Why newspaper readership is sinking

 

 

 

26 0f 28 dailies in Canada  promoted Stephen Harper as our PM.

No one has done more to destroy Canadian democracy than Harper.Who owns the papers?

Have you ever heard of the Sun chain doing anything other than opinion.

At least the star digs like newspapers should.

The Sun and many US rags channel the positions of the wealthy owners.hence the support of Harper

Of course the Internet is worse, giving free rein to the angry white men crowd—-yet, yet there are many sites which bring excellent information—but generally don’t look to corporate controlled papers.

Queen Victoria would not agree.

Ronald Reagan: Accessory to murder

Now that the fundamentalist thug Rios Montt has been convicted of genocide, how about putting on trial St.Ronald Reagan as accessory to genocide. REagan consistently supported the fundamentalist Christian  Montt’s scorched earth policy among the Mayan populace. According to Reagan, Montt,”born again” was “a man of great personal integrity”, who was “totally dedicated to democracy.” This human rights champion Montt was “getting a bum rap” on this file. The spin was that this was  ”disinformation spread by communist sympathizers.”

The confused American electorate always fell for the Gipper’s “Aw shucks shtick’ while in fact he was a pliable pitchman for empire. His defense of Latin American murderers was particularly egregious but no mind, Americans elected him twice.Not only that they wanted to put him on Mount Rushmore.

That a small country like Guatemala, dismissed as a banana republic could stand up to this murderer and his cadre of business supporters is worthy of deep respect and puts USA democracy to shame.Americans have been consistently clueless about Reagan’s horrible foreign policy in El salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala

It was years after the Great Communicator left office that the truth was bared for all to see, the rancid underbelly of US foreign policy under Reagan.

Government documents were declassified by President Bill Clinton in 1999  and they showed that the 34-year civil war had claimed the lives of some 200,000 people  and that  the army was responsible for 93 percent of the killings.

As an aside two of the most blind fanatics  of the period who served the empire were uber Catholics, William Casey and  General Vernon Walters.

Now the truth is laid bare: Ronald Reagan accessory to murder.

65th anniversary of the NAKBA

 

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, when over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from the land that became Israel. Protests, analysis and much more on the losses and hardships, lest we forget, Palestinians continue to endure.

 

Mothers’ Day: An anti-war reminder

 

The horrendous slaughter of men and boys in the American Civil War (1860-65) produced significant repulsion especially among women, already disenfranchised and victims of patriarchy.

The 20th century of course saw a quantum leap in bloodthirsty carnage and the haunting spectre of underdevelloped men cavalierly sending other people’s children to their deaths.

The brilliant German philosopher Immanuel Kant  nailed it:”Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, “War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.”

Here is the original Mothers’ Day Proclamation of  Julia Ward Howe penned in Boston in 1870. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. We still see the cowardly activity of the Dick Cheney’s of this world, a man who had 5 deferments in the Vietnam years yet blythly sent 100s of minority  and working class kids to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So Mothers’ Day today has become the latest victim of capitalist amnesia: turn a radical remembrance into flowers and chocolates!

Remember Julia Ward Howe!

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, 

Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: 

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, 

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. 

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn 

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. 

We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country 

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

 

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. 

It says: “Disarm! Disarm! 

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” 

Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. 

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, 

Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. 

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means 

Whereby the great human family can live in peace, 

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, 

But of God.

 

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask 

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality 

May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient 

And at the earliest period consistent with its objects, 

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, 

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.    

 

Justice in Guatemala

Former Guatemala dictator Rios Montt has been  convicted of genocide

(Reuters) – Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty on Friday  May 10 of genocide and crimes against humanity during the bloodiest phase of the country’s 36-year civil war and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

“Iusticia” the crowd roared when the verdict was read.The consummate liar and mass murderer now 86  met his deserved fate albeit many years too late.

A 50 year sentence was handed down for his shocking scorched earth policy of mass murder of Guatemala’s Mayan Indians.

What was surprising about the verdict was the bravery of the state judiciary which had to prosecute Montt wearing bullet proof jackets. It was the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country. It is estimated that 200,00 were murdered by Montt and his state thugs.

