This post first appeared on Booman Tribune.
I guess killing the Union movement, well paying jobs and moving our manufacturing base off shore to “developing countries” (brought to you by the the Reagan Revolution, “Free Market” Proponents and Big Business) isn’t just a matter of trickle down economics, income inequality, lost jobs, globalization and the Great Recession. According to testimony before Congress it is also a major threat to our nation’s national security.
What kind of threat? The kind where we can’t produce critical components for the weapons our military uses, for example:
“We have allowed our industrial base to deteriorate for the last two to three decades. As a result, just in national defense terms, our supply lines for strategic parts and materials have been stretched around the world,” said Jeff Faux, founding president and distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute. [...]
America’s economic policies over the last the decades have been an EPIC FAIL according to the AFL-CIO because our country has lost the manufacturing base to protect our country:
“As you watch globalization move the manufacturing base offshore, in essence you are moving the defense base offshore,” said Robert Baugh, executive director of the AFL-CIO, “This is dangerous.”
We don’t even have the industrial capacity to build ships or make enough bullets for the troops:
We have already lost our lead in some critical defense-related industries such as semiconductors, printed circuit boards, machine tools, advanced materials and aerospace, Baugh said. The closure of the Avondale and Ingalls shipyards would cripple our ability to make ships.Michael Wessel, a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told the panel the situation is so bad that we no longer have the domestic capacity to produce enough ammunition to supply our troops and law enforcement. There are waiting lists to fill the police departments here at home, he said.
So who is reaping the benefits of an economic policy that eliminated much of our critical manufacturing base and diminished the ability of America to supply the military? Why our “good friend” China:
The nation’s manufacturers are being seduced by China where they can get more for their money due to an undervaluation of their currency, illegal subsidies, and a lack of enforceable laws regarding, worker rights, and environmental and health standards, Baugh told CNN.China’s manufacturing sector is on the brink of passing that of the United States, according to a report released in June by the economic research firm IHS Global Insight. The value of goods produced by China’s factories reached about $1.6 trillion last year, compared to $1.7 trillion by U.S. manufacturers.
Who were the biggest supporters of “globalization” “free markets” and outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs overseas? Conservatives and Republicans. Yes they had the willing assistance of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council to pass NAFTA, but the main cause for the loss of our manufacturing base can be laid at the feet of the Reagan Revolution and the policies he and the Conservative Movement promoted:
[W]hile the trend toward concentration of capital ownership and control was already underway prior to Reagan, the economic policies of Reaganomics opened the flood gates instead of strengthening the dam, leading to an even more dramatic rise in capital concentration over the past 30 years than would have otherwise been the case. … This helped pave the way for the massive off-shoring of American industry in the 1990s, during the time of cheap fuel, cheap borrowing, and institutional investors who were cozy and comfortable with executives but not workers, who pushed executives to take actions that would lead to greater market volatility and short-term gains, both of which were beneficial to “investment” institutions, while they are not particularly healthy for long-term economic stability and growth.… Indeed the system of incentives that emerged from the Reaganomic agenda is one that has driven the country into a downward economic spiral as those driving the economy into the ground benefit from its destruction.
One of the biggest economic ironies of the past 30 years has been the belief among conservatives, famously voiced by Reagan, that “government is the problem”, and the claim that government spending inhibits economic growth, when in fact two of the technologies that contributed the most to real economic growth in America over the past 30 years were developed by the government: the internet and satellite technologies. [...]
The reality is that the demise of the America economy began some 30 years ago. The seeming decent functioning of the economy these past 30 years has been an illusion propped up by public and private debt, and basically by riding on the solid base that was built in this country during the 1940s-1960s. The solid economic base that was built during that time, both in terms of the middle-class itself and in terms of infrastructure and institutions was so strong and so well built that it was able to carry the country for several decades even as it was being weakened. The policies of the Reaganomic agenda reduced investment in the nation’s infrastructure, reduced investment in education, reduced investment in long-term research and development, and instead squandered resources on grossly over-funded military spending and on privatization schemes that resulted not in the shrinking of the size of government nor in the improvement of government services, but rather in the development of a private sector with a profit motive to continuously get its hands on more and more tax payer money.
