For years we have worked to end environmental destruction and human rights abuses in Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Destruction of these habitats threatens clean air and water, animal and plant species, and the people and cultures who depend on forests for their way of life. Large criminal enterprises, using bribery, extortion, slavery and murder, continue to ravage the Amazon and export their contraband.
Last year, two Greenpeace activists climbed aboard a ship carrying Amazon mahogany wood. They held a banner that said "President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging."
Instead of halting the shipment, the government is prosecuting Greenpeace in federal court in Miami. It has charged Greenpeace under an obscure 19th-century law never intended for this purpose. A trial is now set for December. [more]
With our tax dollars, Ashcroft fights his own fundamentalist wars on Tommy Chong, people who fight hard for clean air and water, and bare-breasted statues. Fundamentalist religion = the true enemy of the people.
There's a terrorist in the White House -- at least according to the language of the PATRIOT Act. Whomever leaked the identity of Joseph Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA operative is clearly in violation of section 802, which defines domestic terrorism as "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state" which "appear to be intended to coerce a civilian population."
This is the heart of the dot-com bust, Silicon Valley. Yet, unemployment is a relative thing for some young people in the area. The underground economy -- hustles legal and illegal -- is alive and well among those whose minimum-wage jobs always formed the underside of the glittering high-tech industry.
In my case, for instance, it doesn't matter whether Silicon Valley's economy goes up, down, or sideways. Ever since I was seven, I've been able to come up with some kind of hustle. It started when I helped my grandparents sell used clothes, jewelry, toys and car batteries at flea markets all over the South Bay. My grandmother would sell clothes at double the price and she'd say, "See mijo, you gotta hustle." I still work by that principle.
Artists are constantly interacting with one another's work. Sometimes this means an indirect reference that the audience won't recognize, but sometimes it also means replicating, messing with and imitating other artists. Most hip-hop songs are filled with melody and beat samples from other songs, and artists like Andy Warhol are famous for using fragments of images that were deemed public in their work (like his famous Campbell's Soup can paintings). Borrowing from other artists becomes a way for us to comment on and critique the media-saturated world that surrounds us.
But because of increasingly strict copyright laws, just about everything from the most basic phrase like "Just do it," to familiar graphic icons like a seashell (Shell oil), an apple (Macintosh computers) or a camel (Camel cigarettes) are off limits to us creatively. By cutting us off from making artistic critiques of existing media, we are transformed into little more than passive observers at best, uncritical consumers at worst.
Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny.
Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions.
If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. "A cure for unemployment" is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left.
I would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.
"One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and kingdom many a time." Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince: Concerning The Way In Which Princes Should Keep Faith Florence, 1532
"You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." George W. Bush, joking at a Gridiron Club dinner, Washington, D.C., March 2001
"Goodbye Jack Daniels, Hello Jesus!" So it was that George W. Bush says he met the Messiah as he switched the bottle for the Bible on a summer day after his 40th birthday. When he was young and irresponsible, he was really irresponsible, he admits, but all that has changed. Now, they say, his Christian faith permeates his daily life; he starts each day on his knees, reads the Bible and devoutly attends church. The air in the White House is said to be scented with the fragrant incense of prayerfulness, and presidential speeches are spiced with religious metaphors.
Bush envisions himself fulfilling a divine calling, as he heads a global battle that pits the forces of good against the forces evil. He claims God speaks to his mind, directing his actions and inspiring his presidential policy decisions. He says he "felt the call" before his inauguration as Texas governor in 1999, as he listened to Methodist pastor Mark Craig preach on Moses' reluctance to lead. It spoke conviction directly to Bush's heart for abrogation of responsibility. Assembling leading pastors at the governor's mansion for a laying-on of hands, he announced the news: "I've heard the call, I believe God wants me to run for president."
Bush's testimony appears to the sincere evangelical to be genuine; his heart was changed in a "born again" experience, through a personal encounter with Christ leading to repentance, reconciliation with God, and a conviction of God's plan and purpose for his life. Desperate for a breath of moral fresh air after the putrid impropriety that disgraced the Clinton White House, honest Christians who never question the meaning of the word "is," were swayed by Bush's invocation of the name of "Christ." He was, by his own admission, "one of them."
Few doubted and even fewer publicly questioned the veracity of Bush's "born again" claims. But, hey, hey, in those exuberant days that brought the warm glow of Christian fellowship right to the heart of the election campaign, who would have dared to mouth a ripple of doubt? And who could have foreseen that in pursuing their quest for a leader of integrity and compassion in action, the Christian churches, armed with the Bible in one hand and the flag in the other, were just about to exchange one liar in the White House for a better one.
Dominion and deception go claw in glove. From empire to empire there have always existed foul creatures in elegant attire lurking beneath the mud of political intrigue with megalomaniac intent...
Let's face it, there are lots of reasons to oppose "dubya" and it is sometimes hard to work out exactly what anti-Bush camp you fall into. Thankfully, the Department of Homeland Security has published this quiz to asses the risk you pose to the stability of the US government.
I start with the simple idea that advertising is theft.
I know those are fighting words, but when you consider that the battleground, the theater of operations is human consciousness, the I between our eyes, and that the stakes are what one makes of the world through the din of perception-then it is easy to understand why we do what we do.