 

Montt, the crazed evangelical Christian in his disgusting testimony denied all of the charges.He would have made Pinocchio proud of his incredible testimony which was obviously disbelieved by  all

I never authorized, I never signed, I never proposed, I never ordered that there be any attacks against a race, an ethnic group or any religion. I never did it. And with everything they’ve said, there has been no proof of evidence of my participation.

Well there was proof and lots of it. 100  prosecution witnesses described massacres, torture and rape committed by Guatemalan state forces.

The brilliant journalist Alan Nairn interviewed Montt when he was ousted from power  and he  asked him whether he thought that he should be put on trial for his role in the massacres and whether he should be executed, since he, Ríos Montt, is a big supporter of the death penalty. When  Nairn asked him that, he suddenly leapt up to his feet and shouted,.  “Yes, try me! Put me against the wall!” But then said, that if he was going to be put on trial, the Americans should be put on trial with him. He specifically mentioned Ronald Reagan, who was one of his great sponsors.

And this is the main point here.

Reagan shockingly stated that  Ríos Montt was a man of great integrity who was totally devoted to democracy and was getting a bum rap on human rights.Both the United states and Israel bear much blame for this human disaster. The USA supported Montt all the way and Israel supplied the weaponry. By 1983, the New York Times reported  that Israel was not only acting as a surrogate for the United States (in a similar fashion to its actions in Nicaragua) was  growing  the market for Israeli arms.

The cooperation didn’t just involve UZIs and hand grenades; it also included providing intelligence and operational training, both in Israel and in Guatemala, to the right-wing government. Rios Montt openly declared on  ABC News that his success was due to the fact that “our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” Ethical voices were raised at that time by israelis of conscience. according to a Mother Jones article  in 1985 Yossi Sarid protested on the floor of the Knesset that the country had “abandoned the green route of agriculture for the red and bloody route of arms.” The Jewish magazine The Tablet quoted the relatives of   a man buried at a cemetery in Chichicastenango,  “In church they tell us that divine justice is on the side of the poor; but the fact of the matter is, it is the military who get the Israeli guns.”

In 1982 Israeli military advisers helped develop and carry out ‘Plan Victoria’ the devastating scorched earth campaign which Rios Montt .unleashed on the highland population, many Mayan ndians. In June 1983, the Guatemalan embassy in Washington confirmed that “personnel sent by the Israeli government were participating in the repopulation and readjustment programs for those displaced. The complicity of Israel with These Guatemalam murderer’s was never a secret

At a cemetery in Chichicastenango, relatives of a man killed by the military stated, “In church they tell us that divine justice is on the side of the poor; but the fact of the matter is, it is the military who get the Israeli guns.”

In  May of 1982 The Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued a pastoral letter saying, “Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes. These assassinations now fall into the category of genocide.”

Justice  finally caught up with Montt.It has yet to catch up with USA or Israel.

Stephen Hawking joins Boycott of Israel

The endgame is approaching for Israel, First it was the israeli film The Gatekeepers where the former Shin Bet (secret service, M-5 or CIA,take your pick) heads basically said that the appalling treatment of the Palestinians can not continue. Now the world’s most famous scientist Stephen Hawking has joined the international cultural boycott in the hopes that this amazing country regains its moral compass and stops the Occupation of Palestinian land..This was run in the Guardian.

You may note that this event was to celebrate Shimon Peres 90th birthday.One can be happy that this gentleman has become a nonagenarian but sad that the leadership of Israel still sees the world through the optic of the military eye.As a great former spokesman of the Knesset  Avraham Burg said, “The Holocaust is Over, We must rise from the  Ashes)—the title of his book.

A statement published with Stephen Hawking’s approval said his withdrawal was based on advice from academic contacts in Palestine.Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.

Hawking’s decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.

In April the Teachers’ Union of Ireland became the first lecturers’ association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.

In the four weeks since Hawking’s participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind. In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.

By participating in the boycott, Hawking joins a small but growing list of British personalities who have turned down invitations to visit Israel, including Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh.

Since then, his attitude to Israel appears to have hardened. In 2009, Hawking denounced Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, telling Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera that Israel’s response to rocket fire from Gaza was “plain out of proportion … The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue.”

The office of President Peres, which has not yet announced Hawking’s withdrawal, did not respond to requests for comment. Hawking’s name has been removed from the speakers listed on the official website.

