Rebirth of a Realist

Shuttle Lunacy

2007-10-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

Shuttle Lunacy
Essay Forty-Four

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came back from her recent Middle East tour on Thursday Oct 18,2007. Her statement to the press was either out of a jet lag brain or scripted by the White House before she landed. She said, "there is moment of opportunity" for peace but much work was still needed to be done. She plans to return in two weeks. What opportunity?
"The teams are serious," she said. "The people are serious, the issues are serious, and so I'm not surprised that there are some tensions. I'm not surprised that there are some ups and downs. ... But I was encouraged by what I heard." WHAT?
She went to London ostensible to gain support from the King of Jordan for a Mideast peace
repeating the admonition that Israelis and Palestinians have a new "moment of opportunity" to forge peace, despite the obstacles. What?
Comics and cartoonists are having a field day with the woman who seems to believe that she is doing something important. The poor befuddled Secretary never appears to have a reference point.
Even during her many Trips back and forth the Israelis mock her. Israel announced on October 2,2003 it would build 565 new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Should that not have been her reference point?
Does not the "road map" peace plan require a freeze in construction in 150 Jewish settlements?
Should that not be her reference point? Wasn’t that a plan the US agreed to?
Israel has repeatedly violated that plan. Actually the so -called Road map Peace plan was nothing more than a political speech by Bush probably written by someone like Carl Rove. The U.S. State Department drafted it,
Fourth Geneva Convention, article 49 prohibits any occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory The Hague Regulations "prohibit the occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area, unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term.
Foundation for Middle East Peace reports Israel’s many violations such as Settlers from Tekoa set fire to 300 dunams of land owned by Palestinians from the nearby village of Tuqu’, damaging some 400 olive trees. (OCHA) IDF soldiers and security personnel guarding the Susiya settlement prevent a surveyor hired by Palestinians from surveying their lands in preparation for a presentation to the Israeli High Court. (OCHA)Settlers from Susiya force Palestinian landowners off land located near the settlement. (OCHA)Settlers from Hebron’s Beit Hadassa assault and injure a 13 year old Palestinian boy from Hebron City. (OCHA)OCHA reports on an investigation by the IDF into the uprooting of 300 olive trees belonging to a Palestinian farmer from Qaryut, Nablus. The IDF discovered that the trees had been uprooted by settlers from the Shilo outpost and 140 of them were replanted in the outpost. The IDF returned the trees to the farmer.
It is a land completely out of control and as Condi Rice waves and smiles from the steps of the plane, she give the impression that she is totally unaware of the depth of the problem and the hatred that has been allowed to fester all these years. She has very little if any credibility in the area and her frequent jaunts only add to her image of a lost diplomat without direction.
In all fairness to Secretary Rice what direction can she get from Dupya in the White House?
There is a great deal of talk in Russia about US President Roosevelt. Russian Television recently did a documentary stressing that Americans trusted FDR and so did the rest of the world.
Apparently Putin is comparing himself to Roosevelt. One can only imagine what Putin thinks of Secretary Rice as she flits in and out of Moscow.
It seems no one can capture the trust and credibility we all had in our Government under FDR. Cordell Hull, a man who literally came out of a Tennessee log cabin to become the Secretary of State under FDR before and during the war, would probably view Secretary Rice as I do. A butterfly flitting meaninglessly about and living a short political life.
When I was a young student I learned in History class that the expansionists were the evil ones like the Spaniards that raped and pillaged behind the cross through South America and the Japanese that did the same to China and the beastly nazis who did the same to Europe.
I was given to believe that Secretary Rice was a good student in school, but perhaps she had different teachers and different textbooks.
THE POLITICS OF DENIAL Pluto Press book Review
The 1948 war ended in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages and homes. Israeli settlers moved in to occupy their land and the Palestinian refugees found themselves in refugee camps, or in neighboring Arab countries. Today there are nearly four million Palestinian refugees -- and they want the right to go home. Their problem is the greatest and most enduring refugee problem in the world.
Ninety-three percent of the land is now characterized as Jewish land, meaning that no non-Jew is allowed to lease, sell or buy it.
Genevieve Cora Fraser once wrote from Ramallah
Is America a Servant to the Will of Israel? Is America a servant of Israel's Will?
"Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians since 1948 has also been to regard them as "untermenschen" sub-humans and never more so than today. In January 2001 Ha'aretz published an article by Amir Oren, "At the Gates of Yassergrad" which cites an Israeli officer's statement that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) studies the 1943 military tactics of the Nazi SS against the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, for application against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.Even without the Ha'aretz article, casual observation of the incarceration of the 3.5 million men, women and children of Palestine in concentration camp conditions within the confines of the Apartheid wall, electrified razor wire fence, Israeli-only roads, and nearly 900 checkpoints and roadblocks is a tip-off that something is up. When you add in the destruction of a million olive and fruit trees, farmlands, livestock and beehives, enforced starvation (bombing of the UN food warehouse and refusal to allow in food aid) and dehydration (reservoirs, wells and roof top water tanks destroyed by the IDF), curfews that spread into weeks and sometimes a month or more, plus 24/7 IDF assaults on civilians whose defense is the use of rocks, confiscated rifles and homemade bombs, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why the term neo-Nazi is common graffiti at certain protest sites.
So what is Secretary Rice’s point of reference?
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Jenna six, I'll sit this one out

2007-09-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

In Mid September 2007 I received a call from someone I did not know. The person asked me if I wanted to join in the protest to free the "Jenna six"
Six black students at Jenna High School in Central Louisiana were arrested after a school fight in which a white student was badly beaten. The fight began when the Black youths sat under a "White only" shade tree. The black students were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy.
I can remember that at the end of the Mississippi March for Freedom we were all lining up to march into Jackson. It was June 26,1966 and we were tired and depressed. The rifle butts, the tear gas and the billy clubs in Canton Mississippi, had turned us around and most of us felt that the non-violent Civil rights movement of Doctor King needed a new direction.
We tried to make the atmosphere seem like that of a victory parade and joked about where we were going next. I told Stokely Carmichael that I heard we were going on to "Lousyannna" He laughed and said, "I’ll be right behind you." To us "Lousyanna" was a lost cause.
Today Louisiana ranks third in the nation in the number of elected officials per capita convicted of crimes. The horror of New Orleans; the convictions of a Governor, attorney general, commissioners, a congressman, a federal judge, a state Senate president, to name a few of the convicted officials, still make Louisiana a place I would rather not go. Although I must admit that in my state of Connecticut we have the same list of convicted officials. I think that may be progress for Louisiana. In what some call the state’s black history none of them would have gone to trial.
It took three weeks before I decided to make my answer to the caller public. I do not want to be divisive. That is the last thing that we need.
Here is the essence of what I said.
Do not be a blind follower.

I can remember reading my mother’s literature about the struggle for justice for the "Scottsboro Boys," and her attempt to raise funds for defense attorney. Sam Liebowitz.
March 25, 1931 four black Chattanooga teenagers looking for work in Memphis hauling logs on the river and five other black teens were charged in Alabama of rape. One of the boys was only 13 years old. It was obvious and later proven that they were framed by a prostitute trying to keep herself out of court. The boys spent years in jail. Their lives were destroyed. It was a sophisticated well-orchestrated Lynching. It wasn’t easy during the depression for my mother to raise funds for the defense of four black teenagers in Alabama. I was a teenager myself by the time that I read the material, but I had already taken my stand on Civil rights in America.
I wonder which one, Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson got to Jenna first. We all know they are hopelessly hooked on TV cameras, but I ask you caller not to be a blind follower. You may be doing more harm than good.
Am I aware that racism is alive and well in the United States? Of course I am. Am I aware that the schools in our cities are more segregated today than they were before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus? Of course I am. Am I still ready to stand up to racism whenever it rears its ugly head? Of course I am. Am I willing to stand next to Jessie Jackson and listen to demagogic divisive harangues creating more tension? Of course, I am not.
I hear the old refrain from white residence of Jenna that say there is no race problem there. I heard the same kind of self-deception when I was trying to register voters in Mississippi or acting as a buffer between the red necks and the marchers during the Selma march. It was nothing new to me. ("Our darkies are happy") I attended high school in New Jersey and the school was integrated. It was a Republican conservative town. The whites always claimed that we had no race problem in town. I think they actually talked themselves into believing that. After school the blacks went to their section of town and the white students went to theirs. After all the post football game parties I attended I don’t ever remember seeing a black face at any of them although we had black players on our team. Things haven’t changed that much. Are blacks unfairly treated in the courts in Louisiana, I am sure they are, but I was a court watcher for the Connecticut Council of Churches and Blacks are treated unfairly in Connecticut also. White men charged with a crime would appear before court time and sit outside the prosecutor’s office. Their lawyer would then go in and make a deal with the prosecutor. His client would either just go home or make bail and wait for his deal to come up in court. Blacks could not afford a lawyer nor would a bail bondsmen trust them. They went to jail. I saw it happen over and over again and I doubt if those things have changed anywhere in America.
Would I join Doctor King again and demonstrate against a "white only tree" in front of a school? Yes I would. Would I object to unfair racist court proceedings? Yes I would. Would Doctor King support teen-age thugs who beat a boy senseless, kicked him in the head and risked killing him before he was taken to the hospital? I know he would not and neither will I.
Damn it! If you are going to march, find a real leader, a young committed person and march against segregation in the schools in Hartford Connecticut, Bridgeport, Los Angeles, Trenton, Chicago and almost every city in the country. March for more federal funding for our schools that will help the towns to integrate. There is a dangerous rage about to boil over again in America. Channel it for good and steer away from the demagogues who will grab any incident to elevate them-selves.

When will they ever learn

2007-09-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

"Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing? Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago? Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards, everyone.Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn? "
Recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, Words by Pete Seeger

The answer to Pete Seegar’s question is still blowing in the wind.
The only good thing about getting older is that you have the ability to see the past being repeated, but you always wonder why others can not. I hear the bla bla bla of crazy military men and the just as crazy politicians and I get depressed thinking that if I hang around any longer I will still not see or hear anything new.

"We have taught the enemy a lesson. He has found out that aggression is not cheap or easy. Moreover, men all over the world who want to remain free have been given new courage and New Hope. They know now that the champions of freedom can stand up and fight.
Our resolute stand in Korea is helping the forces of freedom now fighting in Indochina and other countries in that part of the world. It has already slowed down the timetable of conquest....
The new commander, Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, has already demonstrated that he has the great qualities of military leadership needed for this task."
Harry Truman 1950
The war in Korea was lost. Tens of thousand died.
General Westmoreland flashed his stars and medals after being called back to the US to generate new support for the war in Vietnam and the Johnson Administration. He testified before Congress and spoke before the National Press Club in Washington "With 1968," he said, "a new phase is starting. We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view." That was during the time he used the often quoted phrase "There is light at the end of the tunnel" With that phrase he tried to convince the American people that victory was near.
President Johnson had said that he would not be sending American boys to do the fighting that Vietnamese boys should be doing, but later he changed that to," our boys are fighting in the name of freedom"
It has always been my belief that president Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack, but as often is the case he had a military vision of the previous war and no idea of the damage that modern war fare could inflict in one blow. Johnson had the same arrogance and naivete when it came to military matters and thought that he could use World War Two tactics and bomb the Communists into submission. General Curtis LeMay said, "the U.S. should bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age"
. In his book "How We Lost the War in Vietnam", Nguyen Kao Ky, described the U.S. role in Vietnam as "misguided" and naïve."
The war in Vietnam was lost. Tens of thousands died.
On Tuesday January 23, 2007; Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new top commander in Iraq, ( also flashing his stars and medals) told Congress that sectarian violence has reduced Baghdad's population to a daily struggle for survival, undermined the U.S. strategy of handing responsibility to Iraqi forces and created the prospect of a "failed state."
Petraeus went on to say a new approach that would include pushing tens of thousands of additional U.S. and Iraqi troops deep into Baghdad neighborhoods, would allow the Iraqi Government to "come to grips with an "exceedingly difficult situation."
In his report to congress Monday, September 10, 2007 Gen. David H. Petraeus’ said
"The progress our forces have achieved with our Iraqi counterparts has, as I noted at the outset, been substantial. While there have been setbacks as well as successes and tough losses along the way, overall, our tactical commanders and I see improvements (light at the end of the tunnel) in the security environment
In closing, it remains an enormous privilege to soldier again in Iraq with America’s new "Greatest Generation." Our country’s men and women in uniform have done a magnificent job in the most complex and challenging environment imaginable. All Americans should be very proud of their sons and daughters serving in Iraq today."
. Previously in terse, short answers to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Casey did what no one dared to do since Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He doubted the president’s ability to conduct the war. It was risky and shocking, but at that stage I don’t think Casey had anything to lose.
Finally on September 13.2007 President George Bush said, "The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States."…"Now because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, ( more light at the end of the tunnel) we can begin seeing troops come home."
Bla Bla Bla
Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois. Said that, Gen. David Petraeus told her that the U.S. "will be in Iraq in some way for 9 or 10 years."
Even republican congressmen know that the war in Iraq is lost and thousands of American troops have already died and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died.
The question that Pete Seeger asked (when will they ever learn) is still not answered, but the question, when posed back in the sixties, implied that it was the soldiers and the raving generals and politicians that will never learn, but the question should be asked another way; when will the American people ever learn.

