NEW YORK (December 29, 2006) – The Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s Wall Street Project celebrates its 10th anniversary as a force for economic justice and equal opportunity with a gala reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Wednesday, January 10, at the United Nations Headquarters, First Avenue at 46th Street, New York City.

The reception brings to a close the 10th Annual Rainbow PUSH Wall Street Project Economic Summit, to be held Jan. 7-10, 2007, at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, 811 7th Ave. at 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan. For more information regarding the economic summit go to www.wallstreetproject.org.

“When we originated the Wall Street Project a decade ago, our goal was to bring Wall Street to Main Street, broadening economic opportunities nationwide,” said Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., founder and President of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. “Today, the dominant force in business is globalization, and the Wall Street Project, accordingly, is expanding its scope to highlight the worldwide need for access to economic opportunity.”

If anyone thinks that there is anything high minded, noble, patriotic or praiseworthy about what Dick Cheney and the Cons engineered in Iraq, they should sign up for SSI disability because they lost all brain function.

First, the 9-11 crock complete with Pearl Harbor hystrionic and media manipulation is about as credible as an invasion of purple space aliens off the Long Island Sound. That was engineered to support the fear based hellacious pretext for a world war of crusade proportion with the wierd conflation of the alleged terrorism of a secular country wholly unrelated to that still floating around nomad named Bin Laden.

Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
President
International Association of Educators for World Peace
Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education,
Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament
Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University

Since its declaration of independence in 1776, the United States has been involved in many wars. Several books were written in this regard including an elaborate pictorial book, Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism by Dr. Joel Andreas who teaches in John Hopkins University in Baltimore. This pictorial book is also available in Spanish and has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Thai, Danish, and German in addition to other languages. More information from: www.addictedtowar.com or www.akpress.org

Military Held as Top Priority

The pardon of Richard Nixon by President Gerald Ford started this nation on the path that eventually gave us the Constitutional abuses of George W Bush. The current media frenzy supporting the pardon is both simplistic and illogical.

Ford pardoned Nixon before Nixon was brought to trial or convicted. The rule of law was ignored in favor of a double-standard where Presidents were not held accountable for law-breaking. The illegal activities of Nixon in the political sphere were an assault on American Democracy and should have been severely punished. Because of Ford’s outrageous pardon, Right-wing Republicans never understood how un-American the tactics of Nixon were. The current national Republican leadership is still Nixonian to their core!

The year-end debate about the Iraq Study Group's unequivocal diagnosis of failure and its grim list of uncertain remedies is the real measure of the hopelessness of the mess America made. The ISG's 79 recommendations - some wise, some impolitic, some impossible - is itself a confession that all the choices are bad.

That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president - the self-proclaimed decider - who started and ran this misbegotten war.

As Nick Carraway says about the privileged and insouciant Tom and Daisy at the end of "The Great Gatsby": 

"They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ...."

"If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership'."
---Will Rogers

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
--Noam Chomsky

With the intensity of Dale Earnhardt, Jr vying for victory in the Daytona 500, America’s mainstream media outlets have been racing furiously to imbue the citizenry of the Empire with unusually large doses of heavily choreographed agitprop.

Another unindicted US war criminal has casually ridden off into a peaceful crimson sunset. In response, pundits, talking heads, reporters and various other infotainment personnel are working feverishly to perpetuate America’s collective delusion that we embody integrity, decency, and enlightened values.

So this is to be Saddam’s last weekend. So be it. The guy was a dick; let him die. No skin off my ass. The old bastard is even wishing us well in his exit, telling his people not to “hate the U.S.-led forces” –CNN Excellent.

Another barbaric country whose savage inhabitants are one execution closer to democracy.

Excellent.

Do we get to hear about the actual dynamics of the power struggle in Iraq? We might be interested in hear it in plain language...very confusing, of course. If you are an average American citizen, it may be too complex for you to understand...I will try to break it down in simple terms.

No task is more important for any newspaper than to impart the news convincingly to the people and their government that a war is wrong, futile or, ultimately, lost. The United States has been militarily defeated in Iraq. It has no sane options left. All talk of troop "surges," of the need for a "continuing presence," of the feasibility of training an Iraqi army, of any constructive capacities for the central Iraqi "government" is as hollow as kindred talk in Vietnam in the early 1970s. There is no light, of any sort, at the end of the tunnel. The failure of the major newspapers in 2005 and 2006 to disclose the United States's defeat in Iraq has been as disastrous as the earlier failure to challenge the claims of the Bush administration on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

This is an estimate of the number of combined sufferers of Cancer, Aids, Multiple Sclerosis, chronic pain, and dozens of other diseases and injuries that would benefit by the legalization of Medicinal Marijuana.  Daily suffering and nausea is a way of life for these people, and our state government eases their burdens by prosecuting them for trying to get some relief from this agony.  Our state leaders have refused to step into the 21st century with a growing number of states that have legalized the use of medicinal cannabis for pain, muscle spasms, nausea, wasting syndroms, psychological disorders, etc.  Many believe that Marinol is medical marijuana, but they are wrong.  Marinol is synthetic THC (the active ingredient in cannabis) and only works some of the time, and only for nausea and wasting syndroms, not for pain or muscle spasms.  Our leaders refuse to acknowledge current studies that show marijuana is a safe and effective treatment for a variety of maladies, instead pinning their hopes on Big Medicine's synthetic concoctions that often cause more damage than they treat.  Just one look at recent drug recall lists and attorney advertisements show the fallacy of this faith in
Adieu, Gerald Ford! It has always been my view that he was America's greatest president. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible harm. Under Ford's tranquil hand the nation relaxed after the hectic fevers of the Nixon years. He finally pulled the United States out of Vietnam.

            As a visit to the Ford Presidential Library discloses, the largest military adventure available for display was the foolish U.S. response to the capture of the U.S. container ship Mayaguez by the Khmer Rouge on May 12, 1975. As imperial adventures go, and next to the vast graveyards across the planet left by Ford's predecessors and successors, it was small potatoes.

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