Recent comments
ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World
Thom Hartmann has written a dozen books covering ADD / ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Join Thom for his new twice-weekly email newsletters on ADHD, whether it affects you or a member of your family.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Yes, it will!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Republican-plan-to-wre-by-Richard-Clark-100805-768.html
Yes, we are!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-We-Crazy-by-Timothy-V-Gatto-100807-947.html
The right kind of stimulus!!!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-WEALTHY-STIMULUS-NEEDED-by-Jim-Quinn-100806-851.html
Charity!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-American-Dream-for-its-by-Jay-Janson-100807-207.html
Jobs, not charity!
http://www.salon.com/news/economics/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/08/05/reich_rich_rest_of_us&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7_30_110
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Wall-Street-s-Collapse-3-by-Danny-Schechter-100803-795.html
For any distribution of wealth to change, the whole of our population will need something new to
dwell on. Because for as long as Coco Cola, Budweiser, Kraft, and Corporate Felon BP are getting us all to buy what they want us to...what motivation is there for them/anyone to change anything. Will they suddenly, for no reason, decide not to be sociopathic? To share their profits with us over their shareholders. It will need to be something that tickles ears, gives instant gratification, is easy and/or makes us feel good. Then maybe the lemming run will change.
What I know is that most people are overwhelmed with trying to be perfect, to fit the model that is handed down to us as our cultural norm and what we should be. Fitting in (whatever box we choose) is so tied into our personal self esteem and that in turn fuels what we choose to value. It's a matter of survival. Why else would a perfectly good looking woman destroy her body and risk death to appease the male of our species with faux beauty?
I have a friend who keeps an immaculate home, cooks several fabulous meals a day, does all the dishes, manages to keep up with all her many friends, supports her husband in his business in many, many ways, has a large family, and she is never far from knowing what I know about any current event. (And by the way, she is 80 plus years old. I don't know how she does it.) And I make a valiant effort to stay informed.
My house on the other hand is horribly behind in being managed. And I am single. I feel like I am doing something useful most of every day, but I let my house go to watch FSTV and read blogs by Thom Hartmann and ...walk my dogs, and scoop poop, change kitty litter, feed my canaries... oh, and run a very small, not yet going business. When I share what I know with my friends, relatives and customers, they will usually go so far (Glen Beck deep) to reciprocate on any topic.
Having taken the equity of my tiny house and invested it into a future of my making, I have a very small business. I couldn't work for Home Depot, Lowes, JC Penney anymore because there was nothing good anywhere there either. I was supposed to make people want things they didn't need and which were, for the most part, made in another country. I watched millions of dollars of perfectly good merchandise get crushed in compacters (liabilities if left in an open dumpster for someone to retrieve and make use of), one of my works of art included. ("Well, we paid you for it, didn't we?") I was told to go pour the toxic, leaking containers of pesticides, herbicides, etc. along the parkway. (I didn't do it, someone else did though, I complained) They only carried the beautiful plants so they could sell the chemicals.
Cashiers with new breast implants were getting $20 an hour while most of us struggled to get a 10 cent raise.
I was called a Design Homer when I was first hired for Home Depot. "We want you to sell the store. We will train you with the best of every department. You will never be required to down stock or throw freight. We want you to go out to customer's homes and sell the high-end products and add on items. We want you to dress nice and look like a designer. You will have regular hours and days off so clients will know when they can find you."
I was cutting carpet off the roll from a pile stacked 8 feet high by the third week. My fine clothes becoming saturated in sweat. (Those were the days when they didn't air condition.) "Well, there is no one else in that department. Be a team player." (Don't be a whistle blower).
I stayed 7 years so I could get my fully vested 401K money and run. Most of my associates didn't even take the match. "I can't afford to". I said, "You can't afford not to, it's free money" "I don't have time to learn about it...oh, well" they would say.
I managed to live corporate-employed-free for a couple of years while I tried to start my first decorating business. I couldn't compete with the big boxes. I sold my home which had nearly doubled in value (if I could have hung on for a few months more it would have probably been another 50% more in the housing bubble, and if the realtor hadn't been corrupt, I could have had a bidding war and gotten at least another $20K, but he had someone lined up and wanted both commissions and frankly, I didn't know any better).