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Uneducated Graduates

2007-09-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Uneducated Graduates
I am often amazed at how some people with impressive academic credits can be so stupid when it comes to the most important subjects that affect their very lives? Cindy Sheehan described the out of touch, right wing spokes person William Kristol this way," By all accounts, Mr. Kristol is a brilliant man, who like his father before him, uses his brilliance for destruction. He is a shameless supporter of a failed, murderous, and miserable strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the "mushroom cloud" crowd. One thing Mr. William Kristol is not, is a combat vet."
I think she gives Kristol too much credit. Does she believe he is brilliant because he graduated from Harvard? George Bush graduated from Harvard, although I am yet to hear any Harvard folks brag about it. I never equated academic credentials with character or smarts and certainly not with moral structure.
All during the sixties the Kristol types baffled me. They claim to be patriotic and they are not. Patriots stand up for what they believe is in the best interest of their country not the best interests of a chosen few, or the best interests of a foreign state. They claim to be knowledgeable and they are not. One day I debated a representative from then Senator Tom Dodd’s office. (Chris Dodd’s father who was later censured by the congress) Dodd was a Vietnam War hawk. It soon became obvious to the audience that the man didn’t know much about the history or the oppression of the people of South East Asia nor did he know much about the political situation. I can remember him saying things like, "The people of Southeast Asia will be so grateful to us for bringing them democracy."
Cindy also reports," On February 20, 2003, Mr. Kristol incredibly gushed: "If we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world."

It is De’JA vu all over again as Yogi Berra said. What Arab world is he talking about? After the murder and mayhem we have brought the people of the region it will be a long time in hell before we can gain any respect there.

Essay Thirty Nine
Uneducated Graduates

Acadamia is shuddering and shaking like the empire.
Matthew Abraham said on September 5th, 2007 " I am an untenured, assistant professor at DePaul University in Chicago, where Norman G. Finkelstein, the most heroic critic of U.S. and Israeli policy in Palestine ever to set foot in the U.S. academy, was denied tenure over nearly three months ago. I was, and am, deeply saddened that DePaul University, the institution where I have chosen to make a career, has so effectively undermined its social justice mission in a series of actions that have put us, as a faculty body, in grave peril.
By capitulating to the threats, antics, and pressures of Alan Dershowitz, the Israel Lobby, and its numerous affiliates, DePaul has compromised something so integral to an educational institution’s mission, that once so compromised, it is impossible to regain. That something is institutional autonomy. An institution’s ability to withstand outside pressure, and economic coercion — which can often be tantamount to blackmail — is a must in an age of corporate scandal, sleazy deal making, and political cover-ups. The general public used to look to the academy for leadership, vision"

Noam Chomsky of MIT says, "[Dershowitz] launched a jihad against Norman Finkelstein simply to try and vilify and defame in the hope that maybe what he is writing will disappear."
Yes, this is the same Dershowitz that not only defended the Pollards who were found guilty of spying and giving US secretes to Israel, but also campaigned for their release. Obviously His country did not come first.
How can anyone call themselves a patriot when they write junk yard dog attack letters to the dean of a school asking them to refuse tenure to a respected professor simply because he does not like the professor’s writings? He made the professor so uncomfortable that he resigned. Dershowitz also has campaigned to keep others, who may say anything, negative about Israel from speaking at schools. He is Jewish and as such how can he not realize that he is the same as one of the brown shirt book burners?
The influence all of this has on students, in particular the Hillel members on campus must be enormous. If you do not like what someone says, try and get him or her fired. Dershawitz is a main contributor to the Divisiveness that leads to the isolation of many students on campuses. Extra security is needed when incidents like the showing of the very offensive Muslim Cartoons were shown on campuses. Thousands of Muslims worldwide protested both on and off the college campuses. One wonders who put them up to it on the Harvard campus.
More divisiveness is just what is not needed as we start this new school year.
The entire US education system is under duress. The "No child left behind act" has further divided the system. --Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said that "the U.S. higher education system is the envy of the world but primary and secondary schools are failing to adequately prepare students for college." Mr. Gates sends his three children to private schools and he himself is a college drop out. (Proving that the key to financial success is a college degree is not always a fact.) One of the wealthiest men in the world also said, "This nation has to do something very challenging, which is to provide a strong education to almost every student,"
It is true that if you are one of the football elite in high school or a member of the new phenomenon the girls basketball elite and a member of a minority group chances are good that you can go on to college. The chances are also good that you may join the ranks of America’s uneducated graduates. I have had conversations with students at some of America’s most prestigious citadels of higher learning and was amazed that they maintain such high averages in their masters of business administration classes and can not tell you anything about what really makes their government run.
As the rich in America get richer and the poor get poorer US News and World Reports published these figures. "An academic year at a typical public university is $16,400: $5,836 for tuition and fees, almost $7,000 for room and board, and an additional $3,500 or so for books, travel, and entertainment, If prices keep rising at the current rate, (6%per year) students who don't receive any grants will most likely pay more than $115,000 to reach graduation day."
In 2005 Act (The ACT test assesses high school students' general educational development and their ability to complete college-level work) reported half of last year's high school graduates did not have the reading skills they needed for college-level science and math courses. The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.
The 2007 report was glowing, well sorta, "Scores have trended upward for nearly all racial/ethnic groups since 2003. All groups with the exception of African American graduates posted an increase on their ACT composite score this year compared to last, with Asian American students showing a sizable gain of 0.3 point. Scores for African American students this year are 0.1 point higher than in 2003, but have fluctuated slightly in the intervening years, dropping 0.1 point this year compared to last year."
With the reorganization of the militant Students for a Democratic Society forming on many college campuses across the nation and the huge demonstration against the war Planned for Washington DC September 16, 2007 all taking place in a divided society and a divided student body I fear for our young people.
College campuses are just an extension of our society. The anger and alienation splitting racial and ethnic groups amid the fear and anxiety created by the Bush administration, with the help of the Dershewitz types, can soon lead to the violent explosion that will further accelerate the crumbling of the empire.

Trojan Horse

2007-09-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

"America is, by far, the most violent country in the world when measured against comparable, industrialized nations. Violence is deeply rooted in our society and has become woven into the fabric of the American lifestyle. A culture of violence has emerged that invades our lives at every level, from our most intimate relationships at home to our schools and work environments. For many of us, violence has become an acceptable strategy for solving conflict, exerting power and control, obtaining possessions, and satisfying emotional desires. Moreover, violence has itself become entertainment, glamorized in the behavior of both real and fantasy heroes."
California Attorney General Daniel E. Lungren
Essay Thirty Seven
Pure Bred American Violence
Attorney General Lungren made that statement back in 1995. The situation has not improved. It has, in fact, become much worse. There have been 202 homicides in the city of Baltimore alone this year, (2007) The city is headed for at least 300 murders this year. Those are murders alone. It does not include the hundreds of non-fatal shootings.
On any given day in America one can turn on the television set and watch, Kick Boxing, women boxing, extreme fights (Where anything goes, biting, kicking, punching and knees to the groin) There is also a daily fair of so called wrestling (where grown men break metal chairs over the backs of their opponents and perform other insane violent acts.) Add to that the films such as the one that was on while I was writing this piece. I left it on because I was too busy to shut the set after the news and it was so apropros of what I was talking about. The film was titled "Wyatt Erp". In the movie men are shooting men in scene after scene. If you do not want to watch a movie there are many violent detective stories that include all kinds of murder and mayhem for you to enjoy.
After they watch the movie Americans can turn on the local evening news and see how many fellow Americans were shot, knifed or just plain killed by other means in their community. That of course is followed by the death count from Iraq.
It is true that violence is inbred in Americans. It is part of our tradition and culture. We revel in the stories of the Wild West and the horrendous Civil War. We play World War Two movies over and over. Actors who were never in the service glamorize over emphasized violence in "the Longest Day" a movie about the Normandy invasion. It is played along with many other War movies very often on movie channels.
Do not miss-understand me. I am not saying that violence belongs to Americans alone.
I remember one day when I was speaking to a convention of Church youth groups about the Civil Rights struggle in America. During the question period one young women said," I am afraid to go downtown because they (meaning Blacks) are so violent." I lost my composer, for which I later apologized. "You mean like that (N) (I used the forbidden N word) Hitler who was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people Or that (again the N word) Truman who dropped the atom bomb and killed 70 thousand people in one day and then a few days later did the same thing again?"
No we Americans do not have a corner on Violence. No race or ethnic group does, but we have made a religion of it. We have poisoned each generation with it and allowed the mass media to ridicule those who oppose it. We have made it into the most profitable product that we produce. Like sex, violence sells. One can not watch an American football game without seeing the joy a "Great Hit" brings to the announcers. The "Great hits" are played over and over interspersed, of course, with commercials. Violence sells.
Two subjects that American politicians dare not touch without risking burned fingers, are Gun Control and of course the plight of the Palestinians. Both of these subjects are guarded by the most powerful lobbies in Washington and a political career can be dashed on the rocks by supporting the Palestinians who are suffering from the American intercourse with the Israelis’ violence (who came by their brand of violence suckling at the breast of the American military complex) and calling for gun control to protect Americans who are also suffering from their own violence.
US Children are ten times more likely to die from gunfire than in 25 industrialized nations combined. For young black males in the US guns are the leading source of death…In 1995 one in 12 students reported carrying a firearm or some other weapon. In 2004, 81 people were shot dead every day in the US according the US center for decease control. 29,569 were killed by firearms that year.. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reveals that every day; nearly eight children or teens are killed by gun violence in America which adds up to about 235 each month.
Where did they get the guns? That is the question gun control advocates continue to ask, but it is like trying to find an acceptable answer to the so called mid east crises. Everyone knows the answer, but no one can apply it. Let’s just dream for a minute. The answer to the gun lunacy can be simple. Guns, in particular hand guns, are used to kill people so the US government should take over all gun manufacturing businesses that make huge profits from the gun murder rate and see to it that only the law enforcement people and the military have guns. Why do any others need them?
There was a time, not too long ago, in England when even the Bobbies didn’t carry guns, but since the huge influx of illegal weapons they are now forced to carry them in order to protect themselves and the general public.
The gun nuts still parrot "Guns don’t kill people, People kill people." No, people with guns kill people more often. They will also quote from the second amendment to the constitution "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." June 21, 1788.
The small country of 1788 when much of the population had to hunt for food and many still worried about Indian wars was a much different place than the three hundred million divided population of present day America.
The second amendment should have been amended before the Wild West became so wild. For decades cowardly politicians have never been able to rewrite it so that it will really protect the people. After demands by law enforcement agencies who have found some of their men outgunned by outlaws (Protected by the second amendment) the best they could do is try and control military assault weapon being used by criminals. They even failed in that.
Oh my, how the neo-cons will scream. Take over an American business, that is socialism they will say. No, it is common sense to save the children and in turn save the nation. It might even inspire the United Nations members to demand weapons limitations. Of course, the merchants of death will also join the chorus and scream that is Marxism being promoted by the dangerous Peace people.

