Why I will grow a garden and why you should too

Garden? We’re much to busy, all of us, protesting and ranting and agonizing over the destruction of this democracy. But hear me out. If corporate control of government is one of the problems, one of the solutions is to opt out of participating in that slow motion disaster, and rebel, if only a little bit, by stepping back from the real horror of factory food.

Few of us still live on enough land to accomplish wholesale self support by feeding ourselves. But even city dwellers can, in the planting of a windowsill garden or the renting of a small community garden space, manage to produce something for sustenance. City dwellers can, too, seek out local provisions of food. You might be surprised how many small market gardeners and mini farmers are producing groceries right close to where you live. If you think the farmer’s market is for restaurateurs and gourmands, you’re missing out on a growing and active movement of people who are eating locally grown foods for health, for national security, as an act of patriotism and rebellion.

Disgusting does not begin to describe the shameful state of American grocery store food, most of which comes to us by way of processing plants or production farms in China, Thailand and Chile. Although we’ve never, in this land, had a strong food tradition like France or Italy, like Mexico or Jamaica or just about any other country on earth, we at least tended to cook and eat at home up until the last 20-30 years. Consider that the issue here is far more than quality and taste, though those are factors for many of us.

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Lewis Black on the Iraq War

Its not really a video..but listen to Lewis Black talk about the runup to the Iraq War:

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And from our WTF? dept..

Did he really say that? Is the man out there? Krazy Karl had the nads to espouse the following:

Karl Rove claimed that he was “opposed” to holding the pre-war Iraq vote just ahead of the 2002 elections. “The administration was opposed to voting on it in the fall of 2002,” Rove said. He stated that his upcoming book will argue that the administration did not want to schedule an Iraq war vote prior
to the 2002 elections:

ROSE: But you were opposed to the vote.

ROVE: It happened. We don’t determine when the Congress vote on things. The Congress does.

ROSE: You wish it hadn’t happened at that time. You would have preferred it did not happen at that time.

ROVE: That’s right.

Oh holy shit..my dear reader..if you don’t believe that..watch him say it..again:

 

Even Daschle said Krazy Karl is nucking futs..and..trying to sell some books..perhaps his book isn’t going over so well and headed for the sale bin already?

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The Resister

It’s been a long time since I was in the Army. I was drafted in 1968 and I served 22 months in all, with the last 12 being in Vietnam. I was a combat infantryman in a mortar platoon. I always had some shame after Vietnam. I was always ashamed that I didn’t see the war for what it was right away. Others make the excuses for me and I’ve heard them all. “You were a young boy” or “You did what your country asked of you”. Yes, I was young, very young. I was in the Army before I was 19. I got out, after being in the war, before I was 21. And I did go and serve when I was asked to via the draft. But the truth be told, as a young boy, I believed that if I was drafted and I didn’t report, I’d get caught and go to jail. It would be breaking the law and they wouldn’t let anyone get away with that. I knew there were those that were going to Canada to escape the draft. There were also those in college. My brother went into the Marine Corps in 1963 when he was 17. Dad signed a waiver so he could join while so young. He had to graduate high school first. It wasn’t long after he was in the Marines that his girlfriend joined him at Camp Pendleton, California. They got married immediately and they had a child. I can’t attest to this being his plan so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam. In 1963 it was just “advisors” being sent over there anyway. Or it might be me not wanting to give my brother credit for avoiding the war.Once in Vietnam, I realized that it was a crock of bullshit and that I wasn’t defending freedom for anyone. It was dog eat dog, just like it is in any place in the USA. If you had a hungry family, you had to get food. If the North Vietnamese Communists had the food, you were a Communist. If the South Vietnamese had the food, you were a Nationalist. Some went both ways and were Communists by the light of the moon, and Nationalists by light of day.

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As the dollar drops, so goes the US credit rating.

I slogged through my email’s this morning..my mind on other things..when I hit on one from Newsweek that caught my attention. The title: ‘In the Realm of the Dying Dollar’ was enough for me to sit still and read it through. I have heard lately that europeans and canadians are flocking to our shores to shop their little brains out because our dollar is worth less than the Euro and Canadian currency. I realize the devaluation of the dollar isn’t a good thing but noticed I haven’t read too much on that topic lately.

