Big Horn County families have proportionally many more loved ones returning from service in Iraq this New Year. They need a strong welcome home. Now is the time for an honest look at our partially-ended Iraq war, and critically examine the rationale to re run the Iraq war buildup with the next one, substituting "n" for the "q" in Iraq. We are following an almost identical script. It escapes me how an honest, open appraisal of our huge investment of taxpayer money and citizen blood could be anything but highly patriotic, and the best way to honor our veterans. But it's been given that brazenly stupid twist by packs of our paranoid neoconservative politicians and pundits, repeating the war propaganda script (see general-clark- propaganda-iraq-rerun).
It was about a month before Christmas in the late '50's with the moon just past full, enough light to see dimly this phenomenon in the original back 40 of my father's farm. He had just bought this adjacent pasture and timber ground, and went to the local sale barn to buy at auction some 50 head of spring lambs to fatten for the market before Christmas.
He was concerned that wooly critters, new in our valley, could incur a dog problem. So a billy goat and Corriedale buck were each outfitted with a bell just in case my father's worries became reality, and we the family could know what's really happening.
Then came November. My father woke my brother and me around 4:00 AM because the bells were ringing. Getting access to the problem took some effort and risk. The lights on our '51 Studebaker flatbed worked occasionally. With shotguns and enough buckshot shells, we three quickly jumped in. There were several correctly timed solid bumps turning the lights on just in time to miss a tree. We drove out of the timber up to an open flat meadow ridge and stopped.
The bells were close, but nothing else sounded amiss except a small dog's excited "yip-yip." We carefully closed the doors and ran lightly with guns loaded toward the far side of the ridge. Down in a shallow grassy cirque we saw in the moonlight a serious fracas. Three dogs were obsessed with their task, and didn't see us. We noted the carcasses of several lambs they had left mortally wounded, to go after another target. They weren't hungry; they had no real need for the carnage. The three dogs were totally focused and their mission was clear.
With the small one yipping and leading the way, they soon got another lamb down. As they ganged up to tear flesh into total submission we let loose with 12 gauge pumps and both triggers of a 10 gauge double barrel (Dad). We killed all three dogs, inadvertently finishing off the latest lamb.
Then we saw that one of the dogs we killed was ours. The other two belonged to neighbors. One neighbor tried to press charges for loss of a valuable bird dog, but got nowhere because both law and custom gave rights to farmers to protect their livelihood.
For a long time I wondered how our good farm dog, having learned not to do more than nip sheep in the heel, had, in the heat of the pack, quickly forgotten his reason for existence as our farm dog. In fact, we didn't know he was there, and he didn't come to greet us. What caused him to get so frenzied he couldn't hear the truck? What happened in his mind?
We aren't the only beings, us humans that is, who lose our common sense and civility when we run in a pack feeding greed with systemic destructive instincts. We can undermine our existence as a nation, if not our species, with the pack behavior that got us into our last four wars and kept the profits flowing. This is the unspoken truth behind our deceptive political paranoiacs who pack themselves up and run down with dripping fangs anything that wriggles wrong for them, but remains right and constitutional for 99% of the rest of us.
It's the same mind that now infests all branches of our government and all our political parties. How could Representative Dennis Kucinich, right about Iraq then, now be seen as so wrong about Iran (truthdigger-dennis-kucinich-01-01-2012)?
Now almost every American agrees with Obama that we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran, and all options are on the table. What should we do to defend ourselves against an Iran gone nuclear? Start by asking an Iraq war vet. Check out what the Israeli intel chief says (December 29 Mossad-Israeli-Iran-Threat). Read the facts of what our own intelligence says.
Then pray we won't have another Middle East war retreat without victory after another million deaths and ten more years. Then start helping us build back the traditions that made America great since the 1770's, the most important being our tradition of an elected government of, by and for the people. Not for the government. Not for the corporations that profiteer from war. For the people.
For other American traditions now being brought down as those lambs were in the back 40 of my youth, and resources cited, read on
Innocent until proven guilty
The Bill of Rights of the Constitution
Education for all
The right to work for a living
A fair economy
Habeas Corpus
Freedom from unreasonable search, seizure and detention
Government respect when seeking entry to our homes
A military that defends our borders, and respects other nations and nationalities
Abiding by The Geneva Convention we helped create after World War II
Government leaders beholden to laws in no lesser degree than citizens
Freedoms and civil rights for citizens over corporations (latest Montana Supreme Court finding helps recover this one!)
Racial equality of opportunity
Freedom to exist, regardless of race, class, religion, ethnicity or gender.
health care access regardless of income or wealth
Trust busting, breaking up illegal monopolies
Truth in borrowing, lending, financing, buying and selling.
