Bill Maher shreds Ronald Reagan

As Jimmy Carter was leaving the presidency in 1979 one of his last acts was to install  solar panels on the White House. He said:

“In the year 2000 the solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here, supplying cheap, efficient energy. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

This solar panel over the West Wing of course was demolished by the incoming president Ronald Reagan  whom Carter identified as one of the worst presidents in American history, yet strangely adored by the US right. Last night on HBO  Bill Maher absolutely nailed the horrible legacy of Reagan:

Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union busting, race bating, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual who cut rich people’s taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom. It sounds to me like he would fit in just fine. …

Even though Reagan did a few things today’s GOP would not like, he wrote the playbook for them for every issue of consequence. Sure he raised taxes a few times, but when you look at where he started with taxes and where he ended, this is where our income inequality problems began. He invented voodoo economics. …

On race his ideas could not be more ‘Tea Party’. He ran on states’ rights. He invented the notion that black people get all the breaks. …

He described the New Deal as Fascism, Medicare recipients as waiting for handouts, unemployment insurance as prepaid vacation for freeloaders. When they hold up signs that say no socialized medicine, where do you think they got it from? …

Worst of all Reagan inspired a whole generation of people who hate government to get into government. …

Stop agreeing he was a saint especially when his two miracles were turning water into polluted water and walking on the poor.

Bill Maher did what few in today’s media are willing to do. He disregarded Ronald Reagan’s very amiable characteristics and tone, concentrating entirely on his campaigning method and policies. Most importantly Maher points out that the genesis of the path back to exploding inequality was a direct result of Ronald Reagan’s policies. Holding him in high regards is an affront to the poor and middle class.

Segregation equals apartheid

Machsomwatch (http://www.machsomwatch.org/en) describes itself as “ a movement of Israeli women, peace activists from all sectors of Israeli society, who oppose the Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinians’ rights to move freely in their land.

In the above sense Israel acts like a democracy. There are marvelous Israeli resisters to the Occupation.The state knows that it must give the appearance of being a true democracy by minimally allowing such groups to exist. and hoping Europeans and Europeans are not watching too closely.

The overwhelming evidence however is that israel is indeed an apartheid state.This is  beyond dispute. Anybody unfamiliar with the lived reality can check a host of websites delineating this fact.Try this one  http://www.ifamericansknew.org/  or http://www.icahd.org/

Machsom recently published this horrifying (only to the uninitiated) opicture and commentary

For all our non-Hebrew-reader friends,the yellow sign in front of the ferris wheel reads:

“Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays for Jews.Mondays and Wednesdays for Arabs.”

This sign  is in amusement park called Superland, in Israel (near Tel Aviv).One wag added a tagline in German: “Ordnung muss sein” or in plain English “Order must be maintained”

The signs of course are eerily familiar to the “whites only” which were ubiquitous  in South Africa and the southern USA.

It is fairly obvious segregation=apartheid.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…..

 

 

 

All those who have been to West Bank or Gaza raise your hands

The Mayor’s executive  committee allowed Toronto  citizens to speak on whether the city should allow Queers against Apartheid to march in the Pride parade. The usual suspects from the Jewish community spoke against the report which basically allowed this small group to carry their banners with the words Israel apartheid on them.

What was predictable was that all the jewish groups had never visited the West Bank or Gaza to taste Palestinian life and then they  resorted to the tired canard of “antisemitism.” or “hate”. The only “facts on the ground”  is the diminished reality of Palestinian life. The Israel firsters were not interested and are not interested  in discovering these bitter herbs.

Address to the Anti-discrimination Committee  City Hall May 28, 2013

Citizen Schmidt at your service this morning.

I bring to my fellow citizens and  its representatives my plea for openness, tolerance and understanding. We all support  a No Discrimination policy on city-funding events.

I bring credentials that few of you possess.

My early life as a Shabbes Goy amid Toronto’s Jewish community gave to me,unbidden and unasked, a universal appreciation of the effects of racism. As the sole non-Jew on Harbord Collegiate playground team I was targeted as a Jew. This had a profound effect on me. It led me  as a Roman Catholic teacher  to be the first teacher in Canada  to create a Holocaust awareness program in secondary schools. Irt led me to pray besidr the crematoria in auschwitz.This began in 1968. I worked with Ruth Cohen for the Holocaust Remembrance Committee. I was honoured by B’nai Brith for my work. I spoke in many shuls about my experience as written in my memoir Shabbes Goy: A Catholic Boyhood on a Jewish Street in Protestant Toronto. .