The presidency of George W. Bush, the GOP’s dominance of Congress and their corporate friendly policies of lower taxes, promotion of globalization and lax regulation only accelerated the loss of American manufacturing jobs and factories. When we should have been re-investing in our industrial sector and promoting policies to strengthen and increase the dwindling middle class and eliminate income inequality, instead we went on binge that benefited Wall Street’s greed at the expense of the manufacturing sector which had created the middle class lifestyle under which so many Americans had prospered prior to Republican and conservative dominance of economic policy after 1980.
Something has gone radically wrong with the American economy. A once-robust system of “traditional engineering” — the invention, design, and manufacture of products — has been replaced by financial engineering. Without a vibrant manufacturing sector, Wall Street created money it did not have and Americans spent money they did not have. [...]America’s economic elite has long argued that the country does not need an industrial base. The economies in states such as California and Michigan that have lost their industrial base, however, belie that claim. Without an industrial base, an increase in consumer spending, which pulled the country out of past recessions, will not put Americans back to work. Without an industrial base, the nation’s trade deficit will continue to grow. Without an industrial base, there will be no economic ladder for a generation of immigrants, stranded in low-paying service-sector jobs. Without an industrial base, the United States will be increasingly dependent on foreign manufacturers even for its key military technology. For American manufacturers, the bad years didn’t begin with the banking crisis of 2008. Indeed, the U.S. manufacturing sector never emerged from the 2001 recession, which coincided with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Since 2001, the country has lost 42,400 factories, including 36 percent of factories that employ more than 1,000 workers (which declined from 1,479 to 947), and 38 percent of factories that employ between 500 and 999 employees (from 3,198 to 1,972). An additional 90,000 manufacturing companies are now at risk of going out of business.
Long before the banking collapse of 2008, such important U.S. industries as machine tools, consumer electronics, auto parts, appliances, furniture, telecommunications equipment, and many others that had once dominated the global marketplace suffered their own economic collapse. Manufacturing employment dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was in 1941. In October 2009, more people were officially unemployed (15.7 million) than were working in manufacturing. [...]
The U.S. machine-tool industry — the industry that’s the backbone of an industrial economy and the means by which all products are manufactured — produced $4.2 billion in equipment in 2008, a paltry 5.1 percent of global output. American machine-tool consumption has collapsed in tandem with American manufacturing. Since 1998, U.S. machine-tool consumption has fallen by 23 percent. Chinese consumption has increased by 714 percent, from $2.7 billion in 1998 to $19.3 billion in 2008. U.S. consumption stood at $6.7 billion in 2008. For the eight months ending in August 2009, U.S. machine-tool consumption declined to only $1.04 billion. The evaporation of orders, says Mike Austin, vice president of Atlas Technologies in Fenton, Michigan, “is the last straw for many people in this industry.”
Machine tools have long been considered essential to maintaining the country’s national security. In 1948, Congress passed the National Industrial Reserve Act based on the idea that the “defense of the U.S. requires a national reserve of machine tools for the production of critical items of defense material.”
Yet what do Republicans promise us if the regain power? Will they do anything to reverse these trends? Not likely. All they have is empty rhetoric about the evils of government, and the “tyranny” of President Obama and the Democrats. They tout the same tired formula of deregulation of big business, deficit reduction and tax cuts something we know has not worked in the past based on the record of increasing deficits created by the Reagan/Bush I and Bush II administrations:
That is the track record of the Republicans when they have been in power: massively increased deficits, Wall Street Bankers out of Control, lost jobs, ever widening income inequality so that the profits from collective efforts of all Americans are funneled increasingly to the richest Americans and the destruction of our manufacturing base and our technological and innovative prowess.
That and unnecessary wars that sap our military, spread ill will across the globe, kill thousands. In short, Republican and conservative economic and foreign policies have make us ever more reliant on foreign powers for our energy needs (Saudi Arabia anyone), financing our debt and providing the manufactured goods we buy and, more importantly need to supply our armed forces (e.g., China).
