Just say no to corporations

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Bush Administration Supports Torture

The Bush Administration has threatened to veto a proposed ban on abusive treatment of militants and other suspected terrorists if a provision is not included to exempt the CIA [link]. The bill passed in the senate by a vote of 90 to 9. It is no surprise that the Bush Administration supports the use of torture. What is news here is that a great majority of Republican senators joined with Democrats to directly defy the president.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Republican Indictments

This week, indictments are expected in the Valerie Plame case. I am reminded, somewhat, of Al Capone. He committed many horendous crimes, and what did he finally go to prison for? Income tax evasion.

The Bush administration lied to the American people in making their case for war. They lied specifically relating to this case. It is assumed that the reason for the leak was retribution against Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband, who exposed as fraud the claims of the Bush administration that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. Would anyone ever think of indicting anyone for lying to the American people and invading a country, killing over 100,000 Iraqi people, as well as thousands of American troops? Of course not, because that somehow isn't a crime, at least under the American justice system.

No matter who is indicted, even if it is Cheney himself (and I am keeping my fingers crossed that he will be), they still will have gotten away with the worst of their crimes. What does that say about our justice system, and our culture in general?

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

The End Is Near...Repent, Sinners!

The world is going to end in the year 2011, according to Harold Camping, founder of the conservative Christian radio franchise "Family Radio", and he has written a book about it [link].

Oh, well. We had a good run. These last 13,024 years (which according to Mr. Camping is how long the universe has been around, despite overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary) have been a blast.

Oh, wait. He already wrote a book predicting the end in 1994 [link]. Well, I'm sure he got it right this time.

"Family Radio" in Chicago is at 91.9 FM, right next to NPR, which is 91.5 FM. The signal strength is a little better where I live, so on a few occasions I have inadvertantly tuned my analog clock radio to "Family Radio", and been roused in the morning to hateful threats and predictions of my impending damnation. Normally, I would just dismiss lunatics like this without giving them a second thought, but members of my family seem to have been persuaded by his predictions. His teachings are the reason for my father's beliefs about dinosaurs, which I incorrectly stated in a previous post. He does in fact believe that dinosaurs existed, but he believes that they existed at the same time as humans.

What I find most ironic is that there are a great many real, physical things which may lead to the demise of our civilization. They are all, for the most part, man-made, and also of little or no concern to these radical right-wing religious types. I think Kurt Vonnegut said it best here.

Friday, October 07, 2005

What Freedom Means To Me

George W. Bush and his administration, like the administrations before him, are very fond of using the term "freedom." I had thought that the word was pretty much meaningless, in that there was no way to define it which would fit the broad way in which it is used. It seemed to be simply what we have and what our enemies don't.

The traditional definition is primarily associated with freedom of expression, religion, self determination, etc. These freedoms are certainly not consistent with the use of the word by US administrations.

It seems to me that the only definition which would be consistent with history is this: freedom is the unabated ability for the strong to exploit the weak to furthur their own prosperity. This appears initially to be contradictory with what I think freedom should mean, until I realize that those who have defined it this way see only the limited segment of society to which they belong. When George W. Bush refers to America as a "free" society, he is refering only to his own freedom as a member of the wealthy elite to retain his power through exploitation.

Examples of this are abundant throughout the history of the United States, especially in Latin America. In Chile in the 1970s, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende enacted land reform by seizing large plantations and turning over ownership to the workers. This interfered with the freedom of the plantation owners to retain their extravagant lifestyle at the great expense of the vast majority of the population, and because the minority plantation owners are the only people that matter, the US brought freedom to Chile by helping to orchestrate a military coup and installing the brutal dictator Augosto Pinochet. The same was attempted in Cuba. I do not defend the majority of Castro's later acts, but his first act after coming to power was to retake the Cuban sugar industry from American investors and return the sugar plantations to the Cuban people. By doing this, he sacrificed the freedom of a small minority for the sake of the expanding the freedom the majority, and thus the US was required to step in and attempt to bring freedom to the poor Cubans, when in reality the only freedoms being protected were those of wealthy American investors.

Socialism itself, fundamentally, is therefore contradictory to freedom. Under the principal of socialism, everyone works for the social good. No individual is free to lower someone else's standard of living in order to increase his own, and therefore, no socialist society can ever fit the American definition of freedom.