Twelfth Bough

i run my own damn think tank

Archive for category Injustice

This Bailout is Bullshit!

Sep 24

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption & Crime, Economy, Injustice | No Comments

OK, look. I’m no economist. This is the situation as best I can tell. We can pick Door #1: No bailout, severe recession; or Door #2: Bailout, greedy bankers happy, hyperinflationary depression follows, martial law, new currency (Amero) forced on Americans, NWO victory.

If you are not outraged yet, you need to pay closer attention. These Wall Street people have been screwing us every way to Sunday. These high rollers, these are the people ordering the 100 foot yachts and having to get on a waiting list because the demand is so high and there aren’t enough crewmen! to service their amazing lifestyles, these are the people you are being asked — nay THREATENED by Hank Paulson and other White House goons — to bail out. Or else our economy will go in to a severe recession and credit will be tightened.

Is that right? A severe recession? In the unforgettable words of GWB, bring it on.

We can survive a severe recession people. It’s the ‘Rescue Plan’ we need to avoid.

WAKE UP!!!

What’s in your holster, human?

Sep 18

Posted by Marlena in Injustice | No Comments

These people who have of late destroyed the world? What menace courses through their bodies where a soul belongs? Who are these people? What are these people?

I believe in aristocracy though, if that is the right word and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and all through the ages and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. - From a 1941 essay by EM Forster

Some people will screw you at the slightest provocation. Some people go way out of their way to screw you. But others just won’t do it, even if you earned it. They are the true aristocracy. Why? Because they are better, bigger, deeper, made of a finer substance. More human. More humane. Generous. Compassionate. Plucky. Brave.

If you’re lucky, you will at least desire to be like one of them. You will freely recognize and admit their goodness, you will admire their quality, imperfect though your own life may be to the measure. You will not denigrate them for trying. You will understand that without this striving to guide you, you’re just wallowing around in muck; and you will disgust yourself, turning to alcohol or the addiction of your choice to self-medicate and numb your own profound disgust with your own pathetic self. Your unfulfilled goodness will be exquisitely painful.

If you’re so unlucky, you don’t even give a crap about any of this. You don’t even have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. It’s not real to you. You have no problems of interior conflict or remorse. You are the people who skip through life, blithely unaware of the devastation, with that fake smile on your face and those dead eyes blinking at us. To those I say, just because it’s not real to you, that does not mean it’s not real. I’m done with you people, or whatever the hell you are. Go. Away. From. Here.

But if you do understand what I’m saying, you need to be strengthened, and to have courage. Not just for your own sake, but for us all.

What you see unfolding in the world today…well, by their fruits shall ye know them. This is the world that good people created and psychopaths destroyed. Because they have no creative spark. They can only destroy, so everything they think they ‘built’ has been ultimately the instrument of destruction. It was never real. The fiat currency, adored by the greedy, was not real money; and now we all know. We have a giant, monumental crashing destruction taking place. Good. Let it fall down. Let it all come down and be pulverized into dust and ashes. It does not deserve to exist and suck the lifeblood out of good people, as it has done for generations. We can make something much, much better.

Good people can recognize each other, just like the psychopaths among us, ‘passing’ as human. Sometimes it takes a while, because many good people have been burnt so many times that they hold back a little out of caution. Good people know all too well the treachery of the evil, because we good people make such great victims. We know that. We learn that. But still, over time we find each other.

So here’s my shout out to the good people of the world, and there are a lot of you, though perhaps not so many as one would hope. Too many people have been dulled and compromised. They don’t dare to be good. Maybe they had a little good inside, once upon a time, and someone beat it out of them. Please have courage. Please don’t succumb. Please find the shred of goodness you once held in your heart, perhaps many years ago, and dare to expose it.

Goodness is a secret weapon. When you take it out of it’s holster, which is in your heart, it feels like you might die. But you probably won’t. (And even if you did, well shit we’re all going to die someday. Wouldn’t it be better to die for goodness’ sake?) This powerful weapon can have amazing repellent properties against evil. Amazing.

You have to have a little courage, people. I know its scary. I am scared, too. But you can’t cave into that. This is a numbers game, allright? We outnumber them. Good people outnumber evil people by magnitudes. And look at the evil. They have screwed up their own numbers game, the one they own, the very financial system. And you got burnt, too, no doubt. But so have we all. So many many times. And we have had the luxury of not being Iraqis, or Afghans, or Palestinians, or Lebanese, or Africans, or any multitude of people literally discarded and destroyed throughout the world by the rapacious evil.