So, who is the greatest threat to our national security? I think you know the answer to that question by now: it’s the elephant in the room.
This post first appeared on Booman Tribune.
I saw something happen in my state last night that beggars belief. And yet it was not a figment of my imagination, not some nightmare that evaporates in the sunshine of a new morning. My state went crazy last night.
Rick Lazio is an extremely conservative NY Republican politician. When he ran against Hillary for the Senate he accused her of every political sin you can think of, plus a few more you probably cannot. Yet somehow this nutcase beat him like a drum for the GOP nomination for Governor.
Healthy 28-Yr-Old Tasered By Cops Has Heart Attack — When Will Police Stop Using This Lethal Weapon?
This post first appeared on Booman Tribune.
A mentally ill man diagnosed with a bipolar disorder was tasered by two Minneapolis Police officers at a YMCA on Friday. The man was not armed but was struggling with police who had been called to the scene. The taser caused his heart to go into cardiac arrest. He is now in a Minneapolis hospital in critical condition after his heart stopped and he had to resuscitated at least twice:
A Minneapolis man shot by police with a Taser last week during an altercation at the downtown Minneapolis YMCA is on life support and is not expected to survive, a family member said Saturday.David Cornelius Smith, 28, suffered from mental illness, said his uncle, Larry Smith, an attorney from Oak Park, Ill. He remained hospitalized Saturday at Hennepin County Medical Center. Family members believe that police mishandled Thursday’s Tasering incident, Larry Smith said. [...]
“I’m sure the police are trained to handle individuals with mental health issues,” he said. “There are a lot of people with mental health issues in this country, and they don’t get Tased by the police.”
Police were called to the YMCA at 30 S. 9th St. at 3:45 p.m. Thursday on a report of a man who was disturbing patrons and were directed to the sixth-floor gym. When officers Timothy Gorman and Timothy Callahan tried to physically remove Smith from the Y, he fought with them for several minutes, injuring one of them slightly before he was shot with a Taser. [...]
Larry Smith said the initial jolt from the Taser caused David Smith to go into cardiac arrest. “It didn’t stop his heart; it killed him,” he said. “Paramedics restarted his heart on scene.”
Since he arrived at the hospital Thursday, Smith’s heart has stopped again and once again he was revived, his uncle said. [...]
David Smith, a native of Peoria, moved to Minneapolis about eight years ago for a Job Corps position and decided to stay in the city, his uncle said. He lived on his own and was taking college courses, though Larry Smith wasn’t sure where. When the two last spoke in June, Larry Smith said his nephew talked about getting into a finance job and taking classes to become an investment banker.
David Smith was a “charismatic young man” who was an accomplished cello player in high school, Larry Smith said.
Two things: this man apparently had no weapon or the police would have mentioned it in their report. So, though he may have been trying to fight off the officers who came to remove him from the YMCA, a taser was not an absolute necessity. Other options were available such as calling for more police officers or mental health professionals with experience dealing with agitated people.
Second, can there be any doubt that tasers are lethal weapons that can kill even apparently healthy individuals? David Smith was supposedly in good physical condition according to his family. Yet the taser stopped his heart immediately.
Clearly in this situation the officers would not have been justified to use a gun since the disturbed man had at most “slightly injured” one of the officers after several minutes of resisting arrest. Wouldn’t the better course have been to call for more back up and try to calm Mr. Smith down rather than using a taser?
I’m sure the police felt justified in their actions because supposedly tasers are non-lethal, but that’s the problem: they aren’t, and you cannot predict when they will kill someone.
A 2008 report (PDF) from Amnesty International found 351 Taser-related deaths in the US between June, 2001 and August, 2008, a rate of just slightly above four deaths per month.A database of Taser-related deaths maintained at the African-American issues blog Electronic Village counts 96 deaths related to the use of Tasers since January, 2009.
Assuming the statistics are correct, that indicates the death rate has increased to an average of five per month.
Electronic Village counts the 96th Taser-linked death as being that of Adam Colliers, a 25-year-old resident of Snohomish County, Washington, who was reportedly “running up and down” a street and causing a disturbance when he was Tased by two officers. He stopped breathing shortly afterwards, and was pronounced dead in hospital a short while later.
