May 30, 2013

Thirteen Years Ago: Ralph Nader Super Rally in 2000 at Madison Square Garden

I encourage you to watch the whole thing.

Nader talking about how we can/must fight back against:
Monsanto, racial profiling, student debt, the drug war, corporate power, the corrupt Corporation on Presidential Debates, the growing wealth disparity, globalization, the crackdown on labor unions, the way the legal system is built by corporations to rip off poor people, the lack of public infrastructure that makes it impossible for millions of poor people to get to their jobs unless they own cars, factory farms, GMOs, the military industrial complex, and so on.

This could have been filmed yesterday at something "Occupy" related. The fight thirteen years ago is still our fight today.

I'm looking forwards to Green Party Super Rallies starting in 2016... but they won't happen unless you make them happen.





May 27, 2013

War Immemorial


Why the "War on Terror" will never end.
 
President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism speech Thursday was predictably and perhaps characteristically, frustrating. In what seems to have become his modus-operandi, President Obama said all the right things, acknowledging that the war on terror cannot and should not, be sustained indefinitely. But, as usual, he was short on specific plans or legislative actions to put his vast promises into concrete action.
That did not stop the Obama Cheering Squad (a.k.a., the corporate media) from salivating in orgasmic ecstasy over the entire speech, though.
A lengthy New York Times editorial lauds the president’s address, calling it a “momentous turning point in post-9/11 America” (“The End of Perpetual War,” 5/24/13). The Times editors conclude the piece, “There have been times when we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment. This was not either of those moments.”
Well, I’m glad the NYT is apparently so easily satisfied. The rest of us, however, may need a lot more convincing beyond Obama’s rhetoric, lofty as it may be.
Bob Dreyfus of The Nation hails the president’s speech as “important and transformative” (“Global War on Terror, RIP,” 5/24/13). Dreyfus then goes on to defend Obama’s use of unmanned predator drones, or simply “the drone issue,” as he calls it. He writes: “First of all, a drone is just another weapon in the American arsenal, not unlike cruise missiles which President Clinton unloaded on Al Qaeda in 1998, and other lethal power.”
Except that, to my knowledge at least, Clinton never used cruise missiles to illegally and arbitrarily target American citizens. Indeed, it is astounding how blithely Dreyfus minimizes “the drone issue” as though it is an afterthought. Then again, given some 80 percent of liberals approve of drones, I suppose I should not be surprised.
Certainly, there is no doubt the “War on Terror,” or the “Global Struggle Against Extremism,” or whatever made-for-newspaper-headlines label we are supposed use for it now, must end. I just would not hold my breath waiting for Obama to end it. Obama is, in many respects, a greater warmonger than George W. Bush. Upon accepting his absurdly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize shortly after taking office, President Obama disingenuously invoked the peace activism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. only to then attempt to discredit the approach.

“[A]s a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone,” Obama said.

“I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history… So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”

Yet, how can Obama say for certain that negotiations with al-Qaeda would prove fruitless?
Al-Qaeda leaders have proposed peace negotiations—on the condition the U.S. leave Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel withdraw from the Palestinian Occupied Territories—twice in the last ten years and the Bush and Obama administrations have both promptly dismissed them outright. Once again, the “politically practical”—military aggression, in this case—trumps the “naïve altruism” of peace and nonviolence. Perhaps the real reason peace is not considered a “realistic” foreign policy option is because weapons manufacturers—like tax-dodging NBC owners, General Electric—cannot make any money off it.

The United States has been at war with al-Qaeda and other affiliated organizations for over a decade now. The war in Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history. And while the military combat in Iraq may be technically over, the corporate occupation remains very much in place. According to the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), 14,000-16,000 private contractors and U.S. corporations—including such heavyweights as KBR, DynCorp and Blackwater/Academi—maintain a strong presence in Iraq. And those are just the officially declared wars most Americans are cognizant of. We also deliver daily bombings, via unmanned predator drones, to Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.
The “war on terror,” like the Cold War of the 1950s, is an open-ended, potentially endless conflict against an ambiguous, ill-defined enemy and a culture—Islam, essentially—which we stubbornly refuse to understand. Rather than educating ourselves about the Islamic religion or the history and culture of the Middle East, we instead hide behind the infantile question, “Why do they hate us?” (The correspondingly infantile answer: “They hate us because of our freedom.”) The actual answer, of course, likely has less to do with how much “freedom” we enjoy, and the degree to which we, through our ongoing efforts of pre-emptive war, militarization and occupation, inflict upon the rest of the world the same sort of barbaric violence we vehemently decry when unleashed upon us.

