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"Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me

I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door."

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

FDR, 2nd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1937

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Middle East friendship chart

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Corporations enriching shareholders

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Facts not fiction on universal gun background checks

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"Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere"

Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The GOP - Not One of US.

Wall Street, our new criminal class...       

   Business in the USA is sitting on $2 trillion dollars refusing to invest their own funds in expanding and hiring workers.  

   When one adds to this the reserves that banks, equity firms and hedge funds have - the picture is clear - "capitalism in the USA is on strike." 

   The engine of our economy - the spirit of entrepreneurship is not in evidence today.  So much for business being dynamic and risk taking. 

   They hire K- Street lobbyists and their ilk at the state level because they are averse to risk taking - pleading for tax breaks, tax credits and endless loopholes. 

   The "business of business" in America today is not about job creation, it's about wealth hoarding and redistribution from the middle class to the top 1%. 

   So for those who claim government doesn't create jobs, my response is that business doesn't either until given "corporate welfare" by government.  The fact is that the private and public sector are highly integrated, something the anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party types don't understand. 

   Job creation requires public/private partnerships but the benefits of such collaboration should go to the 99% not just the 1%.  

 

RAD'S

WEBSITE PICKS: 


 

  • A Middle East View      

Rami G. Khouri

  • RealClearPolitics:

Realclearpolitics

  • Jim Hightower:   

Jimhightower.com

  • Robert Reich:

Robert Reich

  • Thomas Friedman: 

Friedman Column

  • Nicholas Kristof: 

Kristof Column

Oregon's Motto: 

She flies with her own wings! 


Hard Times in Oregon: 

Hardtimes

The Oregon story - the rich get richer, the poor and middle class lose ground.  Check this front page Oregonian article out. 

Oregon wage gap widens

Homelessness in Oregon - a call to action

Chuck Currie The crisis of homelessness


  

      Oregon's coming 34th out of 41 states in the Obama "Race to the Top" illustrates the failure of leadership from Governor Kitzhaber and his predecessors as they have built an educational bridge to nowhere called high stakes testing.

   Instead of being in a race to the top we seem to be dumpster diving to the bottom despite doing education reform since 1991.  Insanity is termed doing the same thing over and over again.  When can we put a fork in this stupidity? 

   To confuse matters more the Oregonian's editorial board has pontificated that this was a lost opportunity to get federal funding for innovation.  How firing principals and teachers equals innovation is a mystery to me.   

   The way to reform schools is to reduce class sizes, to encourage teacher collaboration and to support their continued education.  High stakes testing and performance based assessment of teachers are NOT the answer!    

   If you want students to succeed you first have to resolve the issues they confront before they come to school.  Children who face poverty, hunger, homelessness, health care issues and family instability require wrap around services for them and their families, 24/7.   

   Every child needs a safe home of their own and parents who know how to be good parents.   

There is only one way to address this impending crisis.  Schools must have a stable source of funding. Until that happens - we will limp from crisis to crisis.   

 

 

    

    Why does the richest nation in the world have the moral blight of homeless people?

Invisible People

http://www.npr.org


 Homelessness

    Connecting the dots between homelessness & hunger in Oregon and Washington County: 

Homelessness:  

•    The faces of the homeless are families with children, single men and women, vets, and many who are impaired. It is estimated that in Washington County up to 56% of homelessness occurs to families.

Hunger:

•    Hunger is highest among single mother households (10%) and poor families (15%) as well as renters, unemployed workers and minority households. 

     In Washington County, Oregon's "economic engine," the divide between the affluent and the working poor continues.  We have a 19,000 unit gap in affordable low income rental housing.  County political and business leaders are indifferent to this crisis...   

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If you want to e-mail me "comments" use my Yahoo back up e-mail address russdondero@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAD Lines

See my FACEBOOK @ Russ

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Trump & The Mob

http-//www.politico.com#13C5A6C


Trump's role models are Vladmir Putin and Benito Mussolini.  He has contempt for our checks and balances system.  He wants to "rule" not govern like a strong man, a despot.  He will shredd the Constitution anytime he feels the urge to do so and like all despots he only listens to his inner circle.  And he is paranoid and narcissistic. 

     

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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Housing Needs in Oregon 

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"There are men who believe that democracy... is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate [and that] tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future..." 

FDR, 3rd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1940

  • "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild


  • Miguel de Cervantes, from The Duke - "I accuse you of being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man."  Cervantes' response - "Guilty as charged, I have never had the courage to believe in nothing."   from Man of La Mancha  


Professor Kingfield, from the Paper Chase

   "I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you." 

- George Bernard Shaw

 

BLOGS:

From the Left Wing:

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Democracy Now
democracynow.org

The Daily Kos

dailykos.com

Blue Oregon

blueoregon.com

 

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." 

- Emilie Buchwald 

 


    "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." 

- Justice John Paul Stevens, Bush v. Gore, 2001

    The state of our union - check out the map, it's a reality check for those who can't figure out why people are so ticked off... 

americanobserver

 



"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war"

- John Adams

"Loyalty to country always.  Loyalty to government when it deserves it."  

- Mark Twain  

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  

- George Santayana 

"The love of one's country is a natural thing.  But why should love stop at the border?" 

- Pablo Casals

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

- William Butler Yeats  

 

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' 

But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"  

- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" (1921) 

"...the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government..."  

- James Madison, Federalist Papers #11 

"Why … should we have government? Why not each individual take to himself the whole fruit of his labor, without having any of it taxed away?”   