Unfortunately police departments often use tasers as a means to take people into custody when other, less lethal means are still available.
Two other men died last week in a strikingly similar situations after being tasered by police in western Washington:
Everett Police Sgt. Robert Goetz says officers were called to the scene of an early morning disturbance. The 25-year-old man reportedly charged a deputy, who used the Taser on him.After the man was hit, the deputies found he wasn’t breathing. They began CPR and called for medical aid. The man was taken to a hospital but could not be revived.
This is the second time in a week that a man has died in Western Washington after being shocked by a Taser. A 27-year-old stopped breathing in Spanaway on Tuesday during an encounter with Pierce County authorities.
Here are the details of the man who was tasered and died in Spanaway, Washington:
Deputies were called about 8:30 a.m. Tuesday to a Spanaway apartment where the 27-year-old man had been staying but refused to leave. He had thrown a propane tank from a barbecue through a window and was hiding behind a couch when deputies arrived.When he struggled, deputies used the Taser stun gun, put him in handcuffs and bound his feet.
Paramedics were on their way when he lost consciousness. He could not be revived and was pronounced dead at St. Claire Hospital in Lakewood.
Police are “investigating” whether drugs or alcohol” played a role ion his death. Well, one thing I can tell them for certain is that the taser played the greatest role in these individuals dying, yet somehow our meida reports the story as if we should assume that a person on drugs and alcohol, or who suffers from mental illness, is responsible for their own death, rather than the use of a taser by law enforcement.
Isn’t it time to treat tasers as the equivalent of guns? Not every person shot by the police dies from their wounds but we wouldn’t authorize police to use their firearms to take shoot someone in order to take them into custody for resisting arrest, so why is a taser any different at this point? How many more deaths do we need to prove the point?
Here are some other recent examples of what I would consider inappropriate taser use by the police:
Police used a Taser stun gun to subdue a man after he jumped off a bridge connecting Iowa and Illinois on Monday.The man jumped Monday morning about 100 feet off the Interstate 74 Bridge into the Mississippi River and survived. KWQC-TV in Davenport reports a call came in around 10 a.m. that a man had crashed his vehicle on the bridge. He was seen walking around, then jumped into the river and managed to swim to a nearby small island.
Capt. Greg Trudell with the Bettendorf Police Department said the man “appeared to be quite disturbed.”
Officers said when they reached the man, he wouldn’t talk or listen to officers, forcing them to use a Taser.
Note the language used by the reporters: “Officers said when they reached the man, he wouldn’t talk or listen to officers, forcing them to use a Taser.” Again we see a case of a taser being employed because the individual “wouldn’t talk or listen” to officers” so they were “forced” to use their taser. When did simple failure to follow police instructions justify being shocked with 50,000 to 75,000 volts of electricity?
Did we simply allow law enforcement officials to shoot these people in the past if they “appeared to be quite disturbed” and “refused to listen or talk to the police?” I don’t think so? But use a taser that might kill them also? That’s not a problem, apparently.
Or how about this case of a woman tasered while lying on a hospital gurney?
Pamela Borton believes a Dothan police officer used an electric stun device on her to punish her for being belligerent toward them during a 2006 incident, even though she says she was suffering from bipolar disorder and was restrained face down on a hospital gurney at the time. [...]The incident in question occurred on the afternoon of Aug. 15, 2006, at Southeast Alabama Medical Center. Earlier, paramedics and Midland City Police had responded to Borton’s residence after Borton’s mother called 911 after Borton went into what she called a “manic state.”
Borton testified that the paramedics and officers were forced to handcuff and tie her face down on the gurney before placing her in an ambulance to take her to SAMC. Borton said she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager and has been confined on numerous occasions. [...]
That’s where the stories of the two parties in this lawsuit begin to diverge. Borton claims Schulmerich used a Taser on her almost immediately after she arrived at SAMC, applying it to her right calf before she was wheeled into the hospital’s emergency room. Borton claims the device was used on her at least two more times while she was still restrained. She said two male officers, two male paramedics and a male nurse were present in the room. [...]