And therein lays the bitter irony of the war on terror. Our imperialist actions—carried out in the name of fighting terrorism—only serve to create more hostility against America, thus leading to more terrorist attacks. According to Guardian blogger, Glenn Greenwald, this is, in fact, the point. In a piece from earlier this year, Greenwald called the terror war, “a pure and perfect system of self-perpetuation” (“The ‘War on Terror’—by Design—Can Never End,” 01/04/2013).


He writes:
“…what one can say for certain is that there is zero reason for US officials to want an end to the war on terror, and numerous and significant reasons why they would want it to continue. It’s always been the case that the power of political officials is at its greatest, its most unrestrained, in a state of war…
If you were a US leader, or an official of the National Security State, or a beneficiary of the private military and surveillance industries, why would you possibly want the war on terror to end? That would be the worst thing that could happen. It’s that war that generates limitless power, impenetrable secrecy, an unquestioning citizenry, and massive profit.”


The war on terror, therefore, can never end. Not, that is, unless We the People force that ending through massive organized resistance, nonviolent civil disobedience and by abandoning the two corporate parties that enable (and benefit from) this war of terror’s continuation.

“The war is not meant to be won,” George Orwell wrote prophetically in 1984, “it is meant to be continuous.”

May 25, 2013

[science] The 'Pleadian Star System meme' is bunk.

A while back, there was a meme floating around facebook saying that our Solar System was part of a larger system of stars mimicking the order of our solar system of planets, a system called the "Pleadian Star System."

I couldn't find anything about it. So I asked Dr Steven J. Gibson, an astronomer at the Aricebo Observatory, who did his dissertation on the Pleiadies Reflection Nebula.


March 20th, 2013
Dear Dr Gibson

So there's been a meme floating around Facebook lately about how our solar system is part of a bigger solar system called the pleiades system.

I am not an astronomer, and while the idea of our star being part of a star system that mimics our solar system is appealing to the human desire for order in the universe, I have doubts as to whether or not this is the case.

My instinct is to say that it's total bunk, especially given the number of web results having to do with "Nordic Aliens," "UFOs," and "cosmic alignments coinciding with major historic events" that google turns up when I search for the term "Pleiades Star System."

So since I could not find anything conclusively on my own, I was wondering if you knew the answer.

Thanks.
Asher

attached image



May 25th
Dear Asher,

I'm sorry this response is so late. I moved years ago and don't read this
email address much anymore; please respond to the cc'd address above.

The meme you reference dates back to a bit of 19th-century pseudoscience,
which held that Alcyone, the brightest star in the Pleiades, was somehow
the center around which everything orbited, including our Sun and all the
visible stars of the sky. It was never taken seriously by scientists, but
it has retained an irresistable allure for some people ever since, as you
have discovered online. In reality, we have known for most of a century
that our Solar sytem is part of a galaxy of billions of stars orbiting a
common center some 30,000 light years away in the direction of the
constellation of Sagittarius; you can read more about this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

Nice blog, by the way. The drone drinking game is brilliant, but
depressing.

Obama's "Assassination Justification" speech

I sat down with Alex Steed of the Bangor Daily News to talk about Obama's speech on the 23rd, in which Obama made the case for the use of drones against US citizens



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May 24, 2013

Jeremy Scahill on Rachel Maddow talking about Drone Strike Assassinations

Just how much did Obama come clean yesterday?

One person to ask is Jeremy Scahill, who gave Rachel Maddow some information it wasn't clear she was ready to hear last night - http://youtu.be/stTUkt2oijA?t=4m

May 23, 2013

President Obama's Speech justifying Drone Strikes

I didn't see it live. Watching it on replay right now. Rumor is that CODE PINK's Medea Benjamin interrupted it. Cuz she's awesome like that.

UPDATE: Medea Benjamin at 49 minutes in. KICKING ASS. AS USUAL.



Video streaming by Ustream

Obama Drone Strike Drinking Game

via David Swanson of WarIsACrime.org

1. The President is going to admit that he has a murder problem and propose to correct it by murdering less in certain countries. If examples occur to you of crimes you might commit that you could not continue committing by promising to limit your criminal activities in some countries but not in others, DRINK!