It does not have to be this way. I just cannot accept that it has to be this way, and I hope you cannot accept it either. Our governments have created God-knows-what technology with their black-ops budgets, money siphoned off through their evil schemes of drug running and gun running. Who can count all the innocent lives destroyed to ‘buy’ this technology, which has been kept hidden from the human race? And what do they give us instead? They wage war on the world without our consent. They make us debt slaves. They give us a broken down country, infrastructure falling apart, pollution and poison in the sky, in the water, and in the food. I know someone who died of Mad Cow disease this week, here in the US. We have a poisoned food supply. I have young friends and family members fighting off mysterious, virulent autoimmune diseases which have robbed them of dignity and robust health. Something has gone desperately wrong. But we can’t give up. Don’t give up until they put you in the ground.

Just as the psychopaths can recognize each other from childhood, every good person must cultivate the ability to recognize both other good people and the evil among us. You must also learn to discern those who have been horribly compromised but are essentially good. This is not easy, but it can be done. People with no conscience will leave their telltale signs. They will make strange remarks. You can figure it out if you know what to look for. Read up on it.

Come on people. You have what it takes. Just use it. Stand up for yourselves. Stand up for each other. Be a human being while we still have time. Dare to wield your inherent goodness in the face of cruelty and chaos.

You can’t accomplish anything with an unchipped heart

Aug 22

Posted by Marlena in Injustice, Psychology, Religion | No Comments

You may have noticed that the subtitle of this blog is Tracing the Arc of Justice. I have noticed that over and over again, in matters small and large, that people overlook injustice. They shrug their shoulders as if to say that injustice is to be expected. Therefore, since there’s nothing that can be done about it, one shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about those poor people over there.

Needless to say, this really bothers me a lot. The attitude I typically get from people is that I am a little wacky for caring about things like the Palestinians. They just don’t see the point. I am lacking ‘common sense,’ or something, which is a pretty funny accusation since the driving force of my philosophy is fighting for the common good. Not the good for this powerful group or that powerful group, but the good for everyone. The most frequent retort I get about people who are ‘behind’ is that it’s probably their own fault. Maybe, but maybe not. It’s just an assumption useful to people who want to justify closing a door behind them. Those who have made it ahead give themselves credit for their own hard work and seem to assume that anyone who didn’t achieve XYZ must be a slacker. I find this grimly amusing coming from boomers, the very generation that turned the world to shit for billions. Must we be reminded that wages have been flat for decades, the dollar performs an incredible shrinking act before our very eyes, and most families need two or three jobs just to stay even? I often wonder if some of those who give themselves such big pats on the back for their own success could make it under today’s rules as easily as they did back in the day. Can an honest person really get ahead today just by hard work and a little luck? Not very likely, and that’s the difference between then and now. I wrote about this a little here.

But enough of that. It will shake out eventually, because I do believe that Dr. Martin Luther King was correct when he said, “The arc of the universe bends slowly but it always bends toward justice.” Those who have shown little concern for those behind them, myopically focusing on everyone ahead, racing, striving and grasping their way forward regardless of the consequences downstream, will be turned around eventually to see what’s left in their wake. Or rather who is left clinging to the detritus. This applies to us individually and as a nation.

For me this need to turn around and look behind us stems from my faith. Being duly horrified at what I see, I can’t help but point it out to anyone who might listen. Oh, my God. It’s urgent that we turn around. It’s urgent for our own lives as much as for those who we are killing, literally, by this country’s trajectory. And if one cannot care enough to turn around, perhaps one can at least see how our leaders leave us in their wake, and we ourselves cling to detritus whether we recognize this or not. The detritus of a shredded Constitution, a wrecked economy, a poisoned environment, a broken social contract.

My friend Jim Martin works for International Justice Mission. We grew up in the same town and somehow share this obsession with justice, though Jim puts me to shame with his action to secure justice for people around the world. He just had an article published which details his own trajectory moving from focusing on mercy to justice, and most importantly, he details how people can get involved doing this locally.

Maria has been going to a small Peruvian evangelical church for most of her 15 years. Until a couple of years ago, she would have seemed just another preteen ambling her way toward adulthood. But soon after puberty the first irrefutable symptom of her condition revealed itself. Her all-too-familiar swollen belly was not caused by lack of food, but by the absence of an advocate. Maria lives in a community where sexual abuse of children is not just common but rampant. Unable to protect herself, she became the victim of choice of a local cab driver, a “friend” of her family, and her repeated abuse resulted in the worst kind of unwanted pregnancy. The challenges of raising an infant with very few resources and even less experience have become the worn fabric of her daily life. Maria has borne, both literally and figuratively, the consequences of the biblical sin of oppression, the abuse of power.

