Op-Ed

So, you have an idea for a way to make your neighborhood better, create social change, or join the resistance. You and others have hit the streets a couple of times, gone to public and community meetings, and want to reach out to others and take the next step to make things happen. A friend says his cousin is a lawyer who could give you advice. You have been online and learned a little something. It must be time to incorporate your idea so that you can build a “real” organization.

Whoa, Nelly, not so fast! Before your knee jerks and you incorporate, you have to figure out the “what” and “when” that would lead you down that path and answer the threshold question of “to incorporate or not to incorporate?”

By David Swanson

Fifty years ago, Bobby Kennedy was about to win the Democratic presidential primary in Indiana. He would soon lose in Oregon and in a few weeks win in California, practically clinching the White House, and be murdered the same night. The film RFK Must Die and book Who Killed Bobby? leave little doubt that the CIA killed him. And of course there is no doubt that many have always suspected as much, which has had a damaging effect on U.S. politics whether or not true. But the major impact of RFK’s killing is separate from the question of who killed him.

The Boston Red Sox have finally decided to atone for two of the most racist, self-destructive snubs in sports history. Like so many other bigoted decisions, the team – and the town – paid a fearsome price.

And it did NOT come from the infamous “Curse of the Bambino.”

That one happened in 1920, when my dad was a two-year-old living in the shadow of Fenway Park. It was about money, not race.

That year the shady Bosox owner sold the great Babe Ruth to the hated Yankees for $125,000. He used the cash to fund a musical.

Soon Ruth led New York to more championships than we can bear to count. We wouldn’t win again until 2004, a “Cursed” wait of 86 years.

But selling the Bambino was NOT the dumbest thing the club ever did.

Just after World War II, the team shunned not one but TWO players as great as Ruth. And it happened not just from stupidity, but also from explicitly stated racism.

The two passed-over African Americans both went to New York, one to the Dodgers, the other to the Giants. Their names are hard for a Sox fan to say, but here they are: Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. 

In Joseph Hickman’s book Murder at Camp Delta, he describes a hideous death camp in which guards were trained to view the prisoners as sub-human and much greater care was taken to protect the well-being of iguanas than homo sapiens. Chaos was the norm, and physical abuse of the prisoners was standard. Col. Mike Bumgarner made it a top priority that everyone stand in formation when he entered his office in the morning to the sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth or “Bad Boys.” Hickman relates that certain vans were permitted to drive in and out of the camp uninspected, making a mockery of elaborate attempts at security. He didn’t know the reasoning behind this until he happened to discover a secret camp not included on any maps, a place he called Camp No but the CIA called Penny Lane.

At least since the time of Marcus Tullius Cicero in the late Roman Republic everyone has certainly understood that politicians lie all the time. To be sure, President Donald Trump has been exceptional in that he has followed through on some of the promises he made in his campaign, insisting periodically that he has to do what he said he would do. Unfortunately, those choices he has made to demonstrate his accountability to his supporters have been terrible, including moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, threatening to end the Iran nuclear agreement and building a wall along the Mexican border. Following through on some other pledges has been less consistent. He has increased U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan and turned the war over to the generals while also faltering in his promise to improve relations with Russia. The potential breakthrough offered by promising exchanges during phone calls to Vladimir Putin have been negated by subsequent threats, sanctions and expulsions to satisfy hysterical congressmen and the media.

Repeal and replace? How about the Second Amendment?

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Setting aside the antique strangeness of the wording, isn’t it time to give thought to the values that permeated the era in which it was written — and who, exactly, “the people” were to which it referred?

I say this realizing that the United States has evolved over the years. Women gained the right to vote. Slaves gained quasi-freedom and then, a hundred years later, their descendants won the right to vote, the right to use a public restroom, the right to . . . live as first-class citizens, sort of. Except for the economy, the prison system, the ongoing racism.

The cries of loss and anguish become public, at last. A million young people seize the truth:

“Half of my seventh grade class was affected by gun violence. My own brother was shot in the head. I am tired of being asked to calm down and be quiet.”

The stories went on and on, speaker after speaker. We marched for our lives this past Saturday. I was one of the thousands of people who endured a bitter cold morning in Chicago to be part of this emerging movement, this burst of anger, hope and healing. Violence in the United States of America is out of control. It has its claws around the lives of its own children. It’s a terrifying symptom . . . of a society built around fear, of a political structure devoted to war.

Something has to change.

In 2014 I wrote an article titled ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. I want to elaborate what I explained in the earlier article so that people have a clearer sense of what we are up against in our struggle to create a world of peace, justice and ecological sustainability.

Of course, as I explained previously, it is not just the global elite that is insane. All those individuals – politicians, businesspeople, academics, corporate media editors and journalists, judges and lawyers, bureaucrats…. – who serve the elite, including by not exposing and resisting it, are also insane. And it is important to understand this if we are to develop and implement effective strategies to resist elite violence, exploitation and destruction but also avert the now-imminent human extinction driven by their insane desire for endless personal privilege, corporate profit and political control whatever the cost to Earth’s biosphere and lifeforms (human and non-human alike).

ust when you thought the pro-Democrat “Blue Wave” ignited by President Donald Trump might bring real change, including a revolution in green power, some Democrats are rallying around the suicidal, obsolete technologies of atomic power and weapons.

The most recent absurdity comes from three Ohio Congressional Dems—Tim Ryan (Youngstown), Marcy Kaptur (Toledo) and Marcia Fudge (Warrensville Heights). They can claim a radioactive soulmate in New York’s “liberal” Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Rather than embrace the renewable revolution now remaking the global energy supply and the millions of jobs key to the future of a working-class constituency, these Democrats are pursuing the GOP wet-dream of atomic energy.

In particular, the three northern Ohio Democrats want to rescue four crumbling, unprofitable, increasingly dangerous atomic reactors. And in the process, they are defending the connection between nuclear weapons and commercial reactor waste.

Trying to make sense about the recent silencing by non-human YouTube robots of many valuable, patriotic, truth-telling YouTube journalists

The report below is taken directly from Corbett Report # 332 by Gary G. Kohls, MD

“Those who question the government narrative and mainstream consensus are extremists who need to be dealt with. We can’t have free-thinking individuals roaming around our streets, spreading their damn truth!”

“In 2008, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who would go on to become Obama’s information “czar,” co-authored a paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” in which he wrote that the “best response” to online “conspiracy theories” is what he calls “cognitive infiltration” of groups spreading these ideas.”