2. The President is going to claim to have targeted, or to have allowed an unnamed John Brennan to have targeted, only one U.S. citizen for murder but to have killed three by mistake, on top of three killed by President Bush by mistake. If you can think of outrages you might commit that you could not go on committing by claiming that 86% of them were accidental side effects, DRINK!

3. The President is going to claim that the one U.S. citizen he or his subordinate chose to murder was an imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threat to violently attack the United States, that capture was infeasible (meaning the target was hiding following lots of death threats, but his location was known anyway), and that said citizen was a senior operational leader of al Qaeda (or an associated group or was an adherent or a backstage groupie who had once met a guy whose cousin knew where an al Qaeda meeting was held one time). If you understand what that means, DRINK!

4. The President is going to hope that nobody notices that laws against war and murder don't include exceptions for people who invent lists of arcane criteria that they require themselves to meet before murdering. If you think you could invent and meet at least three qualifications before engaging in some immoral behavior, DRINK!

5. The President is going to hope nobody notices that he did not actually meet his own criteria before murdering Awlaki. Attorney General Eric Holder now says Awlaki was killed for actions, not words. Prior to the deed, Holder said it was the "hatred spewed" on Awlaki's blog that put him "on the same list with bin Laden." Asked if he wanted Awlaki captured or killed, Holder did not say "captured if feasible," but evaded the question. Awlaki, as far as we know, was never a member of al Qaeda. Obama's and Holder's claims about Awlaki's role in terrorist attacks are undocumented claims. No evidence has been presented and no charges were ever brought in court. If you think shouting "Whoever he is, and whatever he's charged with, he did it!" would be a nifty way to get out of jury duty, DRINK!

6. The President is going to speed past the fact that over 99% of the people he's murdered have not been U.S. citizens, and that the pretense of justification so lazily applied to U.S. citizens has not been bothered with at all in these cases. He's not going to discuss "signature strikes" targeting unknown people and whoever's near them, or the targeting of the rescuers of victims. He's not going to discuss children, women, seniors. He's not going to discuss the posthumous identification of males as "enemy combatants" -- a non-legal term that adds insult to murder. He's not going to discuss the many known cases in which the victims could quite feasibly have been captured, were clearly not involved with al Qaeda in any way, and lacked any capacity whatsoever to threaten the United States. He's going to propose applying the fraudulent, meaningless, and illegal standards he applies to murdering U.S. citizens to murdering non-U.S. citizens in the future ... in some countries. If you can think of some people who might not be satisfied with this reform, DRINK!

7. The President is going to claim to be moving some but not all drone kill operations from a secret agency technically lacking in Congressional oversight to a department Congress simply chooses not to oversee. If this falls short of what you can imagine when you hear "most transparent administration ever," DRINK!

8. The President will not be speaking about how some 75 other nations with drones should begin applying his standards to their own behavior. If you think such matters are worth discussing, DRINK!

9. The President is going to brush over the question of where and how he will be ordering the murder of people by means other than missiles. If you can think of ways this might become seen as a problem down the road, DRINK!

10. The President is going to speed past the existence of a massive ongoing U.S. war on Afghanistan, larger now than when Obama moved into the White House, and expected to continue for many years after it "ends" in another year and a half. If his ability to get away with this strikes you as perhaps what he must love most about drones and how they change the conversation, DRINK!

11. If you have concerns that go unanswered about the global expansion of U.S. bases, threats to Syria, weapons provided to Israel, threats to Iran, or the gargantuan military budget, DRINK!

12. The President will leak a great deal of information about his kill list program in this speech, as he has done on some previous "I killed bin Laden!" occasions, and yet will fail to prosecute himself for espionage at the end of the speech. If you believe laws should be applied equally to all, DRINK!

May 19, 2013

Beat the Press


Why the A.P. Phone Records Seizure Should Frighten Us All.

Forget about Benghazi or the IRS’s alleged targeting of “nonprofit” Tea Party groups. There is a scandal brewing in the Obama White House—one that should outrage all Americans who care about civil liberties. But it is not either of these media obsessions. The real scandal is the Justice Department’s unprecedented seizure of the Associated Press’ phone records.
As the AP reported last week, the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months’ worth of its reporters’ and editors’phone records without a warrant or justifiable cause. The records cover over 20 AP reporters’ telephone lines, including their homes, offices and cell phones. AP President, Gary Pruitt denounced the move, and called on Attorney General Eric Holder to return the phone records and destroy all its copies.

