There Is No Staples EASY Button for Economic Justice; Fighting the Man for the Mule
Fri Jan 25, 2008 at 02:10:59 PM PDT
Part One: What's In It For Me?
Mark Thompson on "Make It Plain" Sirius Left Radio Show asked his listeners the following question: "If Dr. King had been allowed to live would he accept the possibility of electing an African American as President as the realization of his dream?" The "yes" votes led the "no, there is more to do" votes by 52% to 38%, the last time I looked. Wow, that made me go back and reread the speech of Dr. King called "Where Do We Go From Here?" And to check Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" chapter "Or Does It Explode?"
Barack Obama as President living in the big white house would be realizing one part of Martin Luther King’s dream. It would be a symbol of the pride and worth that Dr. King felt was essential for African Americans to have. "As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free." "I am somebody". "But where do we go from here?", asks Dr. King. The next "challenge" was "to discover how to organize our strength into economic and political power." And that would mean that the "forces of power demanding change" would have to "confront"... "the powerful forces of the status quo".
WHY the Dems Should Listen to Carter re: Palestine
Wed May 30, 2007 at 06:32:58 AM PDT
Jimmy Carter was asked which of the current presidential candidates he thinks most likely to move towards negotiating peace in the Middle East. He still has hopes for Barack Obama, but won't decide who to vote for until he has a chance to speak to each of them privately, "I won't even decide who to support privately until I assess their attitude toward the Middle East. That's the number one issue for me." [1]
Tony Blair has been credited with stating that 70% of the worlds problems with terrorists can be traced back to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
"On March 10, 1948, in Tel Aviv, eleven men had a meeting in the Red House headed by Ben Gurion. The eleven decided to expel one million Palestinians from historical Palestine. No minutes were taken, but many memoirs were written about that fateful meeting. A systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and within seven months the Zionists managed to expel one half of all the Palestinian people from their villages and towns."-
Dr. Ilan Pappe to this reporter Nov. 8, 2006. [2]
Punished for Taking Paine's Name in Vain
Fri Nov 24, 2006 at 07:21:49 PM PDT
Not that Christopher Hitchens' diminuitive reputation requires further deflation, but the neo-con fellow-traveller's infinitesimal private parts have run into a buzz-saw over at the London Review of Books.
John Barrell, an expert on the blot on English liberties known as the political trials of the 1790s, takes on Hitchens' little stocking-stuffer Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’: A Biography from a position of actually knowing something about both Paine and the work of his other biographers.
A civil opinion of the devil: Torture and the Crisis of Tom Paine
Sat Sep 23, 2006 at 03:10:35 PM PDT
There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. Rove's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their rights and receive "protection".
The United States Senate is passing a bill endorsing torture. My senator, a good liberal Democrat, has made a few wimpering noises. But apparently being a Senator is a matter of perrogatives, not responsibilities. Above is from Tom Paine, the Crisis, with just a few words changed. Some of his other passages are more chilling.
Old Tom Paine, and the origins of the welfare state
Fri Jan 13, 2006 at 11:18:23 AM PDT
Whether or not the Dems grow a spine and decide to filibuster Alito, it's always worth it to go back to one of the founders of the liberal/progressive political tradition in this country. I just happened to be looking through a copy of Tom Paine's
Agrarian Justice the other day, and found the following passage from the beginning of the pamphlet to be particularly well-said.
To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those advantages which flow from Agriculture, Arts, Science and Manufactures.
More on the flip...