Here are some sources used in this column in BHC News January 4, 2012:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/04/avoiding-another-long-war/ (a group of veteran intelligence professionals who have served in the CIA)
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/12/29/395711/mossad-israel-iran-existential-threat/?mobile=nc (for the Israeli intel chief Tamir Pardo on Iran threat)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBgRAWHJ89U (General Clark on war propaganda)
http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/29/time-go-deeper (Jim Wallis on 2011 and pessimism for 2012)
http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/23/heeding-bethlehem-call-freedom-comes-tenacity (Tom Getman on spiritual tenacity for freedom)
It's easy let our elected dogs, supposedly the safeguards for our American traditions, focus on those lambs as immediate prey instead of future family provision. It's more than greed; it's a simple diversion from the more complex task of guaranteeing fathers work for livelihood of our nation's children's children. Note the political sound bites of the season, picturing as prey: Obamacare, government regulation, Season's Greetings, gay marriage, immigrants, an Afro-American president with some Muslim influence in his heritage, fair taxes on the rich, Iran, habeas corpus, and other American traditions as listed above.
We sold our lambs, took our losses, and my father never raised sheep again. The neighbors agreed with us we did not want to tie up our dogs every night. So instead, we removed from all the dogs the opportunity to go berserk over sheep meat. As my father said that night, once a dog tastes sheep while running in a pack at night, there is no option but destroying it. Sheep slaughtering, after all, is in canine genes. They were created to be predators.
Humans were not. But those three dogs represent politics to me: Republicans, Democrats, and Tea Partiers. All three are despoiling our future national security as well as our well being as a nation.
The Tea Party dog is the latest and smallest on the block, ravenous, easily excited, often irrational, but a good bird dog with the right training. He is the lead attack dog on the sheep of our economy and national political conversation.
The Democrat dog is our farm dog, dedicated to the welfare of the whole family, but under cover of darkness sneaks off to serve the ravenous appetites of the 1%. This explains the current fed's political connections that allowed 7.7 trillion dollars to go to bailout Wall Street, ten times the amount congress and the nation were blissfully debating at $700,000,000,000, the amount we thought we taxpayers lent to those dogs on Wall Street. We still aren't supposed to know about the $7,700,000,000,000.00; note how little the TV and talk media have mentioned it.
The Republican dog would explain that only weak sheep would be culled. Trust me, he says, I'll give you plenty of jobs cleaning up my mess and feeding my puppies. Anyway, we are the energy sector pushing the Keystone Pipeline project, and we're in the 1% family too big to fail. We are so big we can guarantee future national security. This dog doesn't want us looking into the exaggerated job estimates, steel from the Far East creating jobs there instead of America, and the 4 to 41 billion subsidy—depending on sources of this hidden information—that we sink our teeth in from taxes on the 99%. This dog wants to keep hidden how the Republicans stopped Obama from cutting $4 billion of this government spending on unneeded energy sector subsidy. There's lots in this world for Americans to fear, and this dog wants to be our favorite watchdog.
The Republican dog would push the falsehood as truth that the big operators make more jobs for America. This is illustrated in the hugely inflated job numbers of the Keystone Pipeline, complete with ridiculous distortions like counting "permanent" jobs by job years—i.e. 500 jobs for 10 years would be 5,000 permanent jobs, the way these liars figure. Five hundred just happens to be the actual number of permanent jobs this project is projected by a third-party reliable source to provide, yet hear the Republicans bark their enthusiasm of more mutton money jobs we're all supposed to believe in. Yet our gov'ment needlessly spends 4 to 41 billion of our national treasury annually on subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, like Keystone Pipeline—an issue the Dempublican Super committee refused to address.
A realistic scientific appraisal of our planet's health for long term American if not human survival must be tied in with appropriate non-fossil energy investment, but it gets almost no press. Now that this seems the only realist alternative, why is there still no political party with any sense of how to do this in America? Why do we turn our noses up against 95% of the world's population in every climate change conference, and turn the other way as our dogs commit carnage against planet earth's future? It's time to dispose of the Republocrats in Congress and sell the sheep of short-term gain.
As much as we don't want to, it's time to tie up our dogs that don't need the bloody mess they make to fatten themselves on our economy, the resource we have tended as American families over the centuries. Other dogs can be elected to serve the real interests of our nation, more than the wealthy one percent.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100282510
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/01/cain-kills-abel-the-first-class-war/
The first article is by a Baptist minister. Others are equally useful for any evaluative discussion of our latest war run up.
http://www.nationofchange.org/propaganda-re-runs-1325090084
Comments by General Wesley Clark
Iran stands accused of being very close to developing an atom bomb. In 2002, so was Iraq.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" He replied, "Oh, it's worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" -- meaning the Secretary of Defense's office -- "today." He continued, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I asked, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn't show you that memo! I didn't show it to you!"
..end..
Snip is from General Wesley Clark, speaking with Amy Goodman.
The propaganda parallels are so obvious as to reek of laziness. Can't they even make up better lies now?