So, I read the Newsweek writeup and its not pretty. It tells us that the Decider-in-Chief is ruining our lives in another way that isn’t quite as obvious yet. The Newsweek article mentions another writeup in Vanity Fair by a Nobel laureate that rips BushCo a new one:

In a blistering essay in the current Vanity Fair, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a former World Bank economist, notes that Bush took a nation with a budget surplus upon assuming office and turned it into a global debtor, and he has underinvested in education and alternative energy. “In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous ‘war of choice’ in Iraq.

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Plame talks to Jason Leopold Part 1

Valerie Plame talks to Jason Leopold of TruthOut. She asks questions that BushCo has never answered. No surprise there right? Its ten min long.

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The true cost of BushCo’s Wars..

It is with great regret I announce to you what might possibly be the true cost of George W. Bush’s two wars my dear reader. It probably won’t surprise you, but it will jack your jaw just a tad I think. According to the Democrats and The Washington Post..the total cost for both wars, at this point, is somewhere around..

$1.5 Trillion

So, did it freak you out? How this figure was arrived at might be a question you are pondering..I know I did. Well, according to the report, this ungodly number was arrived at by adding in higher oil prices,the costs of treating the wounded and disabled, lost productivity from those injured, potential future expansions in the size of the military made necessary by the war, the costs of repair and refit for military equipment, increases in recruitment and retention costs for the military, and economic disruptions created by the deployment of the Reserves and last but certainly not least.. interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars.

I have always been angry about the fact that we must borrow money to pay for Bush’s wars, I have never been quiet about that. To me its a huge travesty, if not an outright crime to finance these gigantic boondoggles in this way. To actually quote from the Executive Summary of the report:

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the bush legacy

not content with papa bush’s attempt to cozy up to saddam hussein (or replace him with a different dictator more friendly to american corporate interests) by leaving the kurds high and dry after the ‘gulf war’ in 1991, the bushling has decided to cozy up to turkey and butt fuck the kurds again. gee, i guess this must be why karen hughes resigned her job as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs yesterday.

tags: kurd rebellion, turkey in iraq

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BP to pay $373mil to make some problems go away..

First off, its complete bs that British Petroleum-BP can do this. There should be criminal charges filed against these mofo’s at every level of management my dear reader. Per an AP writeup, they are buying their way out of the following problems:

BP PLC is taking a multimillion dollar broom to sweep away a slew of federal charges linked to energy price fixing, a deadly refinery blast and pipeline leaks and focus on its energy business.

The more than $373 million in settlements announced Thursday are part of the company’s attempt to get rid of the problems left over from the stewardship of former chief executive John Browne and move ahead with the recently announced restructuring of Europe’s second-largest oil company.

On top of the fines and restitution, four former BP employees were indicted by a federal grand jury in Chicago on 20 counts of mail and wire fraud connected to a scheme to manipulate energy markets.

The bulk of the fines — $303.5 million — aim to punish BP for conspiring to fix propane prices in 2003 and 2004.

Screw ‘punishing’ them..put their smarmy asses in jail for Christ sakes for the murder of their employees. I know if I commit a crime, I can’t buy my way out of it..can you? But this huge corporation can and will. Also..who is going to pay back the citizens that got screwed when these jackasses colluded to fix prices?

This reminds me of the last post I did here on Sirens..about fixing the price of natural gas on the commodities market.

Look at this picture of the plant in TX that blew to hell because BP was cutting corners on safety. People died in this explosion. And BP gets to just pay a fucking fine. Amazing.