It's either write, or be written. I can raise a pen or a brush in defense of my own mental environment, or allow myself to be the passive, infinitely impressed palimpsest which is the consumer caught in the maw of a marketing campaign.
So if I don't like what Apple or the auto companies are paying to flash at me, does that give me license then to act the sniper, firing my own tracer billets from the same screen of desire?
I suppose the law on this is pretty clear, that money talks and bullshit walks. In this day and age we do not expect our prophets to be without profit motive.
How often have I said to you," Sherlock Holmes observed to Dr. Watson, "that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" And how often do we need to be reminded that this is a maxim that is quite generally ignored by human beings?
Your mind, it seems, cannot help choosing the attractively simple-even if mad- interpretation over the unattractively complicated-even if sane-one. Logic and common sense are being made to play second fiddle to a perceptual ideal of wholeness and completion.
There are many examples in the wider world of human politics and culture where something similar happens, that is to say, where common sense gets overridden by some kind of seductively simple explanatory principle- ethical, political, religious, or even scientific.
When I teach framing in Cognitive Science 101, I start with an exercise. I give my students a directive: "Don't think of an elephant." It can't be done, of course, and that's the point. In order not to think of an elephant, you have to think of an elephant. The word elephant evokes an image and a frame. If you negate the frame, you still activate the frame. Richard Nixon never took Cognitive Science 101. When he said, "I am not a crook," he made everybody think of him as a crook.
WASHINGTON, DC -- The entire nation owes radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh a debt of gratitude, Libertarians say, because his ordeal has exposed every drug warrior in America as a rank hypocrite.
"One thing we don't hear from American politicians very often is silence," said Joe Seehusen, Libertarian Party executive director. "By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite.
"And that's good news, because the next time they do speak up, there'll be no reason for anyone to listen."
The revelation that Limbaugh had become addicted to painkillers -- drugs he is accused of procuring illegally from his Palm Beach housekeeper -- has caused a media sensation ever since the megastar's shocking, on-air confession last week.
As the Limbaugh saga continues, here's an important question for Americans to ask, Libertarians say: Why are all the drug warriors suddenly so silent?...
Schwarzenegger flanked by Warren Buffet, left, and Lord Rothschild, at stately Waddesdon Manor. But has the actor set his sights on a house of a whiter hue?
The 14th Amendment defines citizenship this way: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." But even this does not get specific enough. As usual, the Constitution provides the framework for the law, but it is the law that fills in the gaps.
Currently, Title 8 of the U.S. Code fills in those gaps. Section 1401 defines the following as people who are "citizens of the United States at birth:"
Anyone born inside the United States
Any Indian or Eskimo born in the United States, provided being a citizen of the U.S. does not impair the person's status as a citizen of the tribe
Any one born outside the United States, both of whose parents are citizens of the U.S., as long as one parent has lived in the U.S.
Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year and the other parent is a U.S. national
Any one born in a U.S. possession, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year
Any one found in the U.S. under the age of five, whose parentage cannot be determined, as long as proof of non-citizenship is not provided by age 21
Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is an alien and as long as the other parent is a citizen of the U.S. who lived in the U.S. for at least five years (with military and diplomatic service included in this time)
A final, historical condition: a person born before 5/24/1934 of an alien father and a U.S. citizen mother who has lived in the U.S.
A foreign-born Prez? Could happen Proposed constitutional amendments that would allow foreign-born citizens such as the action-movie star to become president will be debated in Congress this autumn.
One of the proposals, by Schwarzenegger political friend Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, would allow anyone who has been a U.S. citizen for 20 years and has resided in the country for 14 years to be elected president. Hatch denies that he proposed the amendment on July 10 with Schwarzenegger in mind, but it turns out that the 56-year-old actor-businessman was naturalized in 1983.
The other proposal, by a bipartisan group in the House whose ranks include conservative Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. - who spent more than $1.5 million to put the recall election on the Oct. 7 ballot - would allow anyone who has been a naturalized citizen for 35 years to be eligible to become president. The House legislation, whose co-sponsors include liberal Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., was proposed long before the recall movement blossomed in California.
World Marvels at Schwarzenegger's Victory Many at the Tuesday and Wednesday celebrations say they are even convinced that Schwarzenegger also has chances of becoming U.S. president one day if he sets his mind to it and the constitution is changed to allow foreign-born Americans to run.
"If they ever change the constitution, it would be for him,'' [Frank] Bogen said.
I just saw this cover tonite and it made me laugh--brilliant.
You know, I have no doubt that all the Anti-Bushies will coalesce behind the most winnable (not perfect, not a savior, just most winnable) Democratic candidate next year and kick Bush's ass. No doubt, that is, so long as there is a free and fair election.
And then this new coalition which worked together to beat Bush will make damn sure that no new group of crazy-ass, religious-fundamentalist power-hungry whack-jobs will ever try to take over the world again.
Well, they can try.
Regime Change 2004: Saving the World Starts Here
(yo, DNC, here's an ad idea: show Bush saying "We have to find the leakers" footage, then goto black screen and white letters and voiceover saying: "Remind you of anyone?" then goto footage of OJ: "I'm going to find the killer!" then say, "In fact, Bush had two months to find the leaker--instead, he did nothing." etc.)
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