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A Nation Gone Blind: Unacceptable: The Federal Intertwined in Limbo: Tales American Hiroshima I Love You Madly! The God-Man The First Lady of Music Wishing Makes It So Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and
the Rise of People-Powered Politics
The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America Silent People: Hearing the Call of the Dodder Tea with Osiris Straight Jacket An Audience for Einstein
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Time for Americans to Accept When they kick out your front door, how you gonna come, with your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun? By J. F. Miglio Even a cynic as towering as Gore Vidal let average Americans off the hook in a recent interview in The Progressive magazine by saying the American "people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed." He was referring to the fact that the mainstream news media report only what their corporate masters allow them to report to the American public; as a result, Americans are "totally misinformed" about what is really going on. Who can argue with that? Naturally, if average Americans only watch television news, or read their daily paper or weekly magazine (if they even do that much), they will be misinformed, and many of them will have a worldview and understanding of current events in line with the corporate elite who control the news and almost everything else in their lives, including the Democratic and Republican parties. But there is a whole other world of news out there on the Internet, the last bastion of democracy in a country sliding deeper into perpetual war, bankruptcy, and corporate fascism. Some of the news and information online may be a little radical or over the top, I'll admit that, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of it is right on target because it is not dependent on corporate advertising or political parties or academic grants. Many of the publishers (and bloggers) of these independent sites are beholden to no one but themselves and are unconcerned about making huge profits. Moreover, they don't care about being politically correct or playing it safe. In many ways, they are similar to the old colonial pamphleteers, like Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, who published their own news and opinions on sheets of paper and distributed them by hand to the American public. As an added bonus, most of these independent Web sites are free! To access them, all you have to do is get online, Google some keywords, and read through hundreds of sites that are filled with alternative news and information that Corporate America and the Bush administration do not want you to know about. Much easier than the "old days" when you had to go to your local bookstore or library to search for these types of publications, which were usually buried behind their glossy corporate counterparts. Also, there were fewer of them to choose from, since it was (and still is) more expensive to print a newspaper or magazine than to have an online Web site. Which begs the question: If it's so easy, why don't more Americans access and read these alternative Web sites? Or more to the point, why don't they take a more active role in politics in their daily lives and try to change the system for the better? Here are some typical answers: Too busy! Not into news or politics! Doesn't affect me personally! In a word-- apathy. ...Read More The Stolen Election of 2004 By Michael Parenti The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview of what they have reported, along with observations of my own. Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004. Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors. Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggests such a mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up. In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success at registering new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five to one. Moreover the Democratic party was unusually united around its candidate-or certainly against the incumbent president. In contrast, prominent elements within the GOP displayed open disaffection, publicly voicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration's huge budget deficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats to individual liberties. Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so in 2004; forty of them endorsed Kerry. All through Election Day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47 percent, giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes, and a solid victory in the Electoral College. Yet strangely enough, the official tally gave Bush the election. Here are some examples of how the GOP "victory" was secured. ...Read More The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 By Jeremy Putley The horrifying 2004 hostage-taking incident at a school in Beslan, Russia, which resulted in the deaths of 330 individuals -- including 186 children-- is sometimes described as Russia's 9/11. Beslan and 9/11 were incomparably different. But Beslan was an event of such depravity it must be considered uniquely terrible in its own way. John Dunlop's book covers the Beslan events and, in a second section, the October 2002 hostage crisis at the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow. These dramatic events during the presidency of Vladimir Putin both provoked armed responses, and Dr. Dunlop, a senior lecturer at Stanford University, examines the evidence in detail. Dunlop is acknowledged to be a pre-eminent authority on both tragedies. These meticulous and comprehensively annotated -- yet dramatically readable-- studies have previously been made available on the Internet. The book provides striking evidence of complicity in both atrocities by the security forces, and a shocking indifference to the fate of innocent hostages. While the chief guilt must obviously remain that of the terrorists, the book amounts to a severe indictment of the conduct and morality of the Russian authorities. Dunlop's research has established the following facts, as to Beslan: first, there was credible advance warning of a planned assault on the town of Beslan; but in spite of this, there were no police guarding School No. 1 on the first day of the school year save for one unarmed policewoman-- the police who should have been there were apparently bribed to ensure their absence; the terrorists had access to the school premises prior to the attack, since they had hidden weapons and explosives there, and constructed a sniper's lair on the gymnasium roof; the number of the terrorists is unknown, but was certainly more than those killed-- a considerable number escaped after the storming of the school; it is only too probable that the leader of the assault, Ruslan Khuchbarov, alias "The Colonel," was one of those who got away and is still at large. There is evidence implicating officials in assisting the seizure of the school. It shows that many of the terrorists had been in prison until just prior to the raid and were released purposely in order to allow them to take part. The siege ended only after the armed forces, in obedience to orders and in accordance with a deliberate plan, commenced storming the building; the use of flamethrowers and tanks in the assault, carried out while the hostages were still present in the gymnasium, resulted in the collapse of the roof onto the hostages below, killing 160 of them and producing more than half of the hostage fatalities. ...Read More |
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