Tags: British Petroleum, corporate crime, BP

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a little something for the weekend

i haven’t been doing as much posting these days as reading. it’s probably just as well because what i have been reading hasn’t been pretty. many folks are leaving their blogs in what is probably best described as a state of ptsd- and that isn’t to make light of the problem. there is one thing nagging at me that i can’t get a handle on- and that’s why? why what- i am sure you are asking. why people just go with the flow. i mean i suppose i know why- it’s easier and you generally don’t get killed or tortured or jailed- as in burma (myanmar) and various protests here in america. my mother and i were talking about greed and power and how wealthy folks wield a lot of power because of their money. my question was why? and who are these people who are willing to sell out for profit? who are these people who are willing to wiretap fellow americans or kill civilians in iraq or place ‘enemy combatants’ in concentration camps indefinitely? and– how do they sleep at night?

my blog buddy dan would say it’s the group think thing where they believe that their way is the only way- and that it is the right way. i would agree to some extent. it is cultist and elitist and classist- and really not sustainable. the one saving grace we have as a species is- this regressive, conservative way of doing things is not sustainable. we have seen it time and again- from the egyptian empire to the persian to the greek to the roman- and on up to the british and other europeans bid for empires. they have all failed. communism failed. nazism failed. fascism fails. why? they aren’t sustainable. blending the worst of all of these ‘isms’ with an unparalleled arrogance is what is giving us a chance to undo the bush/cheney legacy.

we know their laundry list of crimes and we know that they have had help- from pnac and the strong israeli lobby in this country. the chaos that is ensuing in the middle east is solely for the profits of the neo cons and the strategy of israel. the crippling of the american economy and raping of the resources continues to baffle me. the complete denial of- what almost everyone else on the planet knows instinctively- global climate crisis is beyond me. burying your head in the sand to avoid unpleasantness or walling yourself up in an insulated bubble does not a problem solve. and it doesn’t postpone the inevitable- it’s just that you don’t have to make a decision or clean up the mess.

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Burma; what American’s should know.

I have been watching the unrest in Burma..also known as Myanmar, for almost two weeks now. I have seen things I never thought I would see happening in living color. I watched the murder of a Japanese journalist named Kenji Nagai who was holding nothing but a video camera when a Burmese soldier gunned him down at point blank range. The video was gruesome. It made me cry and scream, scaring the bejesus out of my cats. The video I watched was on a site called The Democratic Voice of Burma(DVB). It’s a site run by individuals that no longer live in their homeland because of the military junta that has controlled that country for decades. I downloaded their video and made a YouTube video of it, which got picked up by Crooks and Liars. Thousands of individuals watched the video and commented. The one thing that many of them said over and over was; BushCo won’t help Burma, they don’t have any oil.

Oh that is so very wrong my dear reader. It showed me how little individuals know about Burma/Myanmar. There are many reasons that the U.S. will not step in and help the citizens in Burma, but the lack of oil isn’t one of them. So I took it upon myself to educate others about Burma.

Burma, or the Union of Myanmar as the junta has renamed it, is the largest land mass country in Southeast Asia. In 1948 England gave up on Burma and the country has been under various forms of regime rule since a coup in 1962. Over 1100 miles of Burma are uninterrupted coastline, which of course is a very good thing for them. Their natural resources are vast; Oil, natural gas, teak wood and it’s a major supplier of rice to the world.

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blog for burma

What is it about the underdog that appeals to the american sense of justice? Since our revolution, and when it suited us, we have always supported the underdog in foreign relations. Not that it’s a bad thing, necessarily, but i think sometimes we miss the bigger picture. When most folks think about the recent unrest in Burma (Myanmar), they see the military crackdown and the monks being rounded up- not anymore since journalists have been killed and threatened and the internet turned off. They don’t necessarily look at the bigger picture. What caused the whole thing to blow?

The usual suspects- greed, power and oil. If you look to most of the issues anywhere in the world, you see the unholy trinity. From the middle east to south america to africa- to now southeast asia, you find big international corporations and greed for huge profits. To what end, i have no idea. So supporting the burmese folks and the monks is a noble ideal. Let’s ask ourselves how to make that stick. The military runs their country and their government- and they knew what they would face if they protested. The monks knew what they would face if they protested. Yet– they did it anyway.

Perhaps that’s what should appeal to us as americans- and fellow citizens of the planet. People willing to stand up in the face of adversity and fight for changes in our country, surely, but for the world too. You see, it isn’t just about the little country of burma, it is about all of us standing together and working to end the forces of greed. We need to take the power out of the hands of the international corporations and put it back into the hands of people. While solidarity is a good start, let’s do what we can to pressure governments and the united nations to stop the bloodshed in burma. My posts for the other countries that the world has forgotten about will be saved for another day.

cross posted at life’s journey

tags: burma, solidarity, human decency,terrorism

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Real War /Faux War

Like most Americans, I suspect, I’ve been riveted by the PBS 7-part series on WWII, told from the ground up (by the real people who experienced it) , and with benefit of newly unearthed contemporaneous video footage (some in color) & stills. It’s been nothing short of astounding, in my opinion.