In a letter to Holder, Pruitt wrote, “We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

The DOJ claims it needs the phone records to identify a source who allegedly leaked information to AP reporters regarding a foiled terrorist plot originating in Yemen. However, as former constitutional lawyer and Guardian blogger, Glenn Greenwald notes, “The legality of the DOJ’s actions is impossible to assess because it is not even known what legal authority it claims nor the legal process it invoked to obtain these records. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, the DOJ’s power to obtain phone records is… dangerously broad” (“Justice Department’s pursuit of AP phone records is both extreme and dangerous,”05/14/2013).
Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges agreed. Speaking on Democracy Now! last week (05/15/13), Hedges called the seizure “frightening.”

“[I]t is one more assault in a long series of assault against freedom of information and freedom of the press,” he said. “And I would also, of course, throw in the persecution of Julian Assange at WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning as part of that process.”
The Obama administration has overseen more prosecutions of government whistleblowers than any other administration in history. Barack Obama has invoked the 1917 Espionage Act twice as many times as all previous administrations combined. What is further infuriating is Obama—a former constitutional scholar—ran in 2008 on a platform of “restoring transparency” to government. Instead, he has done just the opposite. Perhaps that explains why the transparency theme was largely absent from his 2012 campaign.
Whistleblowers, government insiders and other often times “off the record” sources are crucial to investigative journalism. The classic example is “Deep Throat,” who helped Woodward and Bernstein break the Watergate break-in story during the Nixon years. Without Deep Throat (revealed in 2005 to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt), The Washington Post reporters would never have been able to shed light on the Watergate scandal.

Both these intrepid whistleblowers and the reporters who bring their insider information to the public are an indispensable part of democracy. The very job of journalism is to serve as a watchdog of government and corporate entities. It is to bring citizens the truth—no matter how unpleasant or uncomfortable that truth may be. And while it is true the privately-owned, corporate news media have not always lived up to this standard, the press (print-news, in particular) is one of the few remaining safeguards to protect democracy and an open society. Indeed, as history has shown, when totalitarian forces shut down free countries, the press is typically the first institution that is silenced.
But Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on leakers has created a chilling effect.
According to Hedges in the aforementioned interview:

“If you talk to investigative journalists in this country, who must investigate the inner workings of government, no one will talk, even on background. People are terrified. And this is, of course… not really about AP. It’s about going after that person or those people who leaked this story and shutting them down. And this canard that it [the leaked information] endangered American life…there’s no evidence for this.”
Yet the “liberal” media seems more upset that the IRS singled out some right-wing political organizations attempting to pass themselves off as nonprofit, “social welfare” groups, than the DOJ’s gross violation of the First Amendment. Not to suggest, mind you, that liberal groups do not do the same thing. MoveOn.org, for instance, is registered as a tax-exempt, 501(c)(4) nonprofit.
Indeed, many media outlets are defending the DOJ’s move. The Nation’s Leslie Savan--who, like so many other reporters, lumps the genuine AP scandal in with the IRS and Benghazi pseudo-scandals--urges readers to “take a deep breath” (“Don’t Get Sucked Into Obama Scandal-Mania,” 5/16/13). She then, in classic liberal style, blames the phone records seizure on the Republicans. Savan writes:

“Republicans have made a fine art out of demanding Obama do something, then attacking him when he does… [N]ow the same Republicans, like Joe Scarborough, who were screaming for Obama to shut down national security leaks like the one in Yemen, are now screaming that he’s trampling on free speech.”
But Republicans’ double-standard opportunism—however hypocritical—while perhaps noteworthy, does not actually address the severity of the issue. Then again, I suppose that is the point—shoot the messenger, ignore the message.
Over at the left-leaning Daily Banter website, Oliver Willis decries the Associated Press—and the news media in general—for apparently believing they are above the law (“Dear Professional Press, You Aren’t Special,” 5/15/13). “The press does not have special powers not afforded to the rest of us,” Willis sneers. “If you have material relevant to a crime and think that magical source protection applies, there’s no constitutional right to a confidential source.”
Curious side note: Does Willis consider himself a member of the “professional press”? And, if not, does that mean he belongs instead to the class of “unprofessional” press? Just wondering…
Regardless of what Obama apologists and the outright uninformed may think, the U.S. news media does have freedom of the press protections. And this is not the first instance of blatant hostility to those protections on the part of the Obama White House.
New York Times editor, Andrew Rosenthal, sums things up best (“Did the A.P. Leak ‘Put the American People at Risk’?”, 5/17/13). Noting that the AP editors held off on publishing the insider account for five days at the request of the CIA, Rosenthal makes clear the nation was not “at risk.”
“Hyperventilating about threats to ‘the American people’ a year later is outrageous,” he writes. “Mr. Holder might have directed some of that energy into prosecuting crooked bankers and mortgage companies or, say, people who tortured prisoners.”