Borton’s attorney, Gary Hudgins, asked Bissette if using the Taser was the most reasonable response to subdue a 100-pound female with multiple officers and male paramedics present.
“If there are two options, wait or use a Taser and either one will result in the desired outcome, why use the Taser?” Hudgins asked.
“I can’t speak for the officers. I wasn’t there. If the individual was combative, or causing harm to themselves or others, then the use of the Taser is appropriate,” Bissette responded.
Let me be clear. I have no issue with police using a taser when confronted by an armed individual who poses a serious threat to them or when they have committed a violent assault and refuse to submit to arrest. But that does not appear to be the case in the examples I’ve cited.
It’s clear tasers are weapons that employ potential “lethal force” and they should be treated as such by law enforcement agencies. In other words, using a taser should be a matter of last resort by the police, not a means to achieve submission of unruly or disturbed individuals. Until they are, however, we will continue to see people killed and maimed by taser abuse.
The Army said Friday it was investigating a claim that dozens of soldiers who refused to attend a Christian band’s concert at a Virginia military base were banished to their barracks and told to clean them up. [...]Pvt. Anthony Smith said he and other soldiers felt pressured to attend the May concert while stationed at the Newport News base, home of the Army’s Transportation Corps.
“My whole issue was I don’t need to be preached at,” Smith said in a phone interview from Phoenix, where he is stationed with the National Guard. “That’s not what I signed up for.” {…]
Smith, 21, was stationed in Virginia for nearly seven months for helicopter electrician training when the Christian rock group BarlowGirl played as part of the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concerts.”
Smith said a staff sergeant told 200 men in their barracks they could either attend or remain in their barracks. Eighty to 100 decided not to attend, he said.
“Instead of being released to our personal time, we were locked down,” Smith said. “It seemed very much like a punishment.”
Smith said he and the other soldiers were told not to use their cell phones or personal computers and ordered to clean up the barracks.About 20 of the men, including several Muslims, refused to attend the concert based on their religious beliefs, he said.
Smith said he went up the chain of command and traced the concert edict to a captain, who said he simply wanted to “show support for those kind of events that bring soldiers together.”
While not accepting blame, the officer apologized to the soldiers who refused to attend the concert and said it was not his intent to proselytize, he said.
“But once you get in there, you realize it’s evangelization,” Smith said.
How many other commanding officers are using their positions of power over the lives of our young men and women in the service to impose their religious views on them? How extensive is this type of “evangelization” within the officer corps? We already know the Air Force Academy is practically a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fundamentalist Christian Right.
Reporting from Denver — The Air Force Academy, stung several years ago by accusations of Christian bias, has built a new outdoor worship area for pagans and other practitioners of Earth-based religions.But its opening, heralded as a sign of a more tolerant religious climate at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., was marred by the discovery two weeks ago of a large wooden cross placed there.
I’m not a Wiccan but they have as much right to worship and practice their faith as Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and Christians of whatever sect. And athesists have just as much right to not practice any faith. Joining the muilitary doesn’t mean you give up your first amendment protections against the government imposing anyone’s religious values upon you. It shouldn’t mean that your Christian superiors can force you to attend events where they proselytize you to accept their faith or elese face punishment. Any officer, no matter how high or how low should be drummed out of the military for such behavior. Court martials should be held and officers who violated these d=soldiers fundamental constitutional rights should be stripped of their commands and given dishonorable discharges.
The people who fought an American revolution did not fight so that any member of the government, much less a military commander could use his position of authority to coerce anyone to accept his or her religious beliefs. Quite the contrary. They came to America to escape religious persecution, not create a new means by which their faiths would rule supreme over everyone who believed differently than them.
This is just one of many dangerous signs over the last few years that our military is being corrupted by these Fundamentalist Christians. We know that their goal is to Christianize the government and the military and use that political and military power to impose their version of “Biblical Law” on the rest of us.
In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides’ eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa’s postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century’s most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. “We work with power where we can,” the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can’t.” [...]Two weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug’s son and the presumptive heir to leadership of the Family, dropped by the house. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging over a padded arm.