Closed in

“There is a need for spiritual  vitality. What protection is there against the danger of organization?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: When a church becomes like this, it grows sick. It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.”

So says Pope Francis. Dangeously close to the mark, almost searing in its contemporary application. However it will take a long ime to get those JP ll bishops out where the action is or “at the periphery” as Francis calls it .Most of those bishops are “church men” who live in the ambit of ecclesial structures or the first place at the banquet and almost never in a position of any vulnerability. They either lead the parade or they are not in it. You never see them in coffee shops, jazz clubs, marches for justice (unless they’re pelvic oriented) and least of all, never  with the poor. They are quite comfortable in the seats of power, places where they can control the agenda. Poll after poll uses words like “disconnected from the world”, “irrelevant”. Most kind of like being called “Excellency” or “Your Grace”—but never Tom, Dick or Harry. You never will see them at public lectures by world class intellects which blow through town, never with note pads in tow taking down scraps of wisdom and insight like ordinary seekers of truth. It may help them contextualize the gospel but they are not interested. Why should they come as humble learners? It’s obvious— they are the teachers, hardly ever the listeners. See Bonhoeffer quote with his picture.

There are still enough sycophantic Catholic organizations which think it a coup to have them come and talk but the truth is they hardly ever have anything cogent to say.Their language is Churchese a kind of Mom and Apple pie discourse  sprinkled with holy water and hardly ever passed through the crucible of human experience much less linked to contemporary struggles for global or eco-justice.

This  disconnected behaviour often is an institutonal hazard—forgetting the reason for your  very existence and turning inward. St Paul referred to “the powers and principalities” and that great forgotten lay Epicopal theologian William Stringfellow wrote brilliantly about these entities—-the bad or twisted energy which nestles in institutions of all kinds, which turns them away from their original purpose- in this case God’s reign of peace and justice.In stark terms here, people begin to worship the church and not the kingdom. Survival of the institution claims our allegiance. All Christian churches have been guilty of this—people will be fired (see  Ratzinger’s horrible treatment of theologians —-to protect his version of the truth) the sex abuse scandal —the bishops forgot the gospel to protect “the good name “of the church.”

In 1992 the Anglican primate George Carey observed that “ the chief occupational scandal of our time is not the disunity of the Christian church but  the institutional preoccupation of the church in the face of the suffering of the world.”

Both Carey and Pope Francis call attention to  the “ sickness of the church wrapped up in its own world.”

Complicity

The  dead now number over 400 in Bangladesh in one of the worst contemporary examples of capitalist greed and neglect.

The new pope was predictably outraged. He has a sense of realism that the previous pope never had.This pope actually seems grounded in people’s lives. Gone are the abstractions of the academic pontiff. Francis smells the corruption and evil because he himself has dealt with it in his native Buenos Aires.

“That [38 Euros] is what the people who died were being paid. This is called slave labour,” Pope Francis said on May 1, traditionally a celebration of global workers.. “Today in the world this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us – the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity. How many brothers and sisters find themselves in this situation! …I think of people, not just young people, who are unemployed often because of an economic conception of society based on selfish profit outside the bounds of social justice.”

A staggering irony here.

The most religious country in the world the United States which persistently wears its religion on its sleeve bears a major responsiblity for this lack of solidarity and inattention to suffering beyond its own narrow borders.The “race to the bottom” has been going on for decades, factories moving to the cheapest locale so the overindulged in North America and Europe can get cheap clothes which show up in our huge chains like Walmart, JC Penney and now Loblaw’s brand, Joes.

But America the major sinner here  could stop this carnage in a flash by demanding safety measures and increased remuneration for the poor of the world. They could ban these products drenched in human sweat and blood at ther very borders if they so wished. But it appears that the unrelenting maw of global capitalism has a mind of its own, a beast that refuses to be tamed especially by the fundamentalist free marketers in the US Congress and Senate.Their real religion is profit, greed  and the holy market not Christianity. Many go on and on about life being precious, sacred even, but they do not mean it.Their scriopture is not the New Testament but NAFTA  and the WTO both of which are mum about the dignity and rights of global labour.

Out of sight out of mind.