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/globallaborinstitute/research/Keystonexl.html
Follow the links on this site for official testimony and comprehensive scientific findings.
http://4closurefraud.org/2011/12/07/bernanke-letter-to-congress-re-bloomberg-7-7-trillion-secret-bailout-article/
The Rigged Keystone Pipeline Game
We in Big Horn County know a rigged game when we see one. That's when the outcome is set ahead of the game, and power brokers pay a few important players to rig the game in favor of the brokers, against the wishes of the public to access a livelihood.\.
The Keystone Pipeline federal EPA environmental review is a case in point. Who did it? For whose benefit? With what advance understanding, or surreptitious contract?
The Washington Post, after countless news media outlets simply regurgitating the power brokers' propaganda, finally broke through with some truth:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/keystone-pipeline-debate-heats-up/2011/11/04/gIQA824rpM_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/keystone-pipeline-jobs-claims-a-bipartisan-fumble/2011/12/13/gIQAwxFisO_blog.html
It turns out the estimate of 20,000 jobs created by the keystone XL project owner TransCanada is another case of liars who figure. The figures that don't lie are the 20,000 "one person, one year" jobs, rather than the much fewer jobs period, quoting Russ Girling, TransCanada's CEO who defended the lie. Translated, this means each year each worker is hired it counts as job. So if the project were to take 10 years, the way most of us in Big Horn County understand the word "jobs" it would be $2,000. It wouldn't take that long, but even so it begs the question, "How many permanent, as in lifetime, jobs will the Keystone XL project create?" Obviously, they don't want to project that information. The truth is uncomfortable.
That brings up the next question: "What priorities have been given to the workers and the economy of this country in TransCanada's business plan for the Keytsone XL project?" Once again, like too many of the too-big-to-fail enterprises of our great nation, they say one thing to please the government and the citizens, and then do the opposite, buying steel from the far East, getting pipes built in another country, and manipulating figures to mislead us with the truthful lie of 20,000 jobs for American workers.
http://stoptarsands.org/powerful-mini-documentary
http://stoptarsands.org/earthquake-keystone-xl-pipeline-route-proves-state-department-wrong
The U.S. State Department, which must green light the project, forecasts just 5,000 direct U.S. jobs over a two year construction period.
Even according to TransCanada, the amount of permanent jobs created would be only in the hundreds.
"Those are the real numbers," said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of international programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The Republicans have been acting as if this is a national jobs package, and it's not."
Meanwhile, one study from Cornell University said the pipeline could actually lead to a decline in jobs in the long run. One reason is that the pipeline would lead to higher fuel prices in the Midwest, the study said, and that would slow consumer spending and cost jobs. The study also said jobs could also be lost due to crop failures or other events associated with higher pollution levels the oil sands would bring. And it said more oil would mean a decline in green jobs.
http://www.truth-out.org/new-york-city-council-vote-against-corporate-personhood-citizens-united/1325701337 from comments on this website by
Thomas Spencer
His comments follow:
The SCOTUS made a very serious free speech error in allowing unlimited political contributions by corporations. Essentially, they gave corporations a First Amendment right to buy a Congress that will promote their greed at the expense of the human public well being. They agreed with the saying that "money talks", and decided that money was to have free speech.
This was NOT a matter of free speech as they asserted. It IS a matter of one-man-one-vote in a republican form of government. By allowing unlimited contributions by corporations they have essentially given them as many votes as they can afford. It is the equivalent of saying that votes can be had for every x number of dollars, or that only landowners can vote; a concept proposed and rejected by our founders. In addition, they have ignored the laws that prohibit political contributions by foreign interests because almost all publicly held companies have some stock owned by non citizens. Shouldn't it be a violation to let corporations with foreign ownership decide who is going to be a US public servant?
Corporations are NOT people; they are commercial and legal paper entities, and they have legal protections people do not. They do not have children who need good schools, they cannot get cancer from a polluted environment, they cannot lose their lives in wars of choice, they cannot be sent to prison or jail, and they do not benefit from a happy populace. Their sole interest is in monetary profit. When corporations enter political debates with vast expenditures and propaganda, they seek to further their own interest, not those of humans. Far too often their interests prevail at the expense of the public well being because of their immense wealth.
The ruling was a fiasco that threatens the very nature of our republic. It leads us towards an oligarchy (rule by an elite group), which in our case will be a plutocracy, a rule by wealthy paper entities with money, with some level of foreign ownership influence.
The kicker on the SCOTUS is Clarence Thomas's compromised integrity. He actually broke the law by not reporting income: and that income was from special interests that are bringing cases before the court. Not to mention his perceived lack of judicial competence.
It's really scary to know your republican form of government might depend on disease or accident to alter the bent of the SCOTUS. This is the second error they have made recently, the first being putting Bush in office: both obviously politically motivated. We have the worst Supreme Court in history. It's time for a constitutional amendment limiting SCOTUS terms or allowing for public recall.
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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
