrifice.
These reflections, beginning with the Suburban reaction to the Civil Rights Movement - a southern Christian movement by the way, and one that had echoes of the Christian communists (there were and are such) of past and present - and following developments into the perilous present, led me to this book, the Bible, to see what was in there. Because I know that if I quote from the Grundrisse, I will encounter blank stares from my neighbors in Suburbia. If I tell them I am quoting from Matthew or the Epistle of James, people will attend to what follows.
“We have, therefore, in these passages on the ministry of reconciliation,” writes Robert Hamerton-Kelly (Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross, 1992)…
…a good example of the reformation of eros to agape by the replacement of the model/obstacle pole of the triangle by the divine victim. The self-sacrifice of Christ as the model for agapaic mimesis reconciles the world to the creator and the creatures to one another by redirecting desire to the pole of true transcendence. The sin of Adam is reversed, the proper mimetic relation to the creator restored, and the prohibition reconstituted as the command to agape.
In all this the apostle appears as the representative of the divine victim, and the apostolic sufferings reveal and transform the scapegoat mechanism. From now on we are all scapegoats, and if we are all scapegoats, then nobody is a scapegoat. The rule of the surrogate victim mechanism is over and the new creation is here, “the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give us the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (4:6). The Christian community is the vanguard and proleptic presence of this new creation…
…Love is a relational and therefore a communal category. It is inconceivable that love should be solitary or confined to one relationship. Miming the divine desire means loving all the creatures of God, and that means at least participation in a loving community.
There will be gasps among a few… Goff’s gone off the rails and become a Bible-thumper. The stress has beaten him down.
But read this closely, and think seriously about the problem of Suburbia - the problem it presents to the rest of the world, and the problem it is for the people who live there.
Permaculture ethics can be summarized as:
• **Care of Earth
• **Care of all People
• **Return of Surplus
Christian agrarian socialist Wendell Berry writes:
If we read the Bible, keeping in mind the desirability of those two survivals–of Christianity and the Creation–we are apt to discover several things that modern Christian organizations have kept remarkably quiet about, or have paid little attention to.
We will discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein” (Ps. 24:1). There is in our human law, undeniably, the concept and right of “land ownership.” But this, I think, is merely an expedient to safeguard the mutuality of belonging without which there can be no lasting and conserving settlement of human communities. This right of human ownership is limited by mortality and by natural constraints upon human attention and responsibility; it quickly becomes abusive when used to justify large accumulations of “real estate,” and perhaps for that reason such large accumulations are forbidden in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus. In biblical terms, the “landowner” is the guest and steward of God: “the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev. 25:23).
We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve, but all of it: “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made” John 1:3). And so we must credit God with the making of biting and dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error, or that the creator ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding - that is, we are “fallen.”
We will discover that God found the world, as he made it, to be good; that he made it for his pleasure; and that he continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us. People who quote John 3:16 as an easy formula for getting to heaven neglect to see the great difficulty implied in the statement that the advent of Christ was made possible by God’s love for the world - not God’s love for Heaven or for the world as it might be, but for the world as it was and is. Belief in Christ is thus made dependent upon prior belief in the inherent goodness - the lovability - of the world.
We will discover that the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God. Elihu said to Job that if God “gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together… ” Job 34:15). And Psalm 104 says: “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created…” Creation is God’s presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian, Philip Sherrard, has written that “Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God’s hidden being.” Thus we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate. To every creature the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. As the poet, George Herbert, put it, Thou are in small things great, not small in any…. For thou art infinite in one and all.
We will discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Is this really such a bad message, given the stakes, to carry into Suburbia? To this day, one of the major disincentives to join the political Left - aside from its now discredited technological optimism - has been its seeming spiritual sterility, its cold instrumentalism, and its casual dismissals of issues like love and mortality.