Then i travelled to Israel and as  my friend and colleague Mary Jo Leddy warned me, “Your heart will be broken.” She was right.  I met the effects of racism and oppression again. This time it was native Palestinians who were suffering and are suffering under a brutal occupation and second-class citizenship in the country they were born in. As the Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu stated, the situation in Israel/Palestine it was worse than the apartheid in South Africa.

Yet my commitment to the state of Israel has never flagged. Now I have a double solidarity to that state but also as a Christian to the suffering of the Palestinian people… and let me state for the record, there are countries much more oppressive  than Israel but justice there  will greatly relieve Muslim grievances around the world.

I am a Marxist—of the Groucho Marx kind. When asked about evidence versus opinion, Groucho wittily replied, “Who do you believe, me or your eyes.” The brilliant israeli journalist Amira Hass whose mother survived Bergen-Belsen asked her countrymen the same question: How  can you not see what is going on.

To all who serve on this Council I say with respect: If you have not seen up close life in Gaza and the West Bank, you really have nothing to say. Tribal loyalties are not enough. What is enough are the universal values we learned from the Shoah. We must as Amira Hass’s mother told her, speak out against oppression and discrimination whenever we see it. This is what the Shoah taught us. This is what Torah teaches.This is what Gospel insists on.

The use of Israel/apartheid is a red herring. A sign in a huge parade is hardly worth discussing. At this time this city council has much bigger fish to fry. Do not be pressured by those who have not seen nor tasted the bitter fruit of marginalization. Who do you believe indeed.

Israel is a country. Countries may be criticized. Those who love her like I do will speak truth to her.Those who tolerate the unjust status quo there and say nothing are not friends. They are enablers of too much suffering.

I close with words of the former speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg:
We will vow again and again that “Never again” includes everything; it will not happen again to anyone, anywhere anytime..after the Shoah genetic Judaism must end. First and foremost we will stand together  with the civilized nations at the forefront of the worldwide struggle against hatred wherever it is..

 

The fight against high-stakes testing

 

What? No standardized tests in high schools? Only in Seattle’s Garfield High School where Quincy Jones and Jimmi Hendrix got their starts.

In January some brave teachers began a boycott of standardized testing, the simplistic and time-consuming attempt to evaluate students. Long the darling of right-wing ideologues who use the test results to club teachers, break unions and shame both teachers and students, the tests have long been a huge neuralgic issue in the teaching community. Many have seen it as an attempt to privatize education  and open up the billion dollar market to test providers and text book writers. The major criticism of course was that wholesale use of testing was far too simplistic as well as leaching precious time from the humanities, always the first to be scuttled. Washington state a leader in these high stake tests spends $100 million a year on these tests.The teachers argued for tutoring programs instead.

On Monday the Seattle school district backed down and invited teachers to find alternative ways to gauge student performance

Daniel  Horan a Franciscan friar of Holy Name Province of New York recently wrote an article in America magazine (May 13) detailing the depression teachers  almost universally feel about using such short-sighted metrics for evaluating students. He wrote about a teacher friend “a paragon of what a committed, intelligent, creative and motivated young teacher should be”. This marvelous woman has seen her vision “built on the best resources and pedagogical foundations available” sacrificed to evaluations imposed by external education department  and paid consultants. As a result she felt that her” professional and spiritual vocation has been sold from beneath her feet. “ This is not an unusual experience of those professionals closest to their students.Bear in mind teachers do not dispute the need for  periodic testing but these massive, tension-packed tests should simply be one part of a more comprehensive program.

The best person to read on this is a former true believer in high stakes testing Diane Ravitch. Her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (Basic Books, 2010) is a devastating critique of this assault.

She writes, “Testing should be used for help—to diagnose learning problems—not as a basis for rewards and punishments.”

Creative teachers under great pressure from superintendents are forced to “teach to the test” but this does little to enhance critical thinking, imagination, creativity, curiosity, compassion or moral courage.This huge industry, corporate driven has little interest in the induplicable ikons of God, our children. They have become numbers sacrificed on the altar of fuzzy thinking and the greed of the free market privatizers. Schools are the last bastion of sacred protection for vulnerable children.

It is more than ironic that such obsessive  and narrow testing are virtually absent from the practices of high-performing nations. They seem to know better. They are less receptive to the incessant and deleterious demands of “the free market” system which has little or no respect for the weak, the marginal or the average.

The push back has begun in Seattle.Time will tell whether the system which openly proclaims the dignity and uniqueness of all of God’s children will wake from their slumber and begin to advocate for children. So far the leadership has been lacking, the imagination sclerotic and the understanding of the Catholic imagination has been anemic and inadequate.