I fervently hope that Bush & Cheney have been watching, too, since neither of them seem have personally experienced war, & seem not to understand the first thing about the reality of it.

As I’ve often said in my blog, it’s painfully obvious to me that Bush’s glorious & never-ending, overhyped war on Terror, that he so likes to compare favorably to World Wars I & II, in rhetoric anyway (“they hate us for our freedoms!”) is, in actuality, a tempest in a teapot compared to those conflicts, and anybody who’s been watching the series is sure to get that point, too.

George’s bungled war on Iraq, & Cheney’s upcoming strikes on Iran are less about people “hating us for our freedoms” than hating us for manipulating & overthrowing their governments with impugnity & trying to control their resources for our benefit. There’s nothing very heroic in that.

Are Bush & Cheney watching? I seriously doubt it. But if they were, they’d perhaps learn something from history, such as:

1. War is hell, & takes an abominable toll on those forced to fight it. It’s not a matter to be declared lightly on bogus & trumped-up “evidence” .

2. Germany’s concentration camps & gas chambers were filled with not only with the ethnically demonized but homosexuals as well. Here in America, we allowed hysteria & fear to get the best of us when we put innocent American cititizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps.

Today, Republicans openly demonize non-hetereosexual lifestyles with federal marriage amendments & state governments argue over whether to “grant” basic human rights to gays. Torture gulags here & abroad have been revived, & indefinite detention without charges, & no hope of ever being freed, awaits any loose Muslim man Americans opt to treat with suspicion rather than tolerance.

3. Everything old is new again–but this time, with a difference. This time it’s a cynical stunt engineered for extreme partisan ends to provide a justification for suspension of civil liberties at home & the demonization of those who stand between us & “our” oil.

Submitted, that if we had leaders who truly understood the causes & costs of war, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

http://www.pbs.org/thewar/about_making_the_war.htm

 

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what the politicians don’t want you to know about iraq

it has been a rough ride for me these last few years. there was a time when i was- while not a bright eyed idealist- a naive young person bent on saving the world. because back then- i thought i could one person at a time. it has become abundantly clear that that is not an attainable goal. now, i realize that what i thought my life was and my world was- was a fairy tale. reality is a cruel bitch. anyhoo, i don’t remember when i realized that the news was a propaganda tool for the right- but i now go elsewhere for the truth. onwards and upwards we go.

we all know that iraq is in shambles but it has only been recently that we have realized that america wants it that way. not only have we bombed away the iraqis homes, businesses, families, etc. but we have taken away the very soul of the country. we allowed looting of their national treasures and now- we are taking away the food lifeline they have cultivated for centuries. they had a culture; they had national pride. yes, they had a brutal dictator. but look at us. we have the march towards dictatorship without the pride or the culture. who are we to be ‘the deciders?‘

tags: Terrorism, iraq war, corruption

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Generals opposing the war break with tradition.

From CommonDreams:

The generals acted independently, coming in their own ways to the agonizing decision to defy military tradition and publicly criticize the Bush administration over its conduct of the war in Iraq.

What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation’s history.

In op-ed pieces, interviews and TV ads, more than 20 retired U.S. generals have broken ranks with the culture of salute and keep it in the family. Instead, they are criticizing the commander in chief and other top civilian leaders who led the nation into what the generals believe is a misbegotten and tragic war.

The active-duty generals followed procedure, sending reports up the chain of command. The retired generals beseeched old friends in powerful positions to use their influence to bring about a change.

When their warnings were ignored, some came to believe it was their patriotic duty to speak out, even if it meant terminating their careers.

It was a decision none of the men approached cavalierly. Most were political conservatives who had voted for George W. Bush and initially favored his appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

But they felt betrayed by Bush and his advisers.

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