It is Suburbia, this world of brokenness, founded on schismatic racism, and sustained by usury and deadly force - both forbidden by the Jewish Palestinian anarchist our culture often claims to follow - that, if ignored, will be ceded to fascism, that scapegoating cycle within the mimetic of empire.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
-Matthew 6:25-34
I will close now with two quotes from the Civil Rights Movement where this narrative on Suburbia began, from the most recognizable Christian spokesperson of that movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. (1963)
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction… The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. (1963)
Time is short. The stakes are very, very high. Perhaps we should learn this idiom.
Larry
"The Bush Depression is coming" Larry you know I have written a dozen times on the second Greatest Depression. Google Mike Whitney "the second great depression" or I have it in a few stories.
As I tell you in every instance and it id true here too, by the time these "slow" so called experts write about a problem it is beyond stopping.
Not only that but it will be even worse than he alludes to. It kills me that as the general economy gets increasingly worse for Average Americans the stinking stockmarket against all logic continues to do well.
I told you before that Bushco will keep shoring this facade up but when reality hits this house of cards will crumble.
I have to laugh, you read my story maybe but what Chavez and Putin are trying to do through the Political system as you know, Bush just takes because he is the sole dictator I mean decider.
Anyway as i have also said a hundred times now we were headed the way of the Roman empire in the normal cycle of a civilization but like the demise of the world Bush sped that up.
Now the get rid of your debt advice better be adhered to. I got rid of mine a couple years ago and have none. I figure when it comes to it I can survive in my cellar etc.
Anyway as he points out, all but a few will sink but remember, then this societal breakdown will go full swing and while the same thing is happening to the world at the same time.
What I was going to say is that those that have in the end will have to face hoardes of those accpsting them trying to survive.
I think you read my manifesto to the World and read how this will all end. No thanks to Bush but we will not be instinct but small pockets will survive here and there.
I am peeved because it is obvious that we are increasingly left to our own demise as the Federal Government is taken care of. The military and the Government will survive to start over again. I can go on and on. Stay with me Bud!
larry
Yeah, show them the price madmen will pay for taking on a madman. As you know I have said a million times, the hell on earth Bush hsh calls success and has created for Iraq will spread throughout the entire middle east before it ancompasses the entire world.
You know, when that was going on in Fallujah there was a lot more going on. I did a story titled one morticians day in Fallujah. He was picking up one to two hundred bodies per day.
I have heard death estimates as high as 600,000 but that was 6 months ago.
When the insurgents left they boobytrapped every house and street everything. It wasn't just us killing those innocents.
Anyway one of my friends brothers who my son has trained under and admires and emulates is a SMSGT in EOD. He won the silver star de boobytrapping the city. By the way he, my sons, and the guy who was in the front of the head tank going to Baghdad are in the air force and most people do not realize that. Another story for another time!
larry
Stay with me on this. this is my lifes training.
Suburbia’s citizens quite simply will not know how to survive. Even the veterans of war who withdraw back into these spaces are largely incapable of the most basic skills that will be required in a non-technocratic world: building healthy soil, making food, collecting potable water, basic medicine… seed-saving, canning, pickling and fermenting.
I am a survivalist but grew up raising my own food, raising and butchering Beef, pigs, chicken, ets. Making our own bacon was a lot off fun and very tasty. I lived at an agricultural high school where I was the student manager and I taught people around the county.
I also worked on farms all through New England. In Maine I worked on a dairy/Broiler farm. I( was the one who built the soil, raised the crops, Butchered the chickens etc.
Anyway my x held it against me that I wanted to remain single so I could wander an survive. she thought as many still do that I was nuts saying the entire system will break down and I would be okay as well as those with me.
There will be no safe haven money or not. As in the depression those with the least who can survive day to day will be the best off and will suffer the least.
It's funny but I saw this happening in 1970 and people thought I was crazy. Anyway here we are! When I got out of the service I was tapped to go to California to start a commune but I didn't. Let me know what you think. Take care and stay in touch!
Jim:
I do believe it will soon come crashing down, where begging for a crumb will be childs play compared to what lies ahead.
I also believe the fall of the economy, the stripping of rights and the militarization of what will be our society is soon to follow.
I hear people all over the country as I travel saying they are preparing to take to the mountains to survive.
Like you, I don't think many of them understand what that will entail.
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