So I headed off to be near my sister in AZ, not fully aware of the right to work conditions. After a year of trying not to work, I had to try Lowes for $9 an hour and 60 miles away until I finally got a decorating gig with JC Penney. $30K plus a year was a little better but it was still 50 miles one way to get there and another 100 miles running to clients homes. All they did was belittle efforts, compare us to each other (for motivation), add additional associates so they could get their share faster (leaving most of us with part-time employment like conditions because we were getting fewer leads) and take more and more incentives away and reduce benefits all the while putting more duties upon us. Time to leave again.
Now I am still trying to compete with mega corporations to sell items that are sustainable, useful, uplifting, will create industry among my fellow community members. But, most everyone spends their Sundays off communing at the local Wal-Mart. I can't convince them to "spend more and save the world". They say they can't afford to. I try to inform them that they are paying anyway to subsidize the employee benefits package (state sponsored medical), not to mention all the products that are subsidized (high fructose), and all the labor that is lost to off shore jobs manufacturing the biggest part of their stock. They seem to think that the $7-9 wages are "pretty good". "Well, Wal-Mart did bring in good paying jobs.”!!! What!!!
My little "Variety" shop is on a side street and faces the local Circle K. Streams of people file in and out of it all day. Each one leaving with a 6 or 12 pack of beer, cigarettes, coffee, slushy, potato chips, hot dog, candy, liquor, lottery tickets...there is nothing good in there. Styrofoam cups galore, bottled water...energy drinks, the local, much politicized newspaper, oh yes, and gasoline, gasoline, gasoline! Boom boxes blaring. All in a hurry to their next whatever. The local riff raff circulate a triangle between a "sitting" wall down from my shop, the visitor's center across the street and the Circle K. I know they are dealing drugs and drinking alcohol in their disguised containers. The cops drive buy and allow it to go on. Mind you, it does little to encourage business to my shop. The girl ahead of me at Circle K buys her soda fountain drink with her food stamp card. (I'm buying a pack of cracker cut cheddar cheese because any decent food establishment has gone out of business and I need something to offset the acid from the pot of organic coffee I brewed and drank) She is hanging around drunken most of the time. Sometimes her several children are following in her footsteps. Sometimes they are nowhere to be found.
Maybe sewing will make people feel good. It makes me feel good to sew, like it makes my friend feel good to cook and clean house. I'm teaching sewing classes thinking the local young girls who don't get it in school anymore might like it. And they do. In fact, they love it. It is like building a building. You follow instructions, develop skills, put something together and feel immense satisfaction at the accomplishment. And you even have something to sell. (Good luck) But I can't provide the materials because ....well, Wal-Mart.
What can change anything? Voting? Not fast enough. Getting Oprah to speak about it? Good luck. Well maybe Michael Moore. For sure Thom Hartmann. But I can't get anyone I know to watch him..."I don't have time", "He's a liberal"..."You know what Glen Beck said?"....
What am I going to do?! I just keep plugging along in my little shop for as long as I can and tell everyone I know, everything I can about Worlds Best Kitty Litter, Petcurian Pet Food, Yummy Earth Lollipops, Elaine's Toffee, Stampington's Green Craft Magazine, up-cycling, recycling, Loving Pets, Pet-N-Shape, Apple Cider Vinegar, herbal remedies, essential oils, hand-made, one-or-a-kind items and just hope that they will like to keep coming back and that maybe at some point, an influence will take hold and something will change.
I pin a flyer at the local Laundromat and everyone who comes in raves about how "cute your shop is" each one telling me his or her life story, and leaves with nothing. I have decided that we all crave a place to go where we can share our story, open our box and show people where we live, and feel the proximity of each other. We are social creatures. About the only contact we have with each other anymore is coming or going at Circle K and Wal-Mart or visiting in our inboxes and text messages, blogs, twitters and facebooks.
It still takes too long but you have to do something. It might as well be something you think is good.
What else can we really do?
I'm afraid, that there is really little anyone can do. What is happening, is living standards are moving towards equilibrium. Technology has had alot to do with it. Today, one can build a factory in a country with no experienced manufacturing base of labor, because a new state of the art factory involves pushng the green button when you come to work, and the red one when you leave. We want middle class wages to push that button.
I only watch regular TV when I go to the gym, and that is the only opportunity I get to see political ads on local stations. It is a limited amount of time, but the big ads I've seen are negative ads against Whitman sponsored by public employee groups in CA. I'm anxious to see whether this swell of corporate money is going to get involved. Corporations depend on all to be customers and they don't want to alienate anyone. Look at Target, with only a $150,000 contribution. They won't do that again.