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.

 

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.

BLOWBACK,US and Canada

I think we’re living in a world where we are not going to be immune to the payback for some of the things that we’ve done. And unless—unless we, as a society, completely re-imagine what an actual national security policy would look like, one that recognizes the dignity of other people around the world or the rights of people to practice their religion or determine their form of government, unless we’re willing to re-imagine how we approach the world, we’re doomed to have a repeat of a 9/11-type attack or something that’s smaller-scale but constant.

Jeremy Scahill

One recoils in horror at the death of innocents as we saw in the Boston bombing..We shake our head in disgust at the callousness of people who would execute such a heinous crime.

And then we look at the numbskulls who started chanting USA! USA!  when the pathetic teen bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev was taken away wounded in the Boston suburb. There is a link between these two.

The following report from Boston:

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has reportedly cited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a motive behind last week’s attack. According to The Washington Post, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told interrogators from his hospital bed that the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the bombings that killed three people and wounded over 170 more. Investigators say it appears the brothers were “self-radicalized” through the Internet and U.S. actions in Muslim countries. No evidence has emerged linking their acts to foreign militants.

American lawyer and writer for  the Guardian, Glen Greenwald makes the connection:

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world – violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children:

it’s crucial to understand this causation because it’s often asked “what can we do to stop Terrorism?” The answer is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the desire for vengeance and return violence. 

The brilliant journalist Jeremy Scahill quoted above , the unmasker of the notorious mercenary outfit Blackwater, was a guest on Democracy Now :

We’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries. President Obama continues to use them in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the aiding of dictatorships and other  right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to what Reagan and company were doing in Central America.

 

And under both Bush and Obama, the world has been declared the battlefield. You know, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that was passed after 9/11 is technically the law that President Obama and his administration point to when they say they have a right to drone strike in Yemen, because these people are connected to the 9/11 attacks

 

I think that we have rolled back the clock, in some ways, to an era where you have multiple covert paramilitary forces that are operating in secret away from—largely away from journalists or congressional oversight, and they’re engaged in actions that are going to cause blowback. This is going to boomerang back around to us. You can’t launch these so-called signature strikes, killing people in pre-crime, you know, in countries around the world, and think that we’re not going to create a whole new generation of enemies that have an actual grievance against us—not that want to kill us for our McDonald’s or our freedom, but have an actual score to settle.

Then there was Stephen Harper,the gung ho militarist Prime Minister of Canada who was all for the disastrous US invasion of Iraq .His response to Justin Trudeau’s “root causes” observation was totally inadequate, cheap and utterly lacking in serious analysis.

“When you see this type of violent act, you do not sit around trying to rationalize  it or make excuses for it  or figure out  its root causes, you  condemn it categorically and, to the extent you can deal with the perpetrators, you deal with them as harshly as possible.”

Harper does not get it and now we have “blow back” in Canada because of our wrongheaded support of Us militarism abroad. We used to be an honest broker, now we are American lapdogs

The idol of the Market and Thatcher

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence

So wrote Simon and Garfunkel in 1966. It’s an old story. The prophet sees clearly much like Amos did (and he was only a “herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees” 7:14).No advanced degrees necessary to out “the neon gods.”

“Prophecy” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us “is the voice God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor to the profaned riches of the world.”

One does not have to be an “expert” to speak truth to power. In fact as Thomas Berry says look at the PHds justifying global warming.How about the doctorates around the table of the  Wanssee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 which produced the Final Solution in Nazi Germany.

Which brings us to Glenda Jackson, the Labour MP who told the truth about Margaret Thatcher in the British House of Commons. The former Academy Award winner stood up among the sycophants and reminded them of “the heinous social, economic and spiritual damage” Thatcher had wreaked upon the UK needlessly— blunt and cruel policies eschewed  Germany and other Northern  nations. She destroyed any semblance of social cohesion.

The Guardian editorial stated this succinctly:

She disdained the public realm and presided over the growth of the cult of marketplace success as the foundation of a good society – a low-tax, home-owning, privatised, high-carbon, possessive, individualist, winner-takes-all financial model whose failure haunts the choices still facing this country today

Dame Glenda Jackson reminded her country of all this.

“I was meticulous in not being personally rude. I didn’t know the woman: I did know the policies. I spoke up because history has been rewritten over the past week. I lived through the Thatcher period. I know what it was like. I know what it was like for my constituents. The reality bore no resemblance to what’s being presented.”

A class act unmasking marketplace idolatry, delivered by a non-expert who trusted her eyes.