Adam Marletta is a freelance writer and the secretary of the Portland Green Independent Committee.

May 13, 2013

Current TV is dead. Long Live Indie Journalism

Womp womp.


So Al Jazeera, after acquiring Current TV, isn't going to be continuing with Current in any way shape or form.

So Current TV is officially going to be dead starting sometime this month.

Current long ago killed what made them different from the corporate-owned, top-down media structure we all know and loathe. What made them different?

In addition to having a voting system that allowed quality content to float to the top of the heap, and be featured on TV, they also had an editorial staff who also picked out quality content, and created quality news content. Their "Vanguard" journalists did an amazing job doing in-depth stories that the MTV-ized 24 hour news networks are too busy acting like highly distractable puppies with ADHA chasing a ball, to put the effort into producing. So too was the user-generated content. So, Current hired the assholes from MTV who MTVized the channel, and turned it all to vapid shit.

They died in effect, when they stopped featuring user-generated content that made its way up through the reddit-style voting of the online communtiy, and instead, through their "VCAM" project (Viewer Created Advertisement Material) asked us to make advertising for corporate bullshit like Axe Body Spray and Loreal Shampoo. Which wasn't as much user-participation as it was ad firms being incredibly lazy and stealing ideas from people too stupid to realize that they should get paid $40k a year to generate marketing materials.

The online community that had developed around open-source indie journalism, was left on a deserted island of a chatroom, abandoned. Without the ability to get your news stories covered by the channel, few people bothered to come on to the website. As the MTV-ization started, content that was getting voted up was vapid TMZ crap about celebrity culture. Gone were the 7 minute documentaries about arts, culture, science, news, sociological experiments, etc.

Things picked up a bit when they hired on the Young Turks, but the other shows, like Jennifer Granholm's "The Panic Room" (or whatever it was called) was pure, uncut, DNC propaganda, the sort of inane inside-baseball and horse-race bullshit about campaigning we can get anywhere else (mostly CNN, with their holographic sets, touch-screen maps and total lack of news content). Not coverage of issues, and not news, not things that make a difference in people's lives.

I think ultimately, the reason that Current failed so horribly, is that in each misstep along the way, they never really understood the value of what they had, they never understood what made them unique or important. They effectively cut off their own hands. So Al Jazeera America? Great! Al Jazeera has time and again proven themselves to be in line of what Current set out to be in the first place-- high-quality, boots-on-the-ground journalism.

So Current TV is dead. Long live Independent Journalism.

May 8, 2013

Musings on Why it's Not Easy Being Green



The Maine Green Independent Party held its annual state convention Sunday, in Belfast. Jill Stein, 2012 presidential candidate, delivered the keynote address. While many of the looming threats Stein outlined in her speech are dire (economic collapse, exploding student debt, a permanent low-wage economy, environmental crisis), she also offered attendees reason to take hope. Indeed, after nearly 30 years of struggling to defend our political legitimacy, it seems voters are finally listening to what the Greens have to say.

“We are not powerless,” Stein told the crowd. “We are so powerful the corporate media is afraid to talk about us.”

Media coverage of the Green Party tends to follow the pattern outlined in Gandhi’s famous saying, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The corporate media tried to ignore us for years. Now they seem to have moved on to the “laugh”phase.

This was largely the case with Stein’s campaign last year. ABC News political blogger, Matt Negrin dismissed not just the Greens but third-parties in general, claiming their ideas “tend to be a bit radical”(06/06/12). Those “radical” ideas include cutting the bloated, wasteful military-spending budget, legalizing marijuana (a concept now supported by a majority of Americans) and creating decent, well-paying jobs. He’s right--such common sense policies are way too radical for Disney-owned, ABC. In a follow-up article some weeks later (07/11/12), Negrin condescendingly calls third-party candidates a “fun footnote in U.S. presidential elections.”