2007-07-26T07:04:00.000-07:00

Today a group of door to door Evangelists interrupted my work. I am not one given to rudeness, but I was annoyed. When I told them I wasn’t interested and tried to close the door they persisted. I told them if there was a God would he or she have made the two-legged killer called man? Would he or she have religionists all over the globe goading people to kill each other because only their religion is the right one?
Their stock answer is always; "God has a Plan."
It was shortly after lunch and I had just turned off the noon news. The five lead stories on the news were, " Family crushed." It was about two crazies who entered the home of a well-known physician and killed his wife and two daughters after raping them. Before leaving they set fire to the home. Then in order we heard about a body that was cut up and put in a barrel to float down the river, a truck driver who raped and left a women for dead, two knifings and one shooting. All that and we haven’t even gotten to the Iraq body count. Many times they just toss that in at the end of the news. If you are still there you may rejoice to hear that we killed 37 bad guys and only lost two of ours. Turner Broadcasting has decided to "go local" with all of their major news outlets and news rooms are nothing but men listening to police scanners and sending crews out to cover the mayhem.
With each idiotic war a spell is cast on the population. Today we must hate the unshaven Muslims who are worst then the Communists. The Communists didn’t believe in God, but these Muslims believe in the wrong God. They are out to kill us all in the name of the wrong God. They are called extremists. We are bombing them and we are shooting them and we are starving them in their land, but THEY are the extremists. We always seem to find masters of sorcery to lead us into these death traps.
Oh yes, what was I working on when they interrupted me. Tisha B’Av In Israel.
Tisha B’Av is the last day of mourning the destruction of the first and second Temples, both of which were destroyed by the Babylonians and the Romans. During the time of fasting and not washing, other tragedies that befell the Jewish people are remembered including the King of Spain declaring in 1492 that no Jew will ever walk on Spanish soil again. Israelis celebrate that they now are free.
At that time in Spain Father Tomas de Torquemada believed that as long as the Jews remained in Spain, they would influence the tens of thousands of recent Jewish converts to Christianity King Ferdinand and Isabella would not deny the church Many Spaniards gained financially from the tragedy as Jews had to sell their homes and businesses at very low prices. Dominican priests actively encouraged Jews to convert to Christianity and thereby gain salvation both in this world and the next. You see, God had a plan.
I can remember when I felt a sort of ancestral visceral pride in Israel, but that was when I related to a state that was created on socialistic stanchions. What has it become? We see a mall built right in front of the old city that Israel has "Liberated." Corruption and crime are out of control led by the Sorcerers. Ex presidents escape jail time for charges of sexual harassment and indecent acts. Others in the circle of the sorcerers like Omir Sharon son of the former Prime Minister, Naomi Blumenthal convicted of Bribery had her sentence commuted. All this while Israeli jails are bulging with innocent people whose only crime is they resented their temple and homes being destroyed by the Israelis. We hear about the starvation and terrible poverty in Gaza, but Jews are hesitant to admit that extensive poverty in Israel is shameful for many reasons, One it are constantly fund raising and no one knows where the money goes. When American tax payers who are sending Israel 3 to 6 billion dollars a year ask where does the money go we are told it is none of our business, but the real shame is the poverty being suffered by the elderly Holocaust victims. Those who touched the conscience of the world and were chiefly responsible for the creation of the state are powerless and poor.
The so-called Jewish State is nothing of the kind if you use the word Jewish to describe a religion. The battle goes on between the orthodox who are right in saying Israel was created as a Jewish state and they say if you abandon that you have no more rational for taking someone else’s home and land. You can no longer claim that God gave you the land. They insist on more religion in schools and a close adherence to Jewish law. The majority rejects them, but the majority must cling to the rational that God gave them the land.
Religionists are appalled at the corruption that gives developers the right to turn the so-called Holy Land into Long Island. The pollution of the rivers, the clogged and dangerous roads and the ever present swingers with their gambling casinos and legal houses of prostitution makes the religionist warn, History will show Israel died an early death by its own hand.

Revival

2007-07-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

The first demonstration that I can remember was when my mother took me to the New York waterfront to join her labor group. We carried signs asking the President to stop sending scrap Iron and other war materials to Japan. It was shortly after Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany.
Since my discharge from the Navy in December of 1945 and the time spent with college and bar hopping, it seems my life was one long battle. Progressive Party, Korean War, Civil rights, Vietnam War, Zionism, and all stops in between. Would I trade it for a life of security in my little cubby at the insurance company? No, but I hold no malice toward those that seek that security. Most of them are good family people and are needed just as farmers and carpenters and others are needed, but my genes were bent in another direction.
The following essays are a synopsis of an activist’s quest for truth. I have always held the belief that Secretary Dag Hammarskjold so beautifully articulated, "In our era the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action."
David Truskoff

The years go by and the struggle is endless.
Sometimes it all seems so senseless.
Demonstrations, marches, tear gas and jail,
Ten days the judge says and you can’t make bail.
School chums wonder what made you who you are.
And how can you make the payment on the new car?
They patronize and admit that you are right,
But, they, "can’t afford" to get into the fight.
"How long," King asked, "not long he answered"
The audience repeated, "not long, not long"
and I knew that I was where I belong.
The empire is crumbling, but it’s a good thing
because the mendacious are frightened, panic has set in.
Will I have to share they wonder. What will tomorrow bring?
Peace and freedom for all, the whole world will sing.
Was it all worth it? fighters for justice may ask,
No problem for me to answer, You bet your ass.
David Truskoff

Who am I

2007-06-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

Who am I?
As a small boy I had to endure the pain of not knowing who I was.
My parents moved to a town in New Jersey that was populated mostly by Catholic polish immigrants who were brought over by the slave traders with help from the church to work in the rubber and textile mills. They were greatly influenced by the anti-Semitic Detroit Radio priest father Coughlin, who often referred to the president of the United States as President Roosenfeld. At Easter time, when the priests came around to bless the kielbassa and Ham and get their hand out, Polish kids threw rocks at me because I killed Jesus.
At school we had to start the day by taking turns reading from the bible. The teacher always gave me the same page to read from. "The ungodly are not so, They are like the chaff that the wind driveth away." I could feel her eyes burning in my back.
My father’s family in the old country were non-practicing Russian Orthodox and my mother’s family Orthodox Jews. Neither of my parents were religious, although my mother did keep a set of kosher dishes for family visits.
I have never been a member of any church or temple, and I was astounded years later when I was in Israel to listen to the debates over who is or is not a Jew. I remember when I asked my mother. "Mom, am I a Jew?" Her answer was always the same. "I am a Jew so therefor you are a Jew. That’s all there is to it." "But if you don’t come from Jewland and you call the rabies gonifs how can you be a Jew?" My mother never called herself a Jew. She said she was an American of Russian Yiddish descent. That didn’t help me because then Yiddish was a derogatory word like the infamous N word.
It was all so confusing. If your family came from Ireland you were an Irish American. If they came from Italy you were an Italian American. My parents came from Russia so how come I was a Jewish American. I didn’t mind being a Jewish American and I still don’t.
Israeli Law of Return is not a law at all because it still defies definition. Russian is a second language in Israel and most of those who speak it are not religious Jews and many do not call themselves Jews at all.
Wikipedia includes the following paragraph "the registering of "nationality" on Israeli Teudat Zehut ("identity card"). This is also controlled by the Ministry of the Interior, which has generally only registered as a "Jew" those who meet the traditional definition according to the (Orthodox) Chief Rabbinate. However, in a small number of cases the secular Supreme Court of Israel has forced the ministry to register as Jews individuals who did not meet that definition." WHAT?
Uri Avnery said, "Anyone who calls himself a Jew is a Jew." WHAT?
My wife insists that Jewish means religion and genetics has nothing to do with it. It is an important subject because those who blindly support Israeli aggression do so because they feel if there is no "Jewland" i.e. Israel and they do not belong to any religious group they are faced with the same dilemma I had.
That is forever asking the question, who am I? To them Jewish is not religious, not political, but simply a nationality.
I solved it long ago with the help of Avnery. When I brought him to America for a book tour, my mother was already too sick to talk to him, but he taught me to separate Zionism, religion, and the awful Israeli politics from my mother’s beautiful Yiddish culture and I am free to oppose the madness of greater Israel.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

2007-06-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

Shrill lies getting louder and more shrill
A statue purported to be a memorial to victims of Communism worldwide was unveiled on June 13,2007 In Washington D.C. The propaganda show kicked off a barrage of lies that would even make the wild eyed claims of the Hearst press and the New York times of 1933 seem mild.
Cal Thomas, Tribune Media Services, wrote on June 15, 2007.
"The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression" by Stephan Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin lists by country the number of people murdered under communist regimes: 65 million (and counting) in China; 20 million in the Soviet Union, 2 million (and counting) in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam." Other hysterical screaming followed; "Who knows that the communist holocaust has exacted a death toll surpassing that of all of the wars of the 20th century combined."
President Bush at the unveiling said, "In short, communism, an evil ideology unlike any the world has seen, is responsible for the slaughter of more than 94 million human beings. It tops all plagues, natural disasters, crime, and other political ideologies, probably combined. According to the best scholarly estimate, Communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union."
In Moscow Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov who narrowly lost the 1996 Russian presidential election to Boris Yeltsin, was quick to respond. He called the memorial an "attempt to distract the attention of world opinion from the bloody evils of American imperialism as a whole."
Since the Russian Revolution of 1917 the US media propaganda barrage of anti-communism was steeped in lies and hypocrisy, but today it has reached a new level of hysteria and sophism. A brief look at truth and real history shows that in the early thirties America was in the throes of the Great depression. Millions were out of work and there was no safety net for the poor and hungry. Thousand died for lack of proper nutrition and health care. Socialism and the radical labor movements were forming in the States. It was, the conservatives thought, imperative for the media to try and distract Americans and steer them from the left by claiming the famine in Russia was a Communist plan to kill millions of their own people. For years they hammered away at that lie and the lie took on a life of its own growing like the puppet's nose longer and longer.
The 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine had many causes. The main cause was the anti Communist effort led by the kulaks and those who wanted to return to the days of the Tsars. They fought against giving up their land and their oppressive hold on the peasants. In the face of losing their power they began a system of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a blow to Stalin’s idea of collectivization. He felt the shared machinery and free workers could produce more Soviet agriculture, Kulaks slaughtered tens of thousand of live stock. Some armed themselves and joined the anti-Semitic Black hundreds and murdered officials, burned the property of some of the collectives, and even burned their own crops. What followed was the horrible famine of 1933.
Add to that the terrible drought that hit the area causing more sickness and death in the remote areas. ANOTHER FACTOR overlooked by the US media was the disruption following the Russian revolution by the ruthless 15,000 troops the US sent to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok as part of an Allied force in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Until the late thirties many other attempts were made by covert operatives to overthrow the Soviet Government. Yes, through all that chaos, many died. It must have been the most difficult situation to try and raise crops in. By 1934 the Russian famine was ending, but the US needed ten years and World War 11 to recover from the disastrous economic bust the robber barons of the twenties created.
In September of 1947, the Russians proposed at the UN a mutual withdrawal of USSR and US troops from the peninsula of Korea. The UN in 1947 declared that elections should be held throughout the entire country to choose one government to unify the country. The US rejected the proposals. The south under the advice of the US held its own election and created an independent Republic of Korea with Dictator Syngman Rhee as its leader. Rhee Threatened to "annihilate the north" prompting the civil war.
U.S. President Truman authorized the use of American land, sea, and air forces in Korea. On 7-1-1950. The Army's 24th Infantry Division became the first US troops to arrive in Korea. That intervention into a civil war led to American battle deaths that totaled 33,629 and another 20,617 deaths from other causes making a total of 54,246. The number of wounded came to 103,284. Almost half a century later the US still has 37 thousand troops stationed in Korea. The gunboat diplomacy that FDR rejected and the ignoring of a democratic election was the criminal act resulting in that disaster.
The people of Vietnam took the opportunity to establish their own government lead by Ho Chi Minh after the Japanese withdrew. However, at the end of the war the Allies gave back South Vietnam to the French while the North was left in the hands of the non-communist Chinese The Russians didn’t invade Vietnam in 1954, we did. There was an election, but once again America refused to recognize a democratic election. The result that time was approximately 3 to 4 million Vietnamese on both sides were killed in addition to another 1.5 to 2 million Lao and Cambodians who were drawn into the war. More than 58,000 Americans died and another 304,000 were wounded.
This month America has again refused to recognize a democratic election in Gaza. These deceitful machinations have taken their toll on the frustrated American public who feel they have lost their hold on their own country.
One needn’t wonder why the Communist bogeyman has been resurrected. America’s Gunboat diplomacy of the last fifty years has fueled anti America and leftist movements all over the world, but as the US ship of state begins taking on water the screaming liars intend to go down with the ship.
Sadly, I do not see any FDR type savior on the horizon to throw us life jackets and save our ship.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Connect the dots