The legitimate object of government, is to do for the people whatever they need to have done, but which they can not do, at all, or can not do, so well, for themselves – in their separate and individual capacities … There are many such things … roads, bridges and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools … the criminal and civil [justice] departments."    

- Abraham Lincoln 

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society  

- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole..." 

- Edmund Burke  

“It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions.”  

- Jonathan Swift 

A RAD rhetorical question - Were Madison & Marx "Marxists"?  

 

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments."   

- James Madison

 

FYI:  

Squareapace has closed the "comments" section on my blog as a way around this contact me via my Yahoo e-mail address posted on the left sidebar...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN | Main | DUBYA - CLUELESS IN VIETNAM »
Tuesday
Nov282006

THE EVIL SEED

    Christian Parenti, author of "The Freedom, Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq," contributor to The Nation magazine and visiting professor at CUNY Graduate School spoke last night (November 27) at Pacific University.  
    RAD hosted Parenti's father, Michael Parenti many years ago during a week of the Tom McCall Forum - so it was intriguing to hear the son of the father.  As they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!  
    The CUNY Graduate School is also a familiar place since in the early '70s RAD regularly attended annual spring conferences where intellectual heavyweights in political philosophy met.  My most vivid memories were hearing Robert J. Lifton, Bernard Crick and C.B. MacPherson.
    Christian Parenti as a working journalist has been in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  So his knowledge of the scene of America's latest neo-colonial war comes first hand.  And nothing he said last night gives anyone hope that there is a light at the end of the Iraq/Afghanistan tunnel.  
    Parenti argues that the long-term strategic objective in Iraq is tied to a larger hegemonic role of the US as the wannabe arbiter of the oil riches of the Middle East.  Keep in mind, Iraq alone has 10% of world's untapped oil reserves.  Nothing new there.  
    But more intriguing, Parenti connects the Bush policy of pursuing hegemony over oil as a kind of preemptive strike at China - a move to prevent that emerging giant from becoming the next economic and military superpower challenge to US hegemony in the world.   
    As Parenti says in The Freedom (p. 53) - "Of course the war is about much more than contracts or even access to oil.  Iraq is part of an ongoing project of ever-expanding US power…"  Parenti argues that the Bush strategy is part of a great-power competition.  
    "…The two possible candidates for this [competition] are an independent European Union or down the line, China…"  So the policy enunciated by Richard Perle et al and carried out by Donald Rumsfeld et al is part and parcel of a policy "…tied to a larger strategy of global control…" (p. 54)
    The doctrine of American hegemony has been best articulated by Richard Haas, currently President of the Council on Foreign Relations but until June 2003, Haas served as director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, where he was a principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell.  
    Parenti argues - "In his superb book The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for Global Dominance, Peter Gowan points out that during the Cold War, the other two poles of world capitalism - Europe and Asia (with Japan as its economic engine) - were beholden to the US for protection against Soviet power and regional communist rebellion…" (p. 54)
    But with the collapse of the Soviet Union all of this changed.  "…How would the US maintain its power over its friends, particularly the developed economies that might become possible 'peer competitors?'"  Oil becomes central to maintaining US hegemony.  In this case American military control and influence from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Basin is the key.
    With US control of this oil rich region that serves the increasing petro demands of Europe, Japan and now India and China, less so than the US (only 11% of our oil comes from the region) - we can become the "…sole security arbiter upon which all advanced economies are dependent…" (p. 54)
    As "energy gendarme" the US can then put the squeeze on ally and foe alike.  We then can keep other core economies in the role of "junior partners" as the Global North extracts the resources of the Global South.  
    But as Parenti concludes - with a taste of sarcastic irony - "But in the end this grand strategy has turned out to be a pipe dream.  There will be no clean victory in Iraq." P. 55)  Nor for that matter in Afghanistan.  And with the election results of '06 - the screws have tightened.  
    But what is fascinating is that the old China card emerges as part of a very complex vision or plot.  The US has always had a problem with China.  In the 1920s we obsessed about the "Yellow Peril."  In the 1950s under the aegis of McCarthyism we engaged in the blame game over who "lost" China to the "commies."  And in Vietnam, we worried about the domino effect of losing another piece of Asia to godless Sino/Soviet communism.  
    In a globalized economy - why is hegemony necessary?  Why can't each nation with its human and natural resources use its particular "comparative" advantages to compete?  And as global economic and environmental protocols create a more even playing field - such advantages will even out over the long term.  
    What in the American psyche requires of us that we "dominate"?  The search for American hegemony seems to be the evil offspring of two doctrines - manifest destiny and American exceptionalism.  Both have been the undercurrents in US history from our founding.  
    However, they have bought us the veil of tears associated at home with the mistreatment of Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian Americans and now Latinos.  And throughout our history American foreign/military policy has been one of explicit or implicit conquest - first of a continent and then of an economic empire extending from the developing world to space.  
    In our primal urge of conquest and forgetting the lessons of Vietnam, we have now come full circle - sacrificing another generation of American soldiers on the altar of the illusion of global hegemony.  
    So, no matter how much George Bush says it, shouts it, proclaims it - at the end - our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about freedom, regime change or bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice - it's about creating an imperium premised on OIL.  
    Pax Britannica was built on the doctrine of British mercantilism.  The American offspring seems to have not fallen far from that evil British seed.  When Christopher Columbus and Lewis & Clark were exploring the "West" - the goal was to find that passage to the East.  What is this obsession in the Euro/Anglo mindset about China? 
    
 

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