This is beating a dead horse. If CEO's with billion dollar compensation packages is the problem the govenment can simply cap the deduction for management compensation, defining compensation other than salary to favor the government. The problem I see is that most of the billionaires are from the investor class.
And there's more of the same coming folks! Inside "The Beltway" the buzz is that HRC replaces Biden as VP in 2012; It's a Blue Dog future or worse. So what do you want a broken arm or a broken leg? These are not choices at all! And, did you all catch the Royal Wedding, Chelsea and her investment banker husband? We now have our oligopoly devolving into a full fledged aristocracy! The Clintons, the Bushes, the Rockefellers, Morgans, et. al.
"Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen." - Huey Long
Truman was an artillery man in WWI, blowing people up from a distance was second nature to him. Also, like many American military men involved with WWI, they thought Germany was being let off easy by letting them surrender. "The Germans didn't believe they were actually beaten." I think that mentality carried through to Truman when he decided to drop the bombs.
Of course the reality of why Germany rose up after WWI, was more about the Allies keeping their boot to the neck of Germany (especially France) and by the time Germany was finally getting to the point where they were able to regain its economic strength it was too late, the NAZI movement had reached a momentum that swept it into power.
So basically, the dropping of the A-bombs went hand in hand with the carpet bombing of Germany and Japan during WWII, the Allied leaders wanted to beat the Axis powers into humiliation... which they did. However, it wasn't those actions that prevented another world war, but the fact that the Allies at least realized it was important to rebuild the countries (more so as a bulwark against the USSR than any altruistic motive). Also it can be argued that the dropping the bombs was done more to threaten all would be contenders to America's new found Super Power status. Lastly don't forget, to Americans at the time, the Japanese were an inferior race and therefore quite expendable.
We've come a long way since then, though please don't take any part of my rant as an excuse or justification for the destruction of two cities. I'm just trying to round out the whole picture of why it was done, and why America has been so detached from the terror and horror it unleashed.
BTW the First Congregational Church in Long Beach http://www.firstchurchlb.org/cranes.html will have events related to the dropping the bombs on Japan. Personally plan on being there for the Aug 15th event with Capt. Paul K. Chappell speaking about ending war.
N
The Bomb - Howard Zinn
Scott Horton Interviews Chris Busby
Scott Horton, August 04, 2010
Chris Busby, co-author of the epidemiological study “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” discusses the difficulties of carrying out a door-to-door survey of skeptical and hostile Fallujah residents, the severe birth deformities in regions where depleted uranium munitions were used, the study’s focus on infant mortality rates, the military’s outdated risk modeling for battlefield uranium exposure and why a dramatically lower male birth rate is a telling sign of regional genetic damage.
Thanks Nels, I've been enjoying Scott Horton's being on KPFK of late.
@Zero G. re #4, yesterday I was listening to KPFK here in Los Angeles, on my drive home. A fill-in host played a taped interview with a scientist, Christopher Busby, who had did studies on the effects of Depleted Uranium on the citizens of Fallujah. You can check out the free podcast on KPFK, Thursday Aug 5 3:00pm. I recommend anyone here who is even slightly interested in this subject to check it out. Good plain explanation of whats going on over there and why.
N
By the way, the Japanese were trying to find an honorable way to surrender. Admiral Nimitz opined that the atomic bombs were not necessary.
Gene, #3:
One of my favorite Doonesbury strips, the original of which hangs on my wall, is a person going to a Cambodian couple standing in front of their leveled home and saying, "This is a historic site. This is the site of the secret bombing of Cambodia."
The Cambodian man says: "No, it wasn't any secret. I said to Martha, 'Look, there are the bombs falling on us.'" Gary Wills author of Bomb Power
@Zero G: Robert McNamara admitted that he was involved in war crimes with respect to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The US for the first time today sent an envoy to the Hiroshima Memorial Service:
Obama Revives Debate About Hiroshima with Envoy Decision
by David McNeill in Tokyo
But US ambassador to Japan John Roos and UK deputy ambassador David Fitton, who is also attending, will shrug off demands for an apology and questions about the controversial bombing, which killed more than 140,000 people, mostly civilians.