2007-06-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

Connect the dots of those who are connected
Start connecting the dots at the very beginning.
On the 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag (German parliament) caught fire. Hitler described the fire as a "beacon from heaven". History shows that it removed many obstacles to the Nazi power grab and led directly to the rise of Hitler and the brutal killing spree that followed. Communists were blamed, and many were rounded up and imprisoned, but evidence shows the Nazi’s were responsible for the fire. "You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in German history...This fire is the beginning," Hitler told a news reporter at the scene. What followed was death, destruction, and horror. The Bush family is all too well acquainted with that part of history as Prescott Bush (GW’s grandfather) was instrumental in bringing Hitler to power. One former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor insisted that Prescott Bush should have been prosecuted for, "giving aid and comfort to the enemy."
(I can not believe that the Republican Party of Connecticut still has the annual Prescott Bush honor dinner.)
Shortly after George Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, the US stock market seemed to be crumbling. The 171.32-point drop on August 30, 2001 left the Dow down more than 500 points for that week alone. Markets the world over caught the jitters and showed signs of crashing. Close to $5 trillion in paper wealth was wiped out. Personal debt, caused by credit card and ballooning mortgages was rising by an average of 8.2% a month. Thousands of workers were being laid off. Americans were unhappy. They did not feel that they had elected GW Bush, but that the election was stolen and Bush was appointed by a stacked Supreme Court. He had no mandate from the people. There was an American mind lock and a yawning void waiting to be filled by a political explosion. The explosion came on September 11, 2001.
There were people who knew a way to save Bush and the empire. Names jump at you. Larry Silverstien. Rupert Murdoch, Frank Lowy, Lewis Eisenberg, among others.
There is nothing really new here. It has all been written about before, but facts are piling up and now that the big payoff has occurred on May 24,2007 and the money trail becomes more visible, it all must be brought before the world again, and again and again. We must not allow 9/11/01 to simply pass into history. Those who suffered the unspeakable crimes that followed scream for justice.
As the reign of the Bush family comes to an end and the empire shudders and shakes, perhaps a new Nuremberg Tribunal will mete out punishment for those responsible for the tens of thousands who died and the suffering of millions of others as a result of that awful Tuesday 9/11/01.
The deadly dust had not yet settled when the drums of war began to beat. Murdoch’s pro Israel New York paper, (New York Post, 9/12/01) headlined "Kill THE BASTARDS. An editorial stated, "The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift-- kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts."
That kind of inciting gutter, journalism was poured into the eyes and ears of people the world over via the Murdoch Media Empire and there was no letup for years. The Muslim community was astounded by the hate of Fox news and other Murdoch outlets. Murdoch’s unabashed support of Bush and his own devotion to Israel made him a well-known figure to those who took control of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction.
Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy, who leased the WTC property six weeks before 9/11, insisted on the unusual insurance coverage under Terrorist acts, added to the contract. Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg approved the transfer of the leases. One has to wonder how that all came down.
On March 19.2001, Lewis M. Eisenberg released this statement, " re: Net Lease of World Trade Center.
"In connection with the net lease of the World Trade Center, on February 22, 2001, the Port Authority entered into an exclusive negotiating period with Vornado Realty Trust. During this period, Port Authority staff and its advisors, JP Morgan, Cushman & Wakefield and Milstein Brothers Realty Advisors have worked with representatives of Vornado to complete the contract and associated transactional documents. In view of the lack of a final agreement at this time, the Port Authority's Board of Commissioners has instructed staff and our advisors to engage in exclusive negotiations with Silverstein Properties and Westfield America to conclude a 99-year net lease transaction."
In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties were granted a $861 million settlement from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties investment in WTC 7 was approximately $386 million. Silverstein Properties gained almost half a billion. More litigation was to follow.
It is well known that Murdoch, Silverstein and Eisenberg were members and supporters of
many right wing Zionist organizations. It is also well known that Ariel Sharon, the man responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and Murdoch were friends and Sharon looked to Murdoch for support. Murdoch was also a friend and supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu who said on the day of the 9-11 attacks, "It's very good (for American and Israeli relations)…Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)."
As soon as I heard about the Mossad agents being present and taking pictures across from the twin towers on 9/11/01 I immediately thought of The Lavon affair in 1954. The Israeli secret service set up a spy ring in Egypt with the purpose of blowing up US and British targets. The operation was code-named "Susanah." The terrorist hits were to be blamed on the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, with the purpose of alienating the US and Britain from Egypt and Nasser. A bomb exploded prematurely and the ring was discovered. Israel denied knowledge and kept the information from its own citizens until the secret could be kept no longer.
On 9/11/01 police received several calls from angry New Jersey residents claiming "middle-eastern" men with a white van were videotaping the disaster with shouts of joy and mockery. The men in the white van were stopped and arrested in East Rutherford NJ.
On 9/12/01, The New York Times reported that a group of five men had set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers prior to the attack on Tuesday, and were seen congratulating one another afterwards. The Jewish weekly The Forward reported that the FBI finally concluded that at least two of the detained Israelis were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this, and they noted that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. The Israelis were held in custody for 71 days before being quietly released. If by their own admission, "they were there to document the event" does that not mean, to any intelligent person, that they knew in advance what was going to happen?
After 9/11 on a PBS documentary Silverstien admitted that he made the decision to have the building WTC 7 "pulled." meaning he planned to have it taken down well before the disaster. Not Silverstein himself or his daughter who normally would be in the building were present on 9/11/01.
On May 24, 2007 an AP story stated, "The builders of the World Trade Center site and seven insurers have reached a $2 billion settlement that ends all outstanding legal battles over its multibillion-dollar policy, state officials said Wednesday."
Gov. Eliot Spitzer and state Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo announced the settlement after leading two months of talks with the insurers, trade center developer Larry Silverstein and the site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The $2 billion, added to $2.55 billion already paid out since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that destroyed the trade center, is about $130 million less than the amount awarded to rebuild the site after the trial in 2004.
So those connected all got what they wanted. Silverstein got his money. He will rebuild and hold a 99-year lease. Murdoch sold a lot of papers and got the hate Palestinians propaganda into high gear. The Israelis got millions more of American taxpayers dollars and as Benjamin Netanyahu said, "a lot of sympathy".
Bush became the ‘war’ President and The Commander in Chief.
No one except a seemingly deranged man (Zacarias Moussaoui) went to jail.
Tens of thousands have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the oil barons are running amuck. Murdoch’s media still controls the minds of millions of people. Realists are wondering are the people going to allow the 9/11 commission report to stand? Should we not be demanding a new investigation? Do we not owe that to the children of Iraq and the millions of other suffering people including Americans?
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Seeds Of Disaster

2007-05-23T06:44:00.001-07:00

SEEDS OF DISASTER
):
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
Galatians VI (King James Version):
When my father first came to the United States in 1905 he went to work at a job he hated in the coal mines of West Virginia. He said he thought he would do that until he learned the language.
The trouble was the "Slavers," who at that time, brought the workers to the US kept them in segregated groups. The Polish workers spoke Polish and the Italians Italian. Frustrated, my father left and made his way to New York. He soon joined a Russian speaking group who sponsored English classes for new emigrants. There he met my mother and for years and four children later they continued to tease each other about their accents. "No. " my father would say, "it’s not Ott Hiron, Its hot Iron." And my mother would answer, "It’ not wegatbles it’s Vegetables. Although both spoke many other languages and my mother could switch from Russian to Polish to Yiddish to German in one conversation, they would never allow the children to speak any language but English. They did not want us to have a "Hacksent" We were all taught to be proud of our heritage and we were always aware of our parent’s love for their old country and culture that they left to survive the famine and terrible hardship.
I often think about my parents when I hear arguments for dual language in the American school systems. The results have been devastating to millions of new young Americans. They are kept outside the herd. They always feel that they are visitors not members of the society. African Americans in particular living in northern Black Ghettoes retain the old slave mentality. Black television, like Spanish television perpetuates that mentality. Both groups segregate themselves mostly because of lack of language skills.
I get very emotional when I think of the SPECIAL DEDICATION I wrote in my book The Second Civil War.
"To the great patriots; Little Jimmy Jackson, Reverend Reeb,
Shwerner, Goodman, Chaney and Liuzzo who gave their lives in
the fight for freedom and justice and specially to the wonderful
young freedom fighters who showed us adults the way."
We let them and all the other "freedom Fighters of the1960s Civil rights movement "down. Forty years later Spanish speaking children are struggling in school and dropping out. Over four million students are expected to enter high school next semester and almost half of the minority students will not graduate and CNN this week reported, "a third -- or more than a million -- will never graduate. They are coming to high school with poor math and reading skills, become bored and frustrated, and then drop out. Graduation rates peaked in 1969 and have declined for most of the past 30 years. And of those who do graduate, too many lack the skills to enter college."
We are speaking of America’s future. It is the most important subject for Americans to tackle, yet I have not heard one of the, party created, presidential candidates speak about it.
The US Census Bureau released official statistics showing a slight rise in the poverty rate from 2003 to 2004 and a decade-long trend of growing income inequality highlighted by rising revenues for the top 20 percent of households and a drop in earnings for the bottom 60 percent.. It is well known among economists, media, and politicians that income is extraordinarily concentrated among the population. According to the State of Black America 2005, the income level of African American families is only one-tenth of that of white families, and the welfare enjoyed by Black Americans is only three-fourths of their white counterparts. In 2004, the poverty rate was 24.7 percent for African Americans, 21.9 percent for Hispanics, and 8.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites. In New Orleans, 100,000 of its 500,000 population lived in poverty; with the majority of them being black Americans. The homeownership rate for blacks is 48.1 percent compared with 75.4 percent for whites. Although blacks are just 12.2 percent of the American population, 41 percent of American prisoners detained for more than one year are blacks, and 8.4 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars. Only 29 % of students in a Connecticut all black school graduates with their class. The drop out rate leads to the unbelievable rate of street shootings in our cities. All of our cities have become places of fear. Guns are everywhere. Dig deep into those young minds and you will find they do not feel their citizenship.
IRS records from 2002 and 2003, shows that the average income for the top 1 percent of earners in the nation rose by $49,000 while the bottom 75 percent of US residents saw their incomes drop.
By 2007 DAVID CAY JOHNSTON wrote in the March 19,2007 New York Times. "Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.
The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000 also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.
While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.
The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980."
Education, as everyone knows, is directly linked to income. How can any American not be panicked? If this trend continues with the seemingly unstoppable high school drop out rate what will the income gap be in just one more decade? Are we really on a runaway train headed for depression and more violence? Can our military based foreign policy be maintained in the face of such a fracture in our society? Those questions seem to escape all of the Party candidates. If there is a savior he or she is not yet visible.

Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Trickle Down Economics Perpetuates War

2007-04-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

The Trickle down theory of economics has been a Conservative political anthem for a century. Even though most economists admit that it doesn’t work greed still prevails and old trickle down spreads around the world.
The theory is that if you get investors, foreign and local to invest in companies and give the companies large tax breaks, the profits they make will trickle down to the workers. It’s like the old Wobblies song (International Workers of the World) "there will be pie in the sky when you die THAT’S A LIE!"
The folks that put words and ideas into the mouth of Ronald Reagan in the economic insanity of the 1980s cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then down to 28%. How well I remember Reagan’s budget director David Stockman telling American workers that the tax cuts would stimulate the American economy and benefit the workers.
Cold war profits soared, but the number of people below the poverty level
increased from (31.8 million) to (39.3 million) according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The federal budget deficit grew from $74,000 million in 1980 to $221,000 million in 1986 and what was called the greatest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the 1930s left the working poor devastated and facing foreclosures on their homes.
From 1986 to 1989, 296 savings and loan institutions with total assets of $125 billion were forced to close and many workers realizing the American dream of home ownership for the first time lost their homes.
An April 10, 2007, editorial in the New York Times claimed a net loss of homeownership for up to one million families and challenges Congress and state governments to determine whom to hold accountable. It is not whom, but What."
Henry Wallace, vice President under FDR and Presidential candidate then, said back in 1948 "War preparations create record profits for big business, but only false prosperity for the people—their purchasing power shrinks as prices rise, their needs go unfilled, and they are burdened with new debts." He was right then, as Harry Truman prepared for the war In Korea and became the worst trickle down labor president in history, and Wallace would be right today.
Trickle down has never worked; it is not working now. It is a steroid for greed as Russian workers have found out and the Chinese are beginning to understand. It has caused the old cast system in India to be born anew. Countries, that allow foreign investors to buy into their companies and control the workers and the countries resources, quickly discover that trickle down does not trickle. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That is always a formula for social upheavals.
The major cheerleader for Wall Street, the Associated Press gleefully reported on April 20, 2007 that "the signs of a surging economy are every where in China, but Chinese leaders are trying to apply the breaks." It is not the inflation that they have caused that they fear; it is the workers anger.
In my book "The Genes Of Gregoria" I quote a Russian economist who was old, sick and dying. He earned many medals fighting the great war against the Nazis, but after seeing the boorish drunk Yelstin give away the nations resources and insert the trickle down, he shouts at his wife, "Is that what so many of my comrades died for…so a few Russians could get rich?"
At a book show in New York two years ago, a Chinese editor took my book home. Is that what you fear for China?" she asked by email "Yes," I replied. "Greed feeds on greed." Thousands of holocaust survivors living in Israel live in shameful poverty, as Trickle down is a stanchion of Israel’s economy. Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund.
Trickle down creates and thrives on war. War profits do not trickle down they land on the workers drip by drip, but inflation keeps them at the faucet trying to survive. Those of us who call ourselves "peace people" do what we can issue by issue. We try, but only if we can cut off the serpent’s head will real peace arrive. The serpent is greed and it feeds at the trough of Trickle down Economics.

Am I A Racist?