In a rigged, one-party system where it is virtually impossible to vote against a Wall Street sponsored, corporatist candidate, the Green Party is the only genuine grassroots party that speaks for the citizens.“The politics of fear has given us everything we were afraid of,” Stein said. She is right: The corporate media are afraid of us. That is why they go out of their way to mock, ridicule and belittle us. The last thing they want is for informed, morally conscious voters to take us seriously.

And this sort of negative coverage is not limited to the national media. Bollard editor and Bangor Daily News blogger, Chris Busby has been waging a personal vendetta against recently elected Portland School Board member and Green, Holly Seeliger for several months now.

Two weeks ago, he devoted an entire column to discrediting her (“Taking ‘sexist’ back,” 04/25/13). In it Busby writes, without a hint of irony, of his detractors, “…the people who resort to personal attacks and name-calling are morons.” Yup. You’ve got that right, Chris.
To date, I have not read one substantive criticism Busby has of Seeliger’s politics, school reform proposals, or votes. His comments are almost exclusively about Seeliger’s hobby of burlesque dancing. If Busby has a legitimate gripe with an elected official, that is one thing. But he doesn’t. In fact, the man has nothing of substance to say about anyone or anything. If Holly were not a Green I highly doubt he would devote nearly as much ink to her.

Democratic apparatchiks like Maine Rep. John Hink persist in baselessly blaming Ralph Nader for throwing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. This argument ignores the fact that Al Gore won the election. It was the Supreme Court—engaging in the same sort of “judicial activism” its conservative members constantly decry by those on the left—that voted to end the Florida recount, thus handing the presidency to Bush. More importantly, this entire argument hinges on the presupposition that, had Nader not been an option on the ballot, Green voters would have automatically selected Gore as their default candidate. Some of them likely would have done so, yes. But most Greens I know do not compromise so easily. Had Nader not been running, it is more conceivable those voters would have simply stayed home.

Yet 13 years later this bogus notion that Nader“stole votes” from Gore refuses to die. (Point of clarification for liberals: Greens do not “steal” votes. They earn them.) Democrats hysterically trot it out every election cycle to scare progressives into voting against their own interests. Democrats’marginalization of Nader comes directly out of the Republican playbook: Shoot the messenger, ignore the message. It is the same tactic they have used more recently to smear Julian Assange (“Rapist!”) and Bradley Manning (“Angry gay!”). Nader’s public transformation from honored consumer advocate, to egomaniacal “spoiler” was no accident. The corporate-controlled Democratic Party orchestrated it.

As John Stauber writes in a recent article for Counterpunch (“The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats,”March 15-17, 2013):

“After the 2000 presidential election…rich liberal Democratic elite began discussing, conspiring and networking together to try and make sure that no scruffy, radical political insurgency like the Nader 2000 campaign would again raise its political head. They generally loved Al Gore, the millionaire technocrat, and they put in play actions which led to the creation of a movement of their own that aped the right-wing’s institutions.”

Being Green makes you something of a pariah not only in politics, but even in everyday social interactions. A recent encounter with BDN blogger, Carol McCracken at the grocery store, serves as a perfect example. “You’re a Green, huh?” McCracken sneered upon seeing my Maine Greens pin on my jacket. She then proudly informed me, “I never vote Green.”

I responded as I always do in these sorts of exchanges. I asked her, “Which of our Ten Key Values do you disagree with?”McCracken did not respond to my question, which indicates to me she is not familiar with any of the Key Values. (In other words, she has completely dismissed a political party she knows next to nothing about. Good to know she is such an informed voter.)
Instead she repeated robotically, “I never vote Green!” After Mrs. McCracken lectured me on how marijuana is the “gateway drug,” Congress Square Park should “absolutely” be sold to private realtors, and would-be City Councilor Wells Lyons (I hear he’s running again this year) is a “covert Green,” I managed to cordially end the conversation and escape to the check-out line.

This is the sort of treatment Greens receive on a regular basis. Even the seemingly innocuous act of grocery shopping turns into a political debate over our very right to exist. Of all my quirky, left-leaning pins and t-shirts, none provoke as much rage from liberals as the one that says simply, “Maine Greens,” with a hand-drawn dandelion flower.
To watch the video stream of the May 5, 2013 Maine Green Independent Party convention in Belfast, ME, click here.


May 2, 2013

[music] don't let'm lie



Does the money grow the food?
No. The Farmer grows the food.
Don't let them lie to you.
We don't need their money, not like they say we do.

If you like it, please donate --------->

Seattle Police get violent on May Day

They are probably still butthurt over the 1999 WTO protests