THE CURRENT THEME
Entries from September 1, 2007 - October 1, 2007
A Call to Protest!
Let’s Honk Our Horns
as a “Last Resort”
By Hank Edson
On March 8, 2003, President Bush gave a presidential radio address discussing his “War on Terror.” A major portion of his address was devoted to his claims that Saddam Hussein was not complying with weapons inspections, was not disarming, and that “he possesses weapons of terror.” He ended his address, saying,
“We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force. Across the world, and in every part of America, people of goodwill are hoping and praying for peace. Our goal is peace -- for our own nation, for our friends, for our allies and for all the peoples of the Middle East. People of goodwill must also recognize that allowing a dangerous dictator to defy the world and build an arsenal for conquest and mass murder is not peace at all; it is pretense. The cause of peace will be advanced only when the terrorists lose a wealthy patron and protector, and when the dictator is fully and finally disarmed.”
This echoed a long pattern of claims by the Bush administration that it sought every possible means of avoiding a war. On October 9, 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Larry King, “ War should never be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It should always be a deliberate act by people acting rationally, hopefully. And in this case, as the president said the other night, we are trying to see war as a last resort.” On November 14, 2002, White House Press Secretary told the press that Bush “seeks a peaceful resolution. War is a last resort.” On November 20, 2002, Bush himself repeated his own previous assertions that war with Iraq would be a last resort.
On January 22, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell told News
Hour’s Jim Lehrer, “The United States is preparing itself for military action if it's called for. The president still hopes for a peaceful resolution of this matter. The matter is in the hands of the Iraqi regime.” Just two days before the war commenced, Powell was still claiming the administration was trying hard to resolve the crisis peacefully. The International Herald Tribune reported that Powell saw a way out of war with Iraq if "Saddam Hussein, his sons and a number of other top leaders were to leave Iraq" and were replaced by "more responsible leaders."
In fact, less than two weeks before the President made his radio address claiming he was doing everything he could to avoid war, Bush acknowledged to Spain’s leader Jose Maria Aznar that he had rejected an offer by Saddam Hussein to go into exile in exchange for $1 billion and the right to...READ MORE!
Hank Edson
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BLOGGERS UNITE!
Vote Green
To Stop the Abuse
Of All who Depend
Upon a Clean and
Natural Planetary
Environment!
September 27 is Bloggers Unite
Against Abuse Day:
MP3 is Proud to Participate
By Hank Edson
The hardest part about abuse in all its forms is that it almost always involves a cycle of repetition magnified through a complex network of co-dependent relationships, wreaking a social havoc that spreads outward in incalculable shudders through the lives of one’s community, as an earthquake shaking city skyscrapers. Such is the case with the largest scale, if not yet the most violent or egregious, case of abuse human beings have ever known, committed, or suffered: global warming. So who are the abused and who are the abusers? What is the community in peril here? Obviously, we are all touched in some way.
As a spiritual person in a scientific way, believing that there is a conscious intelligence at the quantum foundation of existence where light energy and creative intention combine, I am inclined to think of our planet as a life unto itself as an identity endowed with a sacred right to its own natural cycles, development, and evolution: Gaia.
Even without embracing the Gaia hypothesis, even without recognizing in the individual plant and mineral existences anything of the universal breath of life, there are still all the human beings and animals who live without participating in our oil-based industrial economy: the innocent ones.
And of course, there are the rest of us, the classic abusers, heedless of what we are doing even to ourselves.
We are all going down together unless we get help, unless we help ourselves.
Most of us don’t like what we’re doing. We may even be trying to address the problem. But like the planet Earth, the entities at issue are bigger than what we normally identify as individually conscious and responsible parties: We are talking about our abusive society, our abusive economy, our abusive industry. We are talking about collective societal abuse and the network of co-dependent relationships existing between individuals within society, the society itself, the international economy, and a whole host of dynamics that at present exert an enormously self-destructive magnetism.
To break the cycle of abuse, we will find ourselves compelled into a transformation that is healing and powerful on a global scale. We have no other choice. If for no other reason, this combination of being driven to become enlightened is justification for thinking of the consciousness we share in this moment of peril as spiritual in nature: a challenge to free will, a moment of decision, a crossroads clearly marked. This way doom, that way dawn.