Obviously, it gets depressing to pay attention to all the injustice in the world. It requires courage to look. It’s humbling to realize how much work needs to be done. More than one lovely person has flat out told me they don’t want to know certain things. No offense, I’m to understand. Just change the subject. This unwillingness to care, to look, to feel remorse, and to change, is the main reason why injustice prevails across the globe.

It seems easier not to know, but that is an illusion. You are already oppressed, though not as obviously as a Palestinian or a poor girl in a Peruvian village. In a matter of time, every American will come to understand the bitter truth of our national trajectory, a great nation which soared and then plummeted along the sure arc of justice. You can turn around now and let your mind soak it all in, absorb the blow, regain your equilibrium, and try to function a better way. Or, you can turn around when you’re flung off the back of the boat, knocked unconscious, drowning in grief and despair, and looking for someone to care about your problems when they have their hands full of their own.

You Are A. Peasant, Just Like Me

Aug 4

Posted by Marlena in Economy, Injustice | 2 Comments

Regardless of whether the war with Iran will come, and I believe it will, the economy continues to crash down. It’s like a huge explosion taking place far away. We see a flash of light and see some smoke rising on the horizon, but the terrible shock wave rumbles toward us along the ground, obscured by all the other people, places and things between us and the financial implosion point. It’s just a matter of time, as thunder follows the lightning, before we are each tossed like rag dolls by the powerful shock wave. Or think of the tsunami. Perhaps that is a better analogy. The massive earthquake happened deep underwater, and above it the surface probably rippled and buzzed. The deep water masked the enormity of the earthquake. If you were in a cruise ship sitting right on top of the event, you could sip your martini in peace. But as the wave moved into shallower water it rose up to reveal it’s magnitude. Just so, where the financial waters are more shallow, meaning where the working people live, the calamitous wave of the deep financial collapse will rise up and swamp us without warning. Where does one go for protection? Inland. Far inland, away from the delights of the water. Don’t frolic on the financial shores. If you can’t afford to be on a cruise ship far out to sea, then your next safest place is deep inland: out of debt and living within your means. This is not the time to treat yourself.

My blogger ID is A. Peasant for a reason. What is a peasant? Any of a class of small landowners or laborers tilling the soil. A peasant is not a serf, a slave. I embrace the very idea of peasantry because I recognize that it realistically describes me, my family, and just about everyone I know personally. If you work for a living, you, too, are a peasant in this economy. And the sooner you accept that fact, the better off you will be. For in the peasantry there is power.

As American corporatists continue to work their little butts off in order to create their ultimate wet-dream of “cheap labor” here in the US as well as abroad, might they also be creating some kind of Frankenstein’s monster peasant class that will eventually come back and bite them in said little butts — when the villagers they are trying so hard to create out of America’s former middle class start coming after them with torches and pitchforks?

American corporatists need to be careful what they wish for.

Perhaps they too would benefit from driving around town (past all those home-foreclosure signs and boarded-up banks) while listening to John Reed’s “Insurgent Mexico” book-on-tape.

A revolution in America — either by peasants or not — might be happening here sooner rather than later if the economy continues to fail at the startling rate that it is now bob-sledding straight down. According to Kitco columnist Darryl Robert Schoon, “Since 1913 when the Federal Reserve first issued its debt based paper money in the US, the paper US dollar has lost 95 % of its value, a loss of 95 % over 95 years. Perhaps in five more years, 100 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar will have lost 100 % of its value—which means in five years the US paper dollar will be worth nothing.”

I know many middle class people are beginning to get tired of the pinch. It’s been pinching for some time now, and it’s getting old. They can’t go places and do things freely anymore. They have to watch every penny. The constant spinning and obfuscation of the real economic situation helps keep people from accepting the reality of their peasanthood and pining away after the American dream. As long as people pine away for upward mobility that will never happen under the current system, they will be miserable and powerless, turning on each other and watching their relationships fall apart under duress.

Accept reality. You are A. Peasant, just like me. Does that make you angry? Well…good. Be angry. You have the right to be angry. Just understand who to be angry with. And remember, there’s a lot of us.

Let the buyer (of war) beware

Jul 18

Posted by Marlena in Injustice, Religion, Stupidity | No Comments

Did you know that US troops are being electrocuted regularly and shower and drink totally contaminated water in Iraq?

Not to mention, of course, the Depleted Uranium.

That is not to mention, of course, the untold destruction and suffering of the Iraqi, Afghanistani, and Palestinian people.