“You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.”
Obviously one place they have been building up their power to “rule the world” is in the US Military. And that is a very dangerous sign for our future as a free nation.
The most effective wedge for the insertion of evangelicals into every rung of military life was the NAE and its influential chaplain-endorsing agency, the Commission on Chaplains, which worked tirelessly as a liaison for a wide array of fundamentalist denominations, from the Assemblies of God to the Southern Baptist Convention to the full index of offshoot and splinter congregations. Notwithstanding the military’s policy of allotting chaplaincies on a quota system designed to roughly reflect the religious affiliations of society as a whole, by the late ’60s evangelical denominations were regularly exceeding their allotments.The phenomenon mirrored, in part, the explosive growth of fundamentalist Christianity in America and, in part, the assiduous efforts of the NAE and its Commission on Chaplains to fill posts left empty by the Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and others who were regularly failing to meet their allocations. In what Loveland terms a “quota juggling act,” the NAE and others aggressively lobbied to fill chaplaincies left vacant by other denominations, resulting in a marked shift in the selection process weighted more and more to religious demographics within the military itself, where evangelical numbers continued to swell. This consolidation of power would result, by the late eighties, in the NAE Chaplains Commission’s acting as the endorsing agent not only for established denominations but for hundreds of nonaligned individual churches. [...]
It was inevitable, considering the concerted effort by evangelicals to penetrate every echelon of the service, from the lowliest barracks to the loftiest policy-making aerie, that there would eventually emerge a cadre of Christian officers emboldened to openly profess their faith and use the full influence of their rank to bolster the cause. [...]
It is a convergence that would, in turn, reach its apotheosis in You the Warrior Leader, a gung ho handbook for “applying military strategy in victorious spiritual leadership,” published at the same time Weinstein was beginning to gird himself for a different kind of battle. Written by former Green Beret and current Southern Baptist Convention president Bobby Welch, You the Warrior Leader is as unequivocal a statement of evangelical militarism as could be imagined, an unabashed tactical manual on storming the barricades of unbelief with rousing rhetoric that evokes a kind of holy bloodlust for the trophies of triumphalism. [...]
In the chapter “Attack! Attack! Attack!” Welch asks, “Remember the Warrior Leader’s Mission-Vision?” as he hammers home with steely-eyed determination his grand strategy for winning souls: “To develop victorious spiritual-war fighters who form a force-multiplying army that accomplishes the Great Commission.”
And yes, Sharon Angle and other fundamentalist Christian Republican candidates for National office do approve a Christian takeover of the Country:
When Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a Christian news interviewer this year that “entitlement programs (are) built to make government our God,” she voiced a central tenet of Christian Reconstructionism, according to academics who study the movement. [...]Many of Angle’s religious and political beliefs appear to align with the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism. She’s supported eliminating Social Security and Medicare, is a home schooling champion, sees the separation of church and state as an unconstitutional doctrine that was never meant to protect the state from religious belief, and believes public policy should support the traditional family structure as defined in the Bible.
She also helped resurrect the Nevada affiliate of a national party founded by a prominent Christian Reconstructionist and has raised campaign money from reconstructionists.
But Ingersoll said Angle’s comments on government as a false idol come directly from the movement’s founder, R.J. Rushdoony, an orthodox Presbyterian minister.
Do we really want politicians who will support the continued Fundamentalist Christianization of our government and especially our military? Do we really want people with the most powerful weapons on earth trained to believe that only the Christian faith is truly American? That their duty to a Christian God supersedes their duty to the Constitution? I think you know the answer to that.We need to eradicate this infestation of religious intolerance and infiltration before it leads our country down a dark path in which our armed forces become a pawn of religious zealots determined to make our country as “free” religiously as Iran or Saudi Arabia are today.
This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.