In this seamless world we live in this could be easily mitigated but the odds  against it ever happening are massive.Magna’s  Frank Stronach said it well years ago: “Your first mandate is to make money, and money has no heart, soul, conscience, homeland (quoted in Bilello 1992).

Maybe Pope Francis and the wisdom of Catholic  social teaching can take this on in a big way. After all we are a huge multinational carrying  deeper values.

God is Justice not Love

 

“The option for the poor comes from the first centuries of Christianity. It is the Gospel itself,” said then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio during a 2010 deposition in a human rights trial. He said that if he were to repeat “any of the sermons from the first fathers of the church, from the 2nd or 3rd century, about how the poor must be treated, they would say that mine would be Maoist or Trotskyite.”

The new pope cuts to the chase.

The gospel is social justice. It’s what got Jesus murdered and why he did not live to an old age. The “malkuta Yahweh” commonly called the  “kingdom” or “Godly rule” is about justice, access to the  world’s goods which are skewed in favour of the privileged north. In Jesus time they were captured and hoarded  by the Roman empire and its minions. God’s rule on the contrary  demanded a just reconfiguration, a redustribution—”on earth  as it is in heaven.”

North Americans and conservative Catholics sentimentalize the gospel by  using the word “love” as Jesus’s message. And it’s primarily interpersonal. never structural or global.Well, we love Coke and dogs love Alpo, in other words “love” is a totally bastardized and inadequate word. Nobody gets crucified for “love”—but justice is another problem. God’s will  gets you into trouble.

Love in the New Testament as in last Sunday’s gospel–”Love one another as I have loved you”— is operational not simply emotional.It demands sharing. Contemporary usage born of massive advertising has cheapened the word LOVE.The real meaning is closer  is closer to justice.God is justice.

John Dominic Crossan says, “Think of justice as the body of love and love as the soul of justice”. Alfred North Whitehead’s “Justice is love grown imaginative”  hits the mark as  well. Crossan again, “Justice without love or love without justice is a moral corpse.That is why justice without love becomes brutal and love without justice becomes banal.”

In our privileged lives we don’t want justice. Parishes settle for charity because there is a terrible price to be paid for advocating  justice.The kingdom  will always be a tough sell in North America.We’re a resurrected people aren’t we? Not without the cross, not without justice.

St.Oscar Romero—no kidding

The official Vaticanese  language recently  stated that Archbishop Oscar Romero’s sainthood cause has been “unblocked.”

Well who was blocking it in the first place?

The answer John Paul ll, Benedict XVl and the whole curial apparatus who slavishly took their cues from the power centre. Much to their embarrassment these men never grasped the holiness of Romero or the reality of El Salvador. They listened to the wealthy landowning class “who preferred to dine with the military junta than break bread with the poor.”(David Yallop) They  kept repeating the cheap mantra that Romero was a dupe of the Marxists or Communists, a secret proponent of the feared liberation theology. The detractors of Romero inside the church used the canard that there were “theological errors” in his writings. John Paul ll was  persuaded by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under the Eastern European Cardinal Franjo Seper  to reassign Romero. John Paul ll had the order to do this on the day Romero was martyred. Previously;y the pope had humiliated Romero by making him wait four weeks for an audience. Later it was reported the pope regretted this.

After the Archbishop was murdered while sayinh mass, an italian judge wrote to the paper Corriere  della Sera:

“Why did the traveling pope not immediately set off for San Salvador to pick up the chalice that had been dropped from Romero’s hands and continue the mass which the murdered archbishop had begun?”

The answer was John Paul ll simply failed to understand the stunning oppression of the Salvadoran people and the brave  archbishop who  had become their greatest advocate. Much like he failed to understand the papal sycophant the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel Degollado. The latter, a serial abuser poured millions into Vatican coffers and gained papal trust. In 2004  John Paul ll ordained 60 Legionaries in the Vatican labelling  Maciel as the perfect example of priesthood to be followed by these young priests.  Well maybe not and certainly not Romero.

Within months of his martyrdom Oscar Romero was hailed as a saint by much of the Latin American world but the officials including the pope could not  admit that they had horribly misjudged an authentic disciple of Jesus.

And now within six weeks of becoming pope another Latin American who understands the region and the popular sainthood of Romero has “unblocked” the whole process.

Another nice move by Pope Francis.