Only God knows all the sorrows, the suffering and tears of every human being, each one created in his image, who have paid the price of our military adventures and our support of Israel. Most of us cannot even begin to imagine it, and worse, we don’t want to be able to imagine it. But our cowardice does not really make the suffering disappear. God still knows about each life on earth, and how it lives, and how it dies, and who is responsible for its joys and miseries.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:31

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Proverbs 9:10

The New Boss

Jul 7

Posted by Marlena in Citizenship, Corruption & Crime, Injustice, Religion | No Comments

There’s an excellent piece here about the way leaders make decisions, decisions which equate their own personal power and influence with the lives and well-being of other people. These decisions often result in many deaths, and they are then promptly covered up leaving the impression that the whole thing was a great shock to everyone concerned.

As Condi Rice once lamely said, lying through her teeth, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted…..”

To make a long story short, what’s needed is for ordinary people to have enough moral courage to blow the whistle on these situations before they get to the decision stage.

One lesson of this book is that you will not reduce those risks adequately by action within the firm or government agency. The organization has to be monitored by other organizations that are not under the same management, that don’t respond to the same boss. You can set up processes within the organization that make truth-telling, realistic assessments, and warnings of danger somewhat more likely. But that isn’t close to being an adequate solution. Subordinates who act like bystanders (to keep their jobs) are indeed part of the problem, as Gerstein argues, but the organization’s leaders themselves are the major part.

Who are these organizations under different management? Who is the boss with the higher authority?

The only one I’m aware of is God himself. When people respond to the higher authority of an altruistic, just and merciful God, they will certainly have the moral courage to do the right thing at great personal cost.

It has happened, it does happen, it needs to happen, and I believe it will happen. The big wheels are turning and gaining momentum. Lies have short legs. The day is coming when they cannot outrun justice any longer, and the world will rejoice.

The moral depravity of the Iraq war

Jun 30

Posted by Marlena in 9-11, Bush/Cheney, Citizenship, Injustice, Iran, Iraq, Military, Psychology, Stupidity | No Comments

Watch this video. About seven or eight minutes in you can see bound detainees being forced off the top of a three story building. It appears that American soldiers are doing this, though you can’t see them clearly from the video. People in military uniforms come and whisk away the detainees after they fall.

It would be nice to think that American soldiers are all wonderful, brave people who would never stoop to such depravity, but that is what we call a “fantasy.” Given the many other sickening things that have broken through the media firewall (soldiers tossing puppies over cliffs, tormenting Iraqi children, testimonies of war crimes at Winter Soldier hearings, Haditha, drop weapons, etc.), it would be totally irresponsible and cowardly for any American to dismiss these actions as impossible. There it is on video. Somebody is doing it. Does that mean that everyone in the military is sick? Of course not. But the military, as an institution, has a civilian leadership; and those people are sick. The fish rots from the head.

Besides that, the fact remains that American soldiers are systematically trained to dehumanize ‘the enemy’ in order to be able to kill them. That is the purpose of having a military, after all. So let us not get all righteous and defensive when something like this comes out. It is time for Americans to get real and face the meat-grinding, dehumanizing machinery of the US military and see what it actually it does to people — our people and other people.

We have a military to kill people so we don’t have to do it ourselves. We subcontract the dirty job to others so we don’t have to carry the psychological burden. It’s just like buying steak all shrink-wrapped — we are preserved from the trauma of killing the cow and carving up its flesh. But somebody does those things, and it’s the same with the military. They are not all over there building schools and hugging babies, you know. Well over a million people have been killed in Iraq. Who is responsible for that? Why, we are. Did our people kill every single one? No, but we started the war, so let’s not get persnickety. The possibility of innocent people dying never did bother us that much.

What happens when you take the military and put it under a mentally deranged civilian leadership? You get utter moral depravity. Institutionalized psychopathy, with weapons. If you don’t like this, then stop glorifying the military and war. But don’t deny it. Don’t deny that we are all responsible for tossing bound detainees off the tops of buildings, murdering for fun, destroying an entire country that had nothing to do with 9/11, causing the untold suffering of millions and millions of people and the gruesome destruction of our own fellow citizens. We own it all because we don’t pay attention, and we are lazy, and we let ourselves be led around like a bunch of stupid idiots. We are so incredibly stupid that we are on the verge of letting this all happen again, to Iran.

I fear we are truly lost and the moral compass has been smashed. An attack on Iran would be as unjust if not more so than what we did to Iraq. It will cause unforgivable destruction, including our own this time. For certain, and here in the ‘homeland.’ It is all lies, just like the last time.