2007-04-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

THE CONFUSED AMERICAN LEFT ask, am I a Racist?
Jackie Robinson the icon of American baseball was the first black player to play in the Baseball major leagues. Both the political right and the politic left claimed Robinson as their own.
On April 15, 2007, the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's MLB debut, Major League Baseball invited players to wear the number 42 just for that day to commemorate Robinson.
Robinson made his Major League debut on April 15, 1947
What few Americans know is that the American Communist party was the driving force that broke the baseball color line.
The Communist newspaper the "Daily Worker" pounded the issue for years prior to Robinson’s emergence. A sports writer for the "Daily Worker" named Lester Rodney wrote pointed articles that not only embarrassed the wealthy owners of the teams, but brought demonstrators to Ebbets field in Brooklyn the home field of the Brooklyn Dodgers the team Robinson was to play for. Ebbets field became a shrine for the left. My own brother was one of the demonstrators. It was no wonder that the left felt Jackie was one of their own when the FBI opened a file on Jackie and brought him before the house un-American activities Committee after he appeared at the Harlem Solidity Center of the " International Workers Order," listed as a "Red" organization.
Years after Robinson left baseball he became a vice-president for the Chock Full O' Nuts
. Coffee Company that employed blacks in their many restaurants, and that is when I first met him in 1963. I was booking him on a television show to promote the Coffee Company. I expected him to arrive via a chauffeur -driven car, but no I picked him up at the train station and brought him to the TV station where I worked. After the show we sat in the car and talked. It was early and he did not want to wait at the station and be bothered by autograph seekers. I was already known as a Civil rights activist and that was a subject he welcomed. I was horrified when he told me that he was going to support the right wing candidate Richard Nixon for president. I mentioned the Daily Worker and the effort of the left to bring him to baseball, but he said that John Kennedy "couldn’t even look me in the eye." And the civil rights issue was his main concern. It was devastating to the Liberals and the leftists. It created a serious breach. Many thought that he had been bought off with the Chock Full Of Nuts Job. How could Jackie Robinson, who owed so much to the left turn his back on them?
It was a hard lesson for all of us and today I must think back at that time. Yes there were racists among us liberals then and even though Robinson was himself the grandson of a slave many doubted his mental ability to see Real America. There was much talk then about a prominent Professor’s theory that African Americans were mentally inferior.
Today the liberals are once again asking themselves the question," "Am I, after all, a racist?" On April 4,2007 a morning "Shock Jock" which is terminology " used to describe filthy mouthed low level characters who elevate themselves by using their power of the airwaves to insult people went too far. This time the shock Jock called "Imus" referred to a predominately black college women’s basketball team as a group of, "nappy-headed hos." If you are an intelligent adult you probable never heard the expression or know what it means. African American hair can sometimes be Kinky or nappy. Hair strengthener ads dominate Black magazines. The "Ho" I am told refers to whore. I myself while driving into the city have heard this man make such stupid remarks about one of his co-workers on the air, but this one gave the self declared professional Black leaders a media feast. The result was that Imus was fired.
Jessie Jackson who can smell a TV camera a mile away lodged a protest, and demanded Imus be fired. This is the same Black Jessie Jackson that once called New York City "Hymmie Town" a very offensive anti- Semitic remark and one that set race relations back many years.
In a recent survey by a television station 67% of respondents said they do not believe that Imus should have been fired for his remarks and that is a red alarm for America. The Imus issue has placed many Americans between Jessie Jackson; Al Sharpton and the other so called Black leaders and a white Shock Jock.
Black Television programs; modern Black music and Black attitudes in general are all in the line of fire. Liberal left Americans particularly Jews who can no longer deny or defend the blatant racism of Zionism and dreamed along with Doctor King about a better America are disappointed in Black efforts to help bring that about and are again asking themselves the question, am I, after all, a Racist.

What do young Jews know

2007-04-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Germans are the most gifted and most highly educated people who ever devoted the full strength of a modern state to stopping the exchange of ideas; they are the most highly organized people who ever devoted all the coercive power of government to the abolition of their own intellectual life; they are the most learned people who ever pretended to believe that the premises and the conclusion of all inquiry may be fixed by political fiat."
Walter Lippmann. (1936), The Good Society
In 1939 my father, who always wanted his children to "fight through the smog
of propaganda and see the truth," took me to Union City New Jersey, not far from our home, to witness German American Bund members march through the streets, swastikas and all. I remember him shouting swear words at them in Russian and English. We joined other members of his trade-Union there. I was fifteen and confused. "Why?" I kept asking him, "are they not Americans?"
"Because they are afraid to be called un-German" was his answer. He explained that from the early thirties The German Students' Association conducted a propaganda campaign named "Against the Un-German Spirit" that led to the idiotic book burning.
and masochistic destruction of wonderful German culture that began to bloom again following the First World War.
Many first and second generation German Americans were afraid to oppose Nazism for fear they would be classified as" UN-German" and their life in the German communities in which they lived would become unpleasant. .
A February 1939 rally was held claiming that white gentiles were the "true American patriots and German Americans who did not understand that Hitler was their leader were Un-Germans." This Madison Square Garden rally drew a crowd of 20,000 who consistently booed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chanted the Nazi salutation "Heil Hitler."
The German American Bund closely cooperated with the "Christian Front" organized by the anti-Semitic priest Father Charles Coughlin who spewed anti-Semitic
Hatred from his radio pulpit.
Does it all sound familiar? Perhaps Walter Lippmann could say the same thing about present day Israel.
Today in 2007 young Jews know very little, if anything, about the campaign to make Young German Americans afraid to be called UN-German and to make it unpleasant for them in their own community. Even if they did, I doubt that it would make any difference for as Henry David Thoreau said, "Every generation laughs at the old and follows religiously the new."
No, I am not Un-Jewish or a Jewish self-hater, or anti-Semitic. I am opposed to the atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people by out of control Zionism and I stand with the peace makers in Israel.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Rachel Corrie

2007-03-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Rachel Corrie, a martyr’s Voice as powerful as that of Ann Frank.
The new Jew: personified by the Israeli, muscular tanned Sabra, is a new breed far removed from the Image of the depression-emaciated holocaust Jew of the thirties and forties. He has a new body and a new mind. The transformation however has left the new Jew with out the compassion and sensitivity that I loved about my families’ Jewishness.
The ruthlessness of the IDF: the horrific criminal cluster bombing of Lebanon and the shameful acts of starving children on the West Bank, are crimes against humanity that all Jews will someday have to answer for. The continuing acts of forcing the Palestinians into such dehumanizing poverty puts those responsible not only in the category of the oppressed becoming the oppressors as President Truman described them, but as the worst criminals in history, the Nazis.
The perfect illustration of the blind faith mentality of the new Jew is the pressure brought against a theater to stop the showing of the Rachel Corrie play in New York. They would stop the story of Rachel Corrie, but ask all of us Jews to remember the story of Ann Frank.
I am thankful however to see a rebellion brewing by those who seek to restore the Jewish compassion and tradition of resisting the very tyrannical acts Zionism has wrought on the people of Palestine. Young People including Jews were at the forefront of restoring the Rachel Corrie play and bringing it to the people
On March 16 2003 a bulldozer driven by an Israeli army soldier killed Rachel Corrie. Many believe as I do that the killing was deliberate and to teach other peace activists a lesson.
Rachel, was only 23 years old and her life was full of promise. In a statement Released by her parents last year her mother said, "We are greatly concerned for the non-violent internationals volunteering in the Occupied Territories. We ask that members of Congress call upon the Israeli government to cease harassment of these individuals and, specifically, to cease firing upon them when they are engaged in protecting the Palestinian water supply, protecting Palestinian homes from illegal demolitions, and retrieving bodies of murdered Palestinians for return to their families – all events Rachel witnessed."
As we honor the memory of Rachel Corrie on this the fourth anniversary of her killing which, blind faith, new Jews continue to rationalize, we older Jews must pledge to keep on striving for a new teaching that will replace blind faith Zionism.
The place to begin that is here at home in the USA March 17th in Washington D C. There we will be bringing a message to the gang in the White House. That message will be, "It's over." The people have had enough. That is how we will honor the memory of Rachel Corrie, and that is how we will try and save the new Jew.