Unemployment numbers keep getting worse, not better according to this report from McClatchy:
Take a look at this sign (via Think Progress) which was produced and displayed publicly by NOM (National Organization For Marriage) supporter Larry Adams at a recent rally in Indianapolis as part NOM’s Summer for Marriage Tour 2010, and tell me this isn’t one of the worst examples of hate speech we’ve seen this year (and that’s saying a lot):
How often have we heard that extreme right wing Christian groups love gay people. It’s only the “sin” of gay sex that they hate. Yet there is recent visual evidence of a supporter of the National Organization For Marriage (NOM), the ant-gay marriage group that produced the infamous (and fact free) video “There’s a Storm Coming” about the danger same sex marriage posed to marriage …
… that demonstrates at least some NOM supporters don’t love gay people so much as they would like to implement a “final solution” to the gay problem based on their version of “Biblical Law.” And, what is worse, that visual evidence evokes the worst abuses of the Jim Crow era in our own history: the lynching of African Americans in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The sign speaks for itself. Not only is this offensive to gay people, it is no doubt offensive to many African Americans, especially those of Shirley Sherrod’s generation who can still remember when their relatives, friends and neighbors were routinely murdered by mobs of bigots, killed by the KKK or simply beaten to death by white law enforcement officials.
It is also reminiscent of one of the least publicized aspects of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis didn’t just slaughter European Jews. Gays were also targeted for torture, slave labor and mass murder by that horrific regime.
And lest we forget, Adam’s ugly, violence inciting sign calls for the same punishment of homosexual men and women that extremist fundamentalist Islamic states such as Iran impose against gay people today: Death by hanging. Iran, one of the countries former President Bush’s included in his original “Axis of Evil” is ruled by a theocratic religious regime where homosexuality is a crime based on that regime’s interpretation of Islamic law.
Is that the kind of America NOM and other anti-gay groups really want? Oh, we know that they claim they are only out to protect their (heterosexual) marriages, their children, and their first amendment rights from the dangers of Gay Marriage (though to date I;ve yet to hear a valid argument about the danger same sex marriage poses to my heterosexual marriage), but I for one do not trust them.
Why don’t I trust their “good intentions?” Why don’t I take them at their word when they state that they love the gay “sinner” and merely hate the “sin” of homosexuality?”
Well, it’s hard to trust radical right wing Conservative Christians on any topic related to the civil rights of homosexual men and women at this moment in time. Not when people like Larry Admas appear at NOM rallies carrying signs that advocate for the lynching of members of the LGBT community and are not told to leave or denounced by NOM’s leadership.
And I certainly lack faith in the words of conservative Christians and their leaders after evidence came to light recently that evangelical fundamentalist American Christians were active supporters, promoters, defenders and and architects of the anti-gay legislation in Uganda that would institute death by hanging for those who engage in homosexual acts:
KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family. [...]
One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals …
The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill. [...]
[T]he Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” [...]
Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape. [...]
Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. {…]
And these weren’t just merely random coincidences. “The Family” a secretive conservative Christian organization based in Washington DC, with ties to many socially conservative politicians, was actively involved in Uganda’s “gay eradication” legislation from early on as this interview of Jeff Sharlet by Terri Gross of NPR explains:
The Family is also connected to proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda that could sentence, quote, repeat offenders to the death penalty. That family connection is revealed in new reporting by my guest, Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet is the author of the bestseller “The Family” and is a contributing editor for Harper’s. He’s been investigating The Family for years. [...]GROSS: Now, you mentioned that The Family thinks it’s important to have their people and their concerns represented in both the Republican and the Democratic Party. Is there an active strategy to actually have Family-affiliated politicians in the Democratic Party?
Mr. SHARLET: Yeah, I think it’s always been very important to The Family, going back to the beginning of the group’s roots in the 1930s, when they actually formed with the idea that democracy wasn’t going to work. Remember, this was in the 1930s, and they’re looking around the world, and they see communism as this incredibly powerful world force, and fascism is, of course, too. Well, they certainly don’t want to be communism. Fascism they are a little more sympathetic to, and there were a lot of sort of early-American fascists in the group, but it’s still a problem because it’s a cult of personality. They put Hitler and Mussolini where Jesus is.
So they come up with this idea of a third way, that they later start calling totalitarianism for Christ. And they predict that the United States will pretty quickly embrace this and will get rid of political parties because democracy doesn’t work. People arguing and debating doesn’t work. They don’t want a Republican Party, a Democratic Party. They want one big party – theirs. [...]