Do you have the nagging doubts? You must listen to them. That is what’s left of your conscience. If you can see the faint thread of truth, you must follow it. Pick up the thread and follow it quickly, as quickly as you can until you find the whole thing. Go now. Go.

Wear Orange

Jun 17

Posted by Marlena in Citizenship, Corruption & Crime, Injustice, Politics | No Comments

There are some really great reads out on the interwebs today. You can browse my top ten picks here, but this one in particular deserves wide circulation.

You know all those nagging cognitive dissonances we live with every single day, like how the system seems to be totally broken and yet we feel compelled to participate so as not to give up ‘hope’? Isn’t that annoying? Don’t you want to have some answers that will let you put down at least one heavy bag so you don’t have to carry around both bags all day, every day, year after year?

If elections really were a solution, then why hasn’t the Democratic majority in Congress, ended the war, the torture, and the massive, warrantless surveillance over all of us and impeached the sorry excuses for human beings in the White House? Pelosi and Reid claim that they haven’t had the votes to stop the war. Nancy and Harry: that’s what your leadership posts are for. You don’t need the votes. All you have to do is block the funding bills from coming out of committee. If you don’t like the telecommunications amnesty bill or the spy-on-all-Americans bills, then all you have to do is keep the bills from coming up for a vote. You can kill these bills in the same way you’ve been killing the impeachment resolutions against Cheney and Bush. But then, Nancy and Harry already know this.

Isn’t that the truth? They have the power to block impeachment, yet they claim they can’t do anything about all these other horrible bills. In layman’s terms, that is what we call having one’s cake and eating it, too.

The Bush regime has been spearheading an extraordinary rupture from the norm, de jure and de facto, much of it in the shadows, but increasingly in the open, and the majority of people of this country are deeply disturbed by it.This is in spite of the fact that only a fraction of the people are aware of the magnitude of this rupture because the mass media and the Democratic Party have been actively minimizing and/or concealing this.

In addition, all too many Americans are “opting out” of taking responsibility for the barbaric acts being committed in our names because they themselves are anesthetized by their material comforts.

The rupture’s dimensions, nonetheless, are so far-reaching that it is impossible for this country’s leadership class to conceal entirely the jagged rips and tears going on.

People know. They know that horrible things are happening, though they don’t have the words to put around them. And they don’t have time to figure it out and sort through all the false leads and conspiracy theories and tsunami of news since they have to work two or three jobs per family to keep the mortgage paid, etc. So they put compartmentalize all this anxiety about politics, and they put it into the election, which conveniently takes just one day of our time in November. There (brushing hands together). We’re all set. Just mark that voting day on the calendar.

It’s deeply immoral for the Democratic Party and the mass media to countenance torture and “pre-emptive” wars based on fraudulent premises. Obama and Pelosi and McCain are fully aware of this. They want us to follow their lead and get us to act as if this isn’t the present reality – that we should ignore their collusion in crimes against humanity and support them as fellow colluders.

That is what these elections are really about: herding people into supporting crimes against humanity and declaring that it’s the people’s will.

Is that what you want? Is that the kind of person you are? Is this the legacy we want for our children and future generations - that we stood by and let tyrants and monsters ravage the planet?

Even if you now think that Obama should be “given some slack” for what he’s saying, do you think it is proper to put your faith in one person and faith in the same party that has betrayed us all? Even if you plan to vote for him, do you think that simply voting discharges your responsibility to protest, everyday from now until it is no longer necessary, the moral outrages being committed by our government?

…Every single person who reads this and who steps forward does so in the name of millions of others and creates the conditions for many, many others to step forward.

Don’t we as individuals have a personal responsibility to take a stand against grave injustice and not pass that responsibility on to others to take care of it for us? The people who many people think are supposed to take care of things are obviously not doing it.

So what are you waiting for? Yes, you.

Too much

Jun 9

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Injustice, Israel, Lebanon, Media | No Comments

Here are lots of pictures showing the reality of life in the Middle East, in Lebanon and in Gaza.

This carnage is wrought by Israel; and basically, we pay for it.

There are powerful people in America who never, ever, ever want you to see these things because then you might not be willing to pay for it anymore.

But just because you don’t see it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. And it doesn’t mean we’re all not paying. Everybody is paying for this. Much too much. Especially the people in the pictures.

US pulls out of UN rights body

Jun 9

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Corruption & Crime, Injustice, Israel | No Comments

Shorter: “We can’t control this body, so fu@% that sh^&.”

In a State Department briefing on Friday, it was announced that the United States will no longer be regularly attending meetings held by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council unless specifically compelled to, citing the Council’s stance on relations between Israel and Palestine.

Read full story.