"The attention is on the ceremony itself and on the victims so we don't want to overshadow the event," said a spokesman for the British embassy in Tokyo. "But given the way the international debate is going, we think this is the right move at the right time."
But, the US is continuing to use Depleted Uranium:
The curse of Fallujah: Women warned not to have babies because of rise in birth defects since U.S. assault
By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 3:21 PM on 5th March 2010
I ask again, who are the criminals? Those who tell the truth, or those warmongers and profiteers who seem to have complete immunity?
The problem with Wikileaks is not that they are revealing information vital to the prosecution of the wars and defense of "our" troops, it is that they are revealing to the American public information that the Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis already know.
Another blatant attempt at keeping us in the dark. This is similar to reporting bombing missions in Viet Nam in "violation" of security laws. The Vietnamese already knew where the bombs fell. The American people did not.
"Look forward" is an attempt to weasel out of the responsibility to investigate and prosecute past and present crimes, which by definition, do not occur in the future.
The obligation to uphold and defend The Constitution is being swept aside. It seems that those who swore to uphold and defend are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and should be removed from office to an acceptable dungeon. I'd suggest imprisonment with no possibility of pardon, but the Constitution says we can't do that.
The decision to look forward and not back at the lies, aggression and torture of the previous administration is redoubling in its consequences these days as the war is being rebranded in Iraq and only escalating in Afghanistan. The refusal of the Obama administration to hold to account its predecessors leads to their having to condemn WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning for daring to show us the contemptable face of war.
Now Pentagoon spokesperson Geoffrey Morrell is issueing a threat to WikiLeaks:
"The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps to immediately return all versions of all of those documents to the US government and permanently delete them from its website, computers, and records," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said on Thursday, according to the Guardian.
He added: "If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing."
No, we must tell this administration, in no uncertain terms, it is the Crimes of Aggresssion that put our soldiers and allies at rist. It is the warmongers and profiteers who must be held to account, and not those brave enough to expose the lies and the bloody hell into which this nation has been thrust.
Public Rally Outside Quantico Base to Support Alleged Whistleblower Bradley Manning
Exposing War Crimes is Not a Crime - Support Bradley Manning! and WikiLeaks!
A Rainbow Appears Over Utah capitol During Celebration Rally in support of the California Federal judge's decision against Prop 8, according to Mormon church owned KSL-TV. (See KSL story below with video below that appeared on Salt Lake City TV)
This miracle sign in the sky may have intimidated some who were coerced by the church to give money for Proposition 8. See 8: The Mormon Proposition documentary now available on Netflix. http://www.mormonproposition.com/
_________- KSL Story & video
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=11864230
Utah activists celebrate overturning of gay marriage banAugust 4th, 2010 @ 10:05pmBy Jennifer Stagg
SALT LAKE CITY -- A federal judge overturned Proposition 8 Wednesday -- California's ban on same sex marriage. Gay marriage activists participated in a celebratory Utah rally Wednesday evening, saying the judge in California heard their pleas for equal marriage rights.
Picture: Hundreds of anti-Prop. 8 supporters gathered at the state capitol Wednesday evening, claiming victory.
This is the day they say they've waited for.
"It's about getting 1,138 rights and privileges and responsibilities that married straight couples have right now that I do not have," said gay marriage supporter Mike Picardi.
Hundreds of anti-Prop. 8 supporters gathered at the state capitol Wednesday evening, claiming victory. It was a perfect way, one couple says, to celebrate their anniversary.
"We've been married for 16 years today," said Tracy Johnson-Faulkner and Marilyn Johnson-Faulkner. "Today really is our anniversary, this day."
As the crowd waved rainbow flags, a real rainbow appeared overhead.
The group held signs saying they too have a right to be legally married -- all while a bride posed for her engagement photos. ...
Why would anyone endorse violence (the initiation of force) as an answer?
The Answer Is Here.
Regards
Yes, the Mormon's will pay for the weddings for 10 years, America will apologize for supporting Israel's brutal policies and their illegal occupation, Israel will apologize to the Palestinians and give them back their land, and the United States will withdraw it's two illegal occupations starting immediately. Bush/Cheney will be prosecuted in the World Court for war crimes including the illegal invasion of two countries, indefinite detension and torture of suspects as a policy. And America will start making things again to sell to the world, besides weapons. Optimism is key here.