GROSS: Let’s talk about The Family’s connection to Uganda, where there’s a, really a draconian anti-gay bill that has been introduced into parliament. Uganda already punishes the practice of homosexuality with life in prison. What would the new legislation do?
Mr. SHARLET: Well, the new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.
And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study in the export of a lot of American, largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end. [...]
Mr. SHARLET: Well, the legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family. He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda.
Jesus said “Love thy neighbor.” Too many anti-gay bigots who call themselves Christians would rather ignore those words by excluding gay people from the definition of “neighbor” altogether. Indeed, they seem very eager not only to deny LGBT people the same civil rights that other Americans enjoy, but also to create an atmosphere of fear and loathing of gay people, a fear so great that it encourages hatred and violence against our fellow Americans who simply choose to love members of the same gender as themselves.
And clearly they have succeeded with individuals like Larry Adams and the many, many criminals who have attacked, assaulted and murdered LGBT people solely based on hatred. A hatred fueled by good Christians like those who belong to NOM.
This originally appeared at Booman Tribune.
What do all the income taxes collected (as opposed to FICA, etc.) get spent on? One organization has a handy pie chart which summarizes it nicely for the last Fuiscal Year, 2009: READ FULL POST
The latest chapter in the media’s ongoing struggle to cover the Gulf Oil Spill comes courtesy of PBS Newshour’s Bridget Desimone, who has been working with her colleague, Betty Ann Bowser, in “reporting the health impact of the oil spill in Plaquemines Parish.” Desimone reports that on the ground, officials are generally doing a better job answering inquiries and granting access to the clean-up efforts.But Desimone and Bowser have encountered one “roadblock” that they’ve struggled to overcome: access to a “federal mobile medical unit” in Venice, Louisiana: “The glorified double-wide trailer sits on a spit of newly graveled land known to some as the “BP compound.” Ringed with barbed wire-topped chain link fencing, it’s tightly restricted by police and private security guards.”
This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.
What PCs and Macs Have in Common
Profiting from the worst war on the planet that no one in America knows anything about by purchasing “conflicts minerals” from the Congo for their products:
From Nicholas Kristoff in February:
[S]o far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation …
“Sometimes I don’t know what I am doing here,” Dr. Mukwege said despairingly. “There is no medical solution.” The paramount need, he says, is not for more humanitarian aid for Congo, but for a much more vigorous international effort to end the war itself.
That means putting pressure on neighboring Rwanda, a country so widely admired for its good governance at home that it tends to get a pass for its possible role in war crimes next door. We also need pressure on the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrest Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. And, as recommended by an advocacy organization called the Enough Project, we need a U.S.-brokered effort to monitor the minerals trade from Congo so that warlords can no longer buy guns by exporting gold, tin or coltan.
And you thought Goldman Sachs and BP were evil corporations. Who knew that Intell, Blackbery, Dell, IBM, Gateway, HP, Sony, AT&T, Motorola, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Nintendo, etc., including Steve Jobs and Apple, are providing the funds these barbaric militias and warlords need to continue to fuel the slaughter and rape of thousands of Africans. More from Kristoff yesterday:
I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”
Our computers, cellphones, iPods, Wiis, Playstations, and god knows what other electronic devices are the end product of unimaginable human suffering. 6.9 million deaths. Countless lives destroyed. Misery beyond our ability to fathom.
Guess that’s why you never see this story reported upon by the Network and Cable News Channels. No TV cameras documenting massacres. No documentaries exposing the horrid and deadly trade in the minerals that come out of the Congo through Rwanda, scene of another epic mass murder. After all, those commercials for every new electronic device that comes down the pipeline every few months helps keep the media companies in business. Can’t piss off your advertisers by showing them to be aiders and abettors of crimes against humanity, can you?
Best not to speak of it. Wouldn’t be good for business. And yes I’m typing this from a PC with an Intel CORE processor that no doubt used materials for which others sacrificed their lives so Dell (in my case) could sell it to me.
Excuse me while I go and get sick to my stomach.