So great is the damage already done, so grave is the danger in front of us, that we really can’t be confident about what the future holds even in the best of circumstances, given the vast complexity of existence or even of our little planet. Mankind, you, we, really aren’t the masters we thought we were. How foolish we have been!
Still some progress is being made. If we build on it, if we focus all our energy on building on the movement that has begun, perhaps, we may succeed in the transformation we all long to live to see.
This week marked the anniversary of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) which requires the state by law to cut greenhouse gases by 25% by 2020, which, if successful will bring us back to 1990 levels. California's economy is the 6th largest in the world and this law has set...READ MORE!
Profiles In Shame
A Bad Character
By Hank Edson
Recent events have me thinking about character. Character is the perennial campaign issue the GOP falls back on whenever their pandering to the wealthy leaves them no other reason to offer the American People for voting Republican. “We may be stealing your last hard earned nickel,” they say to us voters, “but at least we have moral strength!” Hunh?
The False Wall Between Morality and Policy
It is bad enough that the GOP has so long succeeded in compartmentalizing personal moral character in the public eye as something completely separate from one’s positions on policies regarding the social welfare of the vast majority of voters. For years the media has bought hook line and sinker this illegitimate segregation of the private and public spheres.
As we all know, for example, the talking heads raged over Bill Clinton’s betrayal of his marriage as though it were the most condemnable moral turpitude imaginable even though his own wife forgave him. When it comes to George W. Bush’s conduct in creating this war, however, few have come out in the press and held him morally accountable for the more than a million dead, the torture, and the murderous ways of his legally immunized private mercenary forces.
I know that, in general, as mature human beings, we are supposed to separate the act from the person. We are supposed to condemn the conduct without personalizing...READ MORE!
The Wisdom of the Best about the Worst
What Would Lincoln Do?
“Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
By Hank Edson
This article was published on CommonDreams.org on September 21, 2007: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/24/3989/
One of the often quoted facts about the American Civil War is that more Americans died in it than died in all the other wars combined. The number of American Civil War dead is estimated at approximately 620,000 people. The President who presided over this carnage we regard as our greatest. Why do you think that is, dear reader? Isn’t it at least a little strange?
Before you answer, let me suggest we take a moment to read Lincoln’s own thoughts on this carnage. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln spoke of man’s intentions and man’s relationship to God, in an attempt to puzzle out the meaning of so much terrible death. Referring to both sides of the war, Lincoln reflected:
“Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes...READ MORE!The President's Hostages
The False Dilemma
Over War Funding
By Hank Edson 
Last week General David Petraeus gave his long awaited report on whether President Bush’s troop “surge” plan had achieved sufficient success to reverse the opinion of two thirds of Americans who want our troops brought home ASAP. President Bush then gave a national address in which he was expected to lay out a clear strategy for moving ahead in Iraq based on the success of the surge or for pulling out of Iraq based on its failure.
Of course, what the American people got from the Bush administration was predictable based on past performance. What we got was an artfully vague choreography of political manipulation in which the big picture was hidden from view, a few positive details were exaggerated, change was postponed, and deception was employed by presenting a plan to “reduce” troop levels that merely brought the number of troops in Iraq back to the level they were before the “surge.”
The week was a classic example of how the Bush administration plays politics. The word leadership is never involved. Always, the ball is hit back into someone else’s court. Bush calls himself the “decider,” but he is really the “returner.” When the buck lands on his desk, he instructs a general to return it to Congress. When blame lands on his desk, he instructs his political lieutenants to return it to the “experts” who were hand-picked to tell him what he wanted to hear.
This time, Bush has passed back to Congress literally the "war buck." The key “check” the legislative branch has against the executive branch concerning the Iraq quagmire is to stop funding the war. Typical of Bush’s divisive style of authoritarian leadership, the entire response to the Petraeus report was carefully crafted to force Congress into continuing to fund the President’s stall tactics or else take the blame for any troop casualties resulting from a lack of resources. One after another, the leading Democrats, after pointing out the shameless negligence of Bush’s strategy, basically accepted the buck they were being given and legitimized the false dilemma presented to them...READ MORE!