2007-03-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

Perhaps We can Still AvoidThe Third Civil War
By David Truskoff
10 March, 2007Countercurrents.org
March 7th 1965 is the day the Selma civil rights marchers were beaten trying to march for freedom. On March 9th we re-grouped and started the historic Selma to Montgomery Freedom March. Presidential candidates are planning to attend this year’s anniversary celebration. They will again embarrass most of us who made that March with their hypocritical promises of a better America for all races.
When I wrote the book THE SECOND CIVIL WAR it was with a great deal of emotion and yes, some tears. I think that it is important that on this day liberals at least read the introduction to the book.
INTRODUCTION
The first time that I met LeRoy Jerome Moton was in March of 1965, one hundred years after the first battle of Selma. He was in his late teens, and the Messiah had come to his hometown. The six-foot gangling youth glowed in the Messiah’s reflection.
It was all a beautiful dream. Martin Luther King, that very articulate, internationally famous, Black man had come to Selma Alabama to lead them to the Promised Land. LeRoy was ready to follow no matter what the cost; no matter what sacrifice had to be made, no matter what dangers had to be faced.
LeRoy Jerome Moton is an intense person, but he has a smile that could turn the Wicked Witch of the West into Mother Teresa. His very presence added to the excitement of being part of the worlds greatest love in, the 1965 Selma March that seemed to shake this country out of it’s one hundred year long Racist stupor.
When ever he came marching into town singing and laughing with a group of students behind him, you couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement generated by the young pied piper who walked, always, like the Alabama mud was too deep.
The last time that I saw LeRoy we both shared a podium at the University of Hartford on Martin Luther King day, in 1997. His hair was silver and his young son sat in the first row of the audience. He was doing quit well. He had a good job, nice home and he was free of the frightening grip of depression and frustration that plagued him in the seventies and part of the eighties. It was a joyous reunion. I was so glad to see him, but I soon learned that his disappointment about America’s progress in ending racism that he saw as not only alive and well, but also developing new roots among both Blacks and Whites, was the same as my disappointment.
When students ask me the question, what has happened to white liberals in America, and why do they seem to be moving away from civil rights. I told them how I felt when Jessie Jackson called New York City "Hymie Town." I felt betrayed. If I, as a white man, called New York "Nigger Town" I would be cast out of the society, but Jackson was not cast out. He is still accepted in the Black community as a leader, and he has his own TV program. I shall never forgive him, nor should anyone. If that kind of phrase comes out of his mouth, then it is part of his thoughts. To me he is a bigot. I do not think that Black people have ever assessed the lasting damage that Jackson has done.
I feel obligated to tell the students about the depth of the impact the O.J. Simpson trial had on race relations vis-a-vis white liberal America. I had to put that into perspective for them. I told them that in March of 1965 a Beautiful person named Viola Liuzzo was murdered by a group of cowardly, racist thugs as she drove along the highway in Alabama. She was on her way to pick up freedom marchers that wanted to return to Selma Alabama from Birmingham where the historic Civil Rights march ended.
I knew her and I knew how proud she was to be helping Doctor King and all the young people who she thought would get a better chance at life once segregation was defeated. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the killers were. The FBI. had a paid informer in the car that pulled along side of her car and emitted the fatal shots.
The men were brought to trial in a small segregated county in Alabama. The lawyer for the killers blamed "Communists" for the killing. He also tried to convince the all white jury that Leroy Moton the young black man riding with Viola might have been the killer. The defense lawyer, Imperial Klonsel Matt H. Murphy Jr. said, in his address to the Jury, "The nigger is an African, and everybody knows that the African lived by the tooth and the claw for three thousand years and never built anything on earth more advanced than a hut with a thatched roof."
It was all a shame and a disgrace to American jurist prudence. The killers walked out of the courtroom free men and signed autographs as they left. Two members of the all white jury, frightened of what the K.K.K. might do to them, could not bring themselves to convict. But wait, I hear you saying isn’t that awful. How could that happen in an American courtroom? Yes, the lawyer who got them off; the racist jury and the frightened judge should all be condemned.
Now I ask you, dear reader, how could I not tell those students to think about what Black attorney John Cochran did in the O.J. Simpson trial? Did he not play the same race card? He even went so far as to have Minister Louis Farrakhan’s body guards come into the courtroom and menacingly stare at the almost all Black jury during the last days of the trial, just as the Klan stared at the all white jury during the Liuzzo trial. I ask you, where is the condemnation? Cochran is a hero in the Black community. He even has his own TV show, as does Jessie Jackson, although I doubt if many white liberals watch either one of them. Many liberals feel betrayed, as I do, and many take their hidden rage into the voting booths with them.
While Black intellectuals talk at each other, and the Black middle class seems preoccupied with escaping Black, the rage among poor blacks increases with each passing day, and the danger exists that when a spark ignites the rage, white liberals will have their own rage to deal with.
It appears that most African American people today cannot determine if they, as a group, are moving forward or backward. In the face of present day media control it is difficult to determine if we, as a nation, have made two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back. Perhaps in the sixties we made one giant step and have been moving in inches ever since. LeRoy had no such problem that day in 1997, his speech was full of pessimism and anger.
The University had made up a poster with a photo of me marching with Doctor King in Mississippi and a picture of LeRoy taken from a newspaper article that I once wrote about him. In the photo of me, I was standing between King and Fanny Lou Hammer. During the question period, LeRoy was asked who the Woman in the picture was. He did not hear the question so I stepped up, not to answer, but to ask how many of the Black students in the audience knew who she was. Not one replied. It was a sobering experience for both of us. One young student finally asked if it was Oprah’s mother. It made us realize that this second, "Me First" generation cannot relate, or even understand those who made the great sacrifices so they can have the education that they were receiving. In the early sixties there were only twelve minority students in that school.
I told LeRoy that it was normal for young people to ignore the past and to remember that we were talking about something that happened before they were born. I told him that he would soon have the same problem with his son as I did with my teen-agers. Never-the-less when we parted, we promised each other that we would do more speaking to young audiences even though neither one of us still had the passionate fires burning. There was a time when those of us who fought for the voting rights act felt proud of what we had accomplished, but now the pride is gone.
Recently, I went to down town Hartford Connecticut to hear a Black politician speak. I heard her say all the things that I said many years ago. There was, however, a major difference. She did not tell the people, who desperately needed decent housing for their families, to go home and get their blankets and pillows and camp inside of city hall until housing was found. We did that in Waterbury Connecticut in 1968. Oh, wasn’t that a special time? I shall never forget the look on the mayor’s face when he arrived to find dozens of kids running up and down the marble stairs. Before the day was over, and the media could print their front page pictures, housing was found for nearly all of the families, and no one had to huddle in front of open ovens to keep warm, as they did in the slumlord apartments.
The African American politician called for more jobs, better housing and better education for minorities. She never said a word about how to achieve those goals. She simply demanded them. The audience applauded and I walked out. Too many times, people my age have heard the demagogues present to new young audiences that six-word combination that will cure everyone’s problem. "Vote for me . . . Give me money"
At my age those speeches become a kind of pornography, obscene acts by opportunists. Young people are always susceptible. As Thoreau once said, "Every generation laughs at the old, but follows religiously the new."
I must admit that after listening to the politician’s speech, I went home in a very depressed mood and decided to re-read the old LeRoy manuscript and at the same time I played some of the tapes that the manuscript is drawn from. I heard LeRoy’s young voice, and some of the singing. Tears came to my eyes. Have we gone forward or backward? I asked myself.
The political speech that I heard was given in the heart of the ghetto. There, the housing problem is much worse than it was thirty years ago: There, the schools are more segregated than they were thirty years ago. There, the isolation is worse than it was thirty years ago. (Bypass highways have been built so the suburbanites do not even have to see the city as they drive to work and into their parking lots). There, crime is much worse than it was thirty years ago, and the lack of leadership is much worse than it was thirty years ago.
Today, Old "Uncle Tom" has been transformed. He is no longer the preacher who fronted for the slumlords or the city hall employee who was counted on to deliver the "Darkie’s" vote. No, today it is the Black politician who is counted on by the white chamber of commerce to keep the restless natives quiet.
I ask you, dear reader, to honestly, without the uses of any rose colored glasses, evaluate America now. Ask yourself are we moving ahead or are we moving one step forward and two steps back. Is there a city in American where there is an African American structure (Mayor, police chief) and the majority of Blacks in that city are better off today than they were thirty years ago? Chicago? Detroit? Hartford? Newark? New York? Los Angeles? Have the cities been turned over to Blacks only after the living sections of the cities have become worthless property and walled off while the Malls and the office buildings remain white owned?
In Hartford Connecticut there are only two major chain super markets in the entire town and both are close to the outskirts. Some women have to take two buses to do their food shopping. Most of the white owned business fled to the suburbs and the malls following the riots of 1969. They were right behind the exodus out of the cities of the white homeowners. The same thing happened to many towns in America, and like Hartford, they never recovered. The tax base continues to dwindle as companies move out to business malls
What was the Los Angeles Riot really about? Most Americans, Black and White were appalled by the pictures of the beating of mister King, but after learning about Kings actions preceding the arrest, they were willing to simply rationalize it away and say a Pox on both the police and King. On talk shows and in letters to the editors many said simply that the riots were uncalled for. There was little understanding of the combustible build-up that the King beating sparked. There seems to be very little awareness of the thickening of the wall of fear that separates the city dwellers from the suburbanite today.
What kind of progress are we making? Run down buildings are being left for the cities to take over every day, punching more holes in the feeble city economies. Once again leaderless minority people have been taken down the garden path. A garden filled with garbage and crime. Promises are followed by more opportunists’ promises while the frustration leads to more Black on Black crime that has already reached terrifying proportions. I am reminded of the old "Wobblies" song. (The Industrial Workers Of The World) that goes, "There will be pie in the sky when you die, that’s a lie." Once again tomorrow has slipped away for too many Americans.
I did not risk my life and deprive my family so that we could replace incompetent, corrupt, opportunist, white, politicians with incompetent, opportunist, corrupt, Black politicians. That is not what I had in mind. I thought that we were all fighting for a restructuring. An American perestroika that would make equality possible.
One violent night in Mississippi in June of 1966, a young Freedom Marcher returned to the tent after being threatened by gun carrying hoodlums riding in a car with a swastika on the side, and learned that his father had been killed in Vietnam. He died fighting for free elections in Vietnam. At least that is what he was told. Most Black people in Mississippi could not vote then. I think that tells the entire story about the weakness of Black leadership then and now. Blacks should have been at the head of the anti-war movement. After all, African Americans were also a heavy load of cannon fodder. When Doctor King finally denounced the war and merged the anti-war movement with the civil rights movement, he became, not a civil rights leader, but an American leader and it was then, many believe, the decision to assassinate him was made.
Black people in the cities are faced with another serious problem that wasn’t so prevalent thirty years ago and that is the problem of the ghetto brain drain. Too many Blacks that benefited from programs that others fought for have taken their education and fled to the suburbs where they are tolerated. Do not misunderstand me. I am not criticizing anyone for trying to create a better environment for their families, but I am distraught by the fact that so many forget their obligation as citizens and not only are glad to escape the cities, but Many are still trying to escape being Black.
It is time for all Americans to turn away from the tube and face reality. I beg you now to join me and look back. Remember when Blacks and Whites were joyously singing "We Shall Overcome" and believing it before President Johnson turned it into a political slogan? Remember when we believed that integration was not only possible, but also workable? I ask you to remember when we were all reaching for a better tomorrow together. Let us try to recreate that momentum because another showdown may not be that far off and the senseless acts of burning ones own community may be repeated. This time Liberals may sit on their hands and watch. Surely the Los Angeles riots of 1992 should serve as a pre-cursor of things to come if we do not act as individuals to prevent it. I ask you to please read on, but keep in mind; with the ever worsening world economy, the widening economic segregation in America, and the bulging jails and the daily horror of children shooting children in our cities, the ticking bomb may have just a few more ticks. It is easy and comforting to look at the few who "make it big time" playing basketball and ignore the thousands who are forced to waste their scholarship and are thrown back on the junk heap. "Live a dream," we are told by those promoting the state Lotteries who want us only to see the few who win and not the millions of desperate dreamers who spend the rent money gambling and lose. Listen to the LEROY tapes with me and re-generate the motor. Look Back so that we can all, once again, march forward together.
PERHAPS WE CAN STILL AVOID THE THIRD CIVIL WAR.

They are Baack

2007-02-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

THEY ARE BAACK .THE USA RETURNS
The Washington Post reported: March 17, 2000, " US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright will announce a major overture toward Iran today, promising steps toward the return of assets frozen since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, lifting a ban on imports of Iranian luxury goods and making it easier for Iranian academics and athletes to visit the United States. While stopping short of an apology, Albright will acknowledge past American meddling in Iran, including the CIA-backed coup that toppled Iran’s leftist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and restored its monarchy in 1953. She also will express regret for Washington’s "shortsighted" support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, according to an administration official who has read the speech."
Liberals saw this as a late and minor victory, knowing that the Savak, the Shah’s secrete police, was known to carry out many crimes. There were 61 Savak officials among 248 military personnel executed between February and September 1979, when the organization was officially dissolved by Khomeini. Khomeini supporters always claimed that the dreaded Savak was created with the help of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Realists wonder if any were trained at the USA School of the Americas.
Today the resources of the Middle East are just as essential to the empire builders in Washington D.C., but coupled with the threat of the loss of the value of the dollar via Tehran’s new policy of switching the currency in oil sales, makes military action almost a necessity.
February25, 2007, In Australia Vice President Cheney said the United States was "deeply concerned" about Iran's activities, including its "aggressive" sponsoring of the terrorist group Hezbollah and inflammatory statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
He also said top U.S. officials would meet soon with European allies to decide the next step toward tougher sanctions against Iran if it continues enriching uranium, which can produce material for nuclear weapons or nuclear power.
"We worked with the European community and the United Nations to put together a set of policies to persuade the Iranians to give up their [nuclear] aspirations and resolve the matter peacefully, and that is still our preference," he said.
"But I've also made the point, and the president has made the point, that all options are on the table," he added, leaving open the possibility of military action.
I don’t suppose that US Secretary Rice will be able to make her apologies to Ahmadinejad at a latter date. There may be no one to apologize to.
David Truskoff

Rebirth of a Realist

2007-02-11T07:08:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

America is the craziest place on the planet
I think it is an old Italian expression that says, "From the head the rotting fish stinks first."
One presidency after another for the last forty years has been rocked with one kind of a scandal or another. They have taken our moral structure down with them. Bush, of course, has escalated that slide downward.
On February eight a pathetic, wretched women died at the early age of 39.
Let’s pretend that we are a Muslim man in Tehran who has access to American media and sees three anchors on CNN news devote almost the entire day to every detail they could find about the women and the sudden death. Newspapers across the country made it a front-page story
So who is this women that has caused millions of dollars to be spent just for American scandal sheets to get a picture of her? Is she a holy person? Maybe a queen? Perhaps a great scientist that has found a cure for one of our killer diseases or perhaps a political figure that has found a way to world peace.
No, she was none of the above. She was the daughter of a women who was married five or six times. She herself married at age 17 to a boy sixteen. Her son was born when she was eighteen. She soon divorced and made a living as an exotic dancer in a nightclub. As a very attractive women it was easy for her to find work as a model. She later became famous by posing nude for a sex magazine. Her next claim to fame was to marry a wealthy man 63 years her senior with just another year or two to live. His death caused a legal battle over his estate.
To cut through this awful life, just before her death she gave birth to a child, but no one knows who the father of the child is. There is a battle about to be fought over custody because who gets the child gets the money. America is spell bound. No TV saga can match it.
After such a life, she deserves to be at peace, but American mass media will not let it be. Her memory and her child forever will be tormented by the sleaze moguls
Now as the Muslim man in Tehran do you think America is an immoral place? Nah, we are just a little crazy.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

democracy USA

2007-02-02T12:21:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

The illusion of Democracy USA
In the 1960s, (and it is hard for me to believe that it was that long ago) many of us were arrested, tear gassed, beaten and jailed for trying to tell Americans that we must live up to our own constitution.
We were saying that America could not pretend to be selling Democracy when it does not have it to sell.
The people of Southeast Asia were not fighting a religious war or even a political one. Basically they were fighting against the white oppressors. First the French and then the Americans. Yes, they saw Black soldiers but to many they appeared as trained slaves whose relatives could not even vote in America. That is the enemy that they saw.
We quoted over and over the X111 and XV amendments to the constitution.
Amendment Dec. 18, 1865 X111
Neither slavery or involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall, have been duly convicted shall exist in the United States
March 30 1870 XV the right of citizens of the United states to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any previous state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
Today Blacks in every state can vote, but the political situation continues to deteriorate and flaunt the constitution.
On February 2/007 we hear that Exxon Mobil has surpassed their own record and reached $39 billion in Profits. Why is that relevant? Because on the same day we learn that the next presidential race in the US may result in candidates or their supporters spending upwards of a billion dollars to get elected. It speaks loudly to the fact that money interprets the Constitution any way it suits those who own it.
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Gettysburg, PennsylvaniaNovember 19, 1863 Abraham Lincoln,
There can be no Government of by and for the people until we take the money out of politics.
Those so called fanatics, those wild eyed terrorists, that we are supposed to be fighting are not unlike the Vietnamese fighting the white oppressor who does not have the product of democracy to sell.
Standing in front of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem a young student from New York pointed to the Sephardim Jews demonstrating in front of the Knesset and said, "those are our Niger’s and we don’t know what to do with our Niger’s any more than you do.I realized then that Israel does not have a product to sell either.
David truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Opiate of the USA

2007-01-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Opiate of the USA
In Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher— Karl Marx said
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Marx lived and wrote a long time ago. As hard as it might be for my grandson to believe that was even before cell phones/
Today there is new opium that replaces religion. It is called mass media. Through it the oppressed can sigh and believe and make believe.
On January 15,2007 Americans celebrate a holiday. It is the birth of Martin Luther King that they celebrate. They will hear, and see excerpts from his famous "I have a dream speech over and over that day.
WE will hear from billionaire Oprah Winfrey and the half-black Senator, who may be a presidential candidate, Barack Obama and White Americans will feel good.
Reality can not penetrate the media induced high they will receive, however the truth makes the often repeat of the Dream speech an obscene mockery of the great man whose birthday we celebrate.
The truth is Northern schools are more segregated today than they were before the dream speech. The wall of fear between the all white suburbanites and the non-white city dwellers is much thicker than it was then.
According to The State of Black America 2005, the income level of African American families is only one-tenth of that of white families, and the welfare enjoyed by black Americans is only three-fourths of their white counterparts. In 2004, the poverty rate was 24.7 percent for African Americans, 21.9 percent for Hispanics, and 8.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites. In New Orleans, 100,000 of its 500,000 population lived in poverty; with the majority of them being black Americans. The homeownership rate for blacks is 48.1 percent compared with 75.4 percent for whites. Although blacks are just 12.2 percent of the American population, 41 percent of American prisoners detained for more than one year are blacks, and 8.4 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars.
Only 29 % of students in a Connecticut all black school graduates with their class. The drop out rate leads to the unbelievable rate of street shootings in our cities. All of our cities have become places of fear. Guns are everywhere.
Martin Luther King’s dream is still just that, a dream, but on January 15 we will breath deeply and once again go on the nod and enjoy our media induced high.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/sutto

War and USA

2007-01-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Christian Americans are the most war like people this planet has ever produced.
I say that because so many refer to America as a Christian country.

Recently someone commented on a piece of mine by asking if I could document the statements I made about how many times the US has been at war and the invasion of Russia in 1918.
I have always been aware of how little most Americans know about their own History, but I think that is true of young folks everywhere.
In 1790 Alexander Hamilton had probably saved the economy of the new American nation. A nation that was practically bankrupt after the Revolution. By the creation of the national bank and other Hamilton economic plans he set the course for what he believed would be a prosperous and peaceful nation.
"Blessed are the peacemakers," Jesus said, but his naivete must have been the same as Hamilton's. In the short span of seventy years that followed Hamilton’s plan, residents of the new country saw the slaughter of the natives. and the most idiotic, bloodiest, war of young Americans against other young Americans in a civil war that was supposed to free the slaves. The real reason for the war, however was to gain control of king cotton and save the north’s textile industry which was second only to agriculture in the nation’s economy. The northern carpet baggers that invaded the South after the war showed everyone what the war was really about.
Neither Hamilton Nor the wandering Carpenter from Nazareth recognized the pandemic infection of greed that was to bring the entire planet to the brink of destruction. 33 years after the depravity of the abominable Civil war the empire building began; the US invaded and occupied the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Two years later US marines invaded China to putdown the Boxer rebellion.
In my book REBIRTH OF A REALIST I ask the question when has the American economy not functioned as a war economy and the answer is never.
In a list compiled by Eastern Connecticut State University we see a general view of the military adventures that have kept the American economy growing.
1898
Hawaii: annexed by force
1898-1902
Cuba: US occupation following Spanish-American War
1898-1902
Philippines: 70,000 US troops fought insurrectionists led by Emilio Aguinaldo and occupied the islands until 1946, when Philippine independence granted
1900
China: troops from the US and other nations put down the Boxer Rebellion
1904-1906
Morocco: US Marine interventions
1904-1999
Panama: permanent US military bases protected US-controlled Panama Canal Zone
1907-1941
Dominican Republic: US military occupations 1905 to 1907; 1912; 1914; and 1916 to 1924; US controlled government finances 1905 to 1941
1906-1922
Cuba: US military ran the government from 1906 to 1909; occupied by US troops in 1912, and 1917 to 1922
1912-1925
Nicaragua: US military occupation 1909 to 1933, and controlled government finances from 1910 to 1924
1914-1917
Mexico: US military intervention during revolutionary turmoil; Marines sent to Tampico and Vera Cruz in 1914; from 1916 to 1917, 6,000 US cavalry under Gen John Pershing clashed with troops of Caranza’s Mexican army
1915-1934
Haiti: US Marine occupation and US control of government finances
1917-1918
WORLD WAR I
1918-1920
Russia: US sent 15,000 troops to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok as part of an Allied force in opposition to the Bolsheviks
1941-1945
WORLD WAR II
1945-1949
Korea: post-War II US occupation
1945-1954
Germany: post-War II US occupation
1945-1957
Japan: post-War II US occupation
1950-1953
KOREAN WAR (undeclared): US major contributor to the United Nations armed forces which pushed out Chinese and north Korean troops from south Korea
1954
Guatemala: CIA-trained exiles overthrew the socialist government
1958
Lebanon: 5,000 US Marines sent to aid President Chamoun government
1961
Cuba: 1,400 CIA-trained exiles landed at Bay and Pigs and were defeated
1964-1973
VIETNAM WAR (undeclared): US troops sent to Vietnam and Cambodia in support of South Vietnam
1965
Dominican Republic: 20,000 US Marines occupied the country and installed a pro-American government
1975
Cambodia: US Marines assaulted Tang Island to free the US merchant ship Mayaguez
1982-1984
Lebanon: US contributed troops to UN peace keeping force
1983
Grenada: 1,900 US Marines invaded and deposed the existing government
1984
Nicaragua: CIA secretly mined Nicaraguan harbors
1986
Libya: US bombed the capital at Tripoli
1989-1990
Panama: US invasion force of 24,000 overthrew President Manuel Noriega
1991
GULF WAR (undeclared): US-led invasion of Iraq with 425,00 US troops freed Kuwait from Iraqi occupation
1994-1995
Somalia: US contributed troops to UN peace keeping force
1994--
Haiti: US occupation and subsequent contribution of 2,400 troops to a UN peace keeping force
1995--
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia: US contributed 20,000 troops to UN peace keeping force
1999--
Yugoslavia: US participated in NATO actions in Yugoslavia
1999--
East Timor: US contriubuted a small number of support personel to the UN peace-keeping force
2001--
WAR IN AFGHANISTAN (undeclared): US led a multi-national NATO force to oust the Taliban and capture al-Queda leader Osama bin Laden; neither goal has been achieved and US troops remain in the country
2003--
IRAQ WAR (undeclared): US invasion and subseqent occupation overthrew government of Saddam Hussein
These figures do not illustrate the use of napalm and
.
These figures do not illustrate the use of napalm, nuclear weapons, Agent Orange and other weapons of mass destruction. It does not include the air strikes and the bombardments from the sea. It does not include the assassinations like Alende in Chile, ML King, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and the many attempts to kill Castro of Cuba.
One could say the so-called Christian Americans are the most war like people this planet has ever produced.
It boggles the mind to see the film "Jesus of Nazareth" on television during the Christmas holiday and at the same time see church going Americans support the carnage in Iraq.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

The Prophets didn't work for the Associated press

2006-12-18T12:48:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

The prophets didn’t work for the Associated Press.
Many years ago, my father once told me that if the story by- line is the Associated Press, read it with a smile because it is usually just propaganda disguised as news. If it says, "combined wire services," don’t bother reading it all because it is usually just a state department handout."
My father collected outrageous media propaganda pieces. I remember one that told the story of the Finnish soldiers who hid in trees with can openers and when the " rickety Russian tanks" went by they would drop down from the trees, open the tanks with can openers and blow them up. When the Red army drove the Nazi out of Stalingrad with the most efficient tanks of the entire war, my father would wave the clipping and say, "Stupid Nazis forgot their can openers."
There is a piece by the Associated Press in a December 15 Connecticut newspaper that tells the story of Soviet soldiers killing 16000 Polish troops by shooting them all in the back of the head. "Their guns got so hot young officers had to bring them fresh guns," the story said. I think that one would make old red baiter Randolph Hearst smile. The story rants on about Soviet atrocities and how Yale University press has discovered the atrocities and also Soviet espionage during the cold war. Could there have been American espionage and could there be any today?
The story does not mention the fourteen or more times that highly financed mercenary armies tried to create a counter revolution in Russia or the fact that US Marines invaded Russia. US sent 15,000 troops to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok as part of an Allied force in opposition to the Bolsheviks.
Unknown to most Americans and little noted by historians is the fact that 11,000 U.S. troops invaded Russia in 1918 to assist the Czar's White Army opposing the Communist takeover. 7,000 U.S. Marines had landed at the port city of Vladivostok on the coast of Siberia. Another 4,000 troops were dispatched to the far north of Russia to join British soldiers already fighting there. Young Americans know nothing about our support of the counter revolutionaries or of the atrocities committed by our man Admiral Kolchak who we set up as the new Russian Czar.
Not only does that not appear in our history books but little is mentioned of the fact that young America from 1898-2006 has invaded other countries or been at war no less than 36 times and our troops are stationed in every part of the planet.
The new wave of anti Communist propaganda is a result of the shrill attempt by the US media to head off any sympathy for the world wide pro socialist and anti American movements now spreading like wild fire.
"From early times, the prophets preceding you and me have prophesied war, disaster and plague against many great nations and kingdoms. But the prophet who prophesies peace will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord only if his word comes to pass."
Jeremiah (28:8-9):

Who owns the American congress

2006-12-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Who owns The American Congress ?
When Dr. Martin Luther King was going through the metamorphous that was to transform him from a Black Civil Rights leader and a preacher to a major internationally known political figure, he made a very profound statement that rankled the neo-cons and the American media. He said, "it is one thing to throw a coin to a beggar, it is another thing to address the edifice that creates beggars." The new REALIST, Dr. King, was saying that a major structural change, was needed to re-create the America outlined in our constitution.
King is gone and his words forgotten. Each election time in America we hear politicians bleating about change and election reform, but if they are elected they do nothing.
This past election presented a clear picture of where the American political structure is at, a picture that should not only frighten Americans but frighten the world because the whole world is affected.
The candidate, who spent the most money won, The biggest campaign spender was victorious in 398 of 428 decided House races and 22 of 33 decided Senate races. Top spenders won 98 percent of House races and 88 percent of Senate races.
In New York Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrat, spent close to $forty million and won with 67 percent of the vote, defeating Republican John Spencer, who could raise only $4.8 million.
Joe Lieberman, whose own party refused him the nomination, nevertheless raised close to $twenty million and won a senate seat as an independent. His opponent who spent a fortune of $11 million out of his own pocket was outspent by an independent candidate who didn’t spend a dime of his own money.
So where did that $twenty million come from? The major portion came from individuals and Pro Israel support groups. AIPAC coordinates such fund raising.
Lieberman is the leading proponent of aid to Israel and the darling of the American Israel public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It is called a "public affairs Committee" to make it more palatable, but it is a Political action Committee capable of raising more money from around the world to support or defeat candidates than any other political structure. So if the game is the one who spends the most wins, than it follows that the one who raises the most controls the game.
Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress and a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says "But the Congress, if anything, is urging the Administration on and criticizing them even at their most accommodating. When it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, the terms of debate are so influenced by organized Jewish groups, like AIPAC, that to be critical of Israel is to deny oneself the ability to succeed in American politics."
The question remains "Who owns the American congress?
I understand the fear of those who are career politicians to speak out. No one wants to revive the "Protocols of Zion," or give the crazy, hate obsessed, bigots ammunition, but we Jews must act on the facts and the facts are that out of control right wing, blind faith Zionists are creating another wave of mindless anti-Semitism, just as blind faith right wing American Empire builders are creating a new wave of anti American hatred around the world.
David Truskoff

Nazi in the U.SD. Senate

2006-11-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

A Nazi in the United States Senate.
-
In 1952 when I built my first house in Connecticut USA my Father came to visit me.
": Very nice house, "he said. (He was a proud member if the builders union) "But David why in Connecticut"
"What’s wrong with Connecticut?"
"The people here are all crazy. They sent a Nazi to the United States Senate. A Nazi who supported and got rich from doing business with the madman Hitler.
My father lost many of his relatives in Byelorussia during the Nazi rampage in that country. Naturally he followed the war news very closely and that day he told me about Roosevelt passing the "Trading with the enemy act in 1942 and how the U.S. confiscated the Prescot Bush holdings in a Nazi banking group. Until then I had never heard about that and I could hardly believe it. How could voters, less than ten years after that horrible war send such a man to the U.S. Senate?
On November 8th 2006, following the U.S. elections I thought about my father. I remembered when he took me to Union City New Jersey, not far from where we lived to see the German American Bund march through the streets swastikas and all. "You should go to Hell," My father would shout at them along with some choice words in Russian.
Yes, I thought about that day because I could easily equate the Jewish community that sent Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate with the German American Bund. They are the same kind of blind faith followers.
Almost the entire country voted against the war in Iraq, but Connecticut sent the leading warmonger and blind faith Israel supporter back to the senate. They knew who and what he was. They voted for him anyway just as they did in 1952 for Prescot Bush.
the father of our President. Most people the world over are only what the media makes them and the media in Connecticut supported Prescot Bush and recently. Liberman.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia tells us that Prescot Bush came under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Controversially, Bush wrote home about receiving medals for heroic exploits. His letters were later published in Columbus newspapers, but were retracted a few weeks later when it was revealed that he, in fact, had not received such medals. The retraction was made in a cable in which Bush stated that his earlier letter had been written "in a spirit of fun" and was not intended for publication. Is lying passed down genetically?
Investigator John Loftus has said, "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averell Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."
Ben Aris in Berlin, and Duncan Campbell in Washington wrote for the Saturday September 25, 2004 issue of the The Guardian
"New documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
As a young man I wondered how in hell the German people ever let insane Nazism happen to their country. When I had German prisoners aboard our ship during the war, I asked them that question, They shook their heads and looked down. Later one rated man said, "It’s a sickness. Someone tells you you are better than others and you like to hear it so you follow."
Simple enough. It is the fuel of all religion and politics. It is also the wind that
keeps the wild fires of greed spreading.

Liar,liar, pants on fire

2006-11-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Liar Liar pants on Fire.
In 1952 Hanson Baldwin wrote, about the war in Vietnam, "The people of France are becoming more and more Weary of conflict that brings them no return at a cost known to every tax payer" In November 2006 the American taxpayers said the same thing with their vote against the Bush War. There will be many investigations and subpoenas that will now lead to chaos and turmoil in American politics, but in the end greed will prevail. It always does. The liars will see to it.
In 1948 when the United States and Israel became joined at the hip ("One nation Indivisible" Senator Lieberman said) The very creation of the state was based on Hypocrisy and Lies. Many of the Russians who made up the second Aliya to Palestine in the early 1900s were committed socialists. Their influence permeated the thinking of the next Kibbutzim generation, however when western Jews brought the gathering instincts of their capitalist upbringing to the land they came in direct ideological conflict with the Socialists. Young Jews enamored with the idea of carrying a gun joined the Irgun and found themselves in the midst of an exciting game. Their families escaped Nazi Germany. They were Jewish. God gave them the land. They will fight for it. They will bring peace, prosperity and Justice to the land.
When they matured and their Israel became the oppressor and began blowing
up Palestinian homes and practicing blatant ethnic cleansing, what could they do? I remember Rashod Hasson calling Uri Avnery the "anti-Zionist Zionist" and there are many in Israel today who can be described that way. Each day they wonder who they are and where they are going.
Since 1948 when America began its mad dash to the extreme political right to build the empire, it brought Israel right along with it. There are those who want to believe that President Truman was an enthusiastic advocate of the creation of a Jewish state and that it was important to the empire, however the historical records show just the opposite. Read some of the quotes of President Truman obtained from The Truman Library…
"I told the Jews that if they were willing to furnish me with five hundred thousand men to carry on a war with the Arabs, we could do what they are suggesting in the Resolution [favoring a state] - otherwise we will have to negotiate awhile."
"It is a very explosive situation we are facing, and naturally I regret it very much, but I don't think that you, or any of the other Senators, would be inclined to send half a dozen Divisions to Palestine to maintain a Jewish State."
"What I am trying to do is to make the whole world safe for the Jews. Therefore, I don't feel like going to war for Palestine.""
According to Henry Wallace, Truman said, "Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was here on earth, so how can anyone expect that I would have any luck?"
Showing despair and anger over the atrocities committed by Jews against the Palestinians, He wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt on August 23, 1947,
"I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side."
He was not the brightest President we ever had, but he sure was on the mark with that one. Later he was to admit that Zionists held his I.O.Us. "If not for my friend Abe, (Feinberg') I couldn't have made the [whistle-stop train] trip and I wouldn't have been elected," Truman stated
He was referring, of course, to the financial help he received. He had no money of his own and got little help from the Democratic Party.
On June 27, 1950, Truman told the American people that North Korea's attack on South Korea showed the world "Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed Intervention, Truman equated Joseph Stalin's actions with Adolf Hitler's in the 1930s. He was terrorizing America and lying to the people about Soviets invading Korea. It was the strategy of the empire builders. Americans feared the "Reds" are going to invade us and blow up all of our churches.
The truth is that civil war in Korea began the day the Japanese were driven out and with the help of "American advisors" the South Koreans initiated most of the border clashes with North Korean forces at the 38th parallel.
A young idealistic congressman obviously propelled into a job above his head was sent to Asia to acquire knowledge his Father thought he needed to become White House material. Upon his return Congressman Kennedy said,
"The Indo-Chinese states are puppet states, French principalities with great resources but as typical examples of empire and colonialism as can be found anywhere. To check the southern drive of Communism makes sense but not only through reliance on the force of arms. The task is, rather, to build strong native non-Communist sentiment within these areas and rely on that as a spearhead of defense. To do this apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure."
It wasn’t long before those grooming the young man for the White House instilled the Red bogeyman into his brain. He inherited the embarrassing work of (code-named JMARC). concocted by the likes of Richard Bissell. E. Howard Hunt and they even worked with such Mafia degenerates as Johnny Roselli and SamGiancana. The purpose was to kill Fidel Castro and restore Cuba to the Mafia Gamblers and the child prostitution racketeers that Castro kicked out.
It must have been difficult for the helpless Kennedy still trying to hold on to some of his youthful Idealism. He disappointed the cutthroats by not sending the bombers over Havana during the Pay of Pigs fiasco and I do believe that his assassination was planned that day.
Kennedy was still carrying the inner shame of the hero label his father insisted he be given (Joe Kennedy wanted him to get the Congressional medal Of Honor, But high ranking navy officials put out the word that they would say he should have been court-martialed for being asleep with no one on watch and letting his speedy PT boat be run over by a Japanese war ship.) The Congressional Medal was dropped.
This poor wretched man suffering back pain and other ailments was pushed and pulled apart and finaly shot dead. He had the war mongering Cardinal Spellman, Allan Dulles then CIA head, and the kings of the Military Industrial complex who thrived on the anti-Communist fear propaganda, all doing the pushing and shoving.
According to the terms of the Geneva Accords, Vietnam would hold national elections in 1956 to reunify the country. The division at the seventeenth parallel, a temporary separation without cultural precedent, would be erased with the elections.
Dulles and Spellman had other Ideas. Spellman saw it as an anti-Catholic Document and Dulles
a pro Communist one. The debate about whether Kennedy wanted to pull out (and evidence seems to show that Kennedy did want to withdraw the bulk of America troops from Vietnam.) is no longer relevant. What is relevant is that millions died and so many were wounded because of the lies and millions may die because of the lies of the present Bush administration.
Only a few benefit from the lies, Korea is still divided, Vietnam is Communist,
Israel suffers from the same lies that brought America to its present state of deterioration.
Both are divided nations with poverty, corruption, crime and violence making daily media fare.
Today I read a headline in a local paper…"one out of every six children in Hartford Connecticut has a relative in Jail". What kind of a society did the lies build? Israel is awash in scandal and corruption. Poverty there is a scandal in itself as it is in America.
The deadly lies are still fed to us by the media. There for the main objective should be to direct
some of the subpoenas and congressional investigative committees to the 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – who now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth so we might as well include them.
Realism and Truth must be reborn or the liars will still thrive and millions more will die.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-11-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
Lieberman on Lieberman,
It is ironic that the elections in Israel and the elections in the US will involve two similar political characters named Lieberman. The Lieberman of Israel is described by Uri Avnery as a man who, "advocates the expulsion of the Arab citizens from Israel. He threatened to destroy Egypt by blowing up the Aswan Dam. He demanded the execution of the Israeli Arab Knesset members for meeting with Syrian and Hamas leaders."
Joe Lieberman and his namesake are similar in that they are both blind faith right wing Zionists. Joe an eighteen year US Senator, lost the primary in the Democratic party to a neophyte, albeit a very rich neophyte, Primarily because of his goose stepping to the marching tune of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and supporting the war in Iraq. With the help of AIPAC and about eighteen million Dollars or more he is thumbing his nose at the party and may go back to the senate as an Independent.
One congressional staff person was quoted as saying, "We can count on well over half the house, 250, to 300 members, to do reflexively what ever AIPAC wants."
Like our out of touch (out of this world) President, Joe has no idea of what is happening in America.
As a Jew, I have often pointed out that blind faith right wing Zionism and the brutality of the IDF has, and is causing a new wave of world wide anti-Semitism.
The Council Of National Interest Foundation (a Washington DC based organization that calls for a two-state solution in the Middle East) has released the following statement.
"A new poll commissioned by the Council for the National Interest Foundation shows that a significant number of Americans are wary of the power of the Israel lobby, and believe it is behind the invasion of Iraq and the current belligerent tone of the White House and Congress toward Iran.
The poll, which was carried out by Zogby International, reveals that 39% of the American public "agree" or "somewhat agree" that "the work of the Israel lobby on Congress and the Bush administration has been a key factor for going to war in Iraq and now confronting Iran." However, a similar number, 40%, "strongly disagreed" or "somewhat disagreed" with this position. Some 20% of the public, or more than one in five, were not sure.
The poll suggests that the espionage charges against two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the publicity given to a new study of the power of the Israel lobby by two mainstream academic professors has had an affect on people's awareness of the lobby."
The problems in the US are not unlike those in Israel. There is an ever-growing divide between the have and the have-nots. Poverty in Israel and poverty in America are both reaching dangerous proportions and the two Liebermans will soon face the wrath and leaderless rage of the miss-lead, here-to-for powerless people. The above mentioned poll shows a beginning of a new awareness in the US.
Joe Lieberman may get elected. If he does he will emerge as the most powerful man in the US Senate; bigger than his own party that rejected him, and he will have an open door to the white house where he will be welcomed like a long lost son.
Perhaps he will even get another Kiss from G.W. Bush and return it, but on another part of the anatomy.

The taking of the American Congress

2006-10-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist
Yes, I am old enough to remember the Republican Party dirty tricksters scaring non Catholic Americans into believing a Catholic President Kennedy would be taking orders from the Pope. It drove Kennedy to make the following statement in 1960 to
Southern Baptist Church leaders.
"I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials"
-- US Senator Joe Lieberman pays no heed to that statement. In a 2004 press release he
underscored the strong solidarity between the United States and Israel in these remarks. "This shared faith in progress and common commitment to the values of freedom and equality are the basis of the solidarity between Israel and the United States. And both nations are dedicated by their founding documents to secure those values not just for their people, but for all peoples. We, the people—of the United States and Israel—are committed to forming a more perfect union, between our two nations and with all nations who share the dream of democracy," Lieberman said.
The problem is that calling Israel a democracy might be acceptable if it were not an exclusively Jewish state, and if not only Jews were given first class citizenship rights.
It is astounding how the Jewish Lobby and Congress of the United States have ignored the message of Kennedy that we Jews all applauded.
On its web page AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) says that part of its agenda is to influence American students.
"The challenges for today's students are enormous -- fewer
Jewish youth than ever identify with Israel, average student turnout in recent elections is only 25 percent and anti-Israel activity on campus is rising. AIPAC trains and educates pro-Israel students across America and develops their leadership skills so that they become effective citizen lobbyists today and pro-Israel leaders tomorrow."
The unbridled power of AIPAC is fueled by the fear and cowardice of our leaders who do not have the courage of Kennedy.
"The work that AIPAC does is a vital part of our democratic process. You speak out boldly, and that's good for America and Israel. You make sure that politicians hear what voters have to say not only on election day but on every day of the year."-President George W. Bush
"One thing which has not changed, however, is our appreciation of AIPAC. You help strengthen the friendship between Israel and the United States - a friendship based on the shared values of freedom, democracy and the sanctity of life."-Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
Sanctity of life? Comming from Sharon!
A tax-exempt organization that lobbies Congress on behalf of Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been under investigation by the FBI for allegedly receiving classified information from a Pentagon official and using this information on behalf of the government of Israel.
AIPAC gives large amounts of money through many satellite groups to politicians it favors and to those running against politicians it does not favor.
In that way they can actually reshape the congress of the United States and that is why so many American politicians are in their grip.
It is a nightmare come true. The Pope did not take over the American Government, but AIPAC did.
David Truskoff

www.erols.com/suttonbear

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-10-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

"NO BLOOD FOR OIL."
Most popular sign carried all over the world during May, 2003 anti-war demonstrations.
At the end of World War II, American and British oil companies were once again fighting for control of the Iranian oil fields and giving Stalin another reason for deep concern. The Iran -Soviet border was long and treacherous. Stalin had already pulled his troops out of Iran in April of 1946, but his own very productive oil fields in Baku were near the Iranian border. With the western powers constantly fomenting revolution and discord in Iran, Stalin was understandably concerned. Aramco, Shell, Socony and other huge international oil companies were rushing to sign long- term contracts with the western supported, Iranian Government. For sixty years, the British plundered the Iranian oil fields by maintaining friendly sovereigns in power. After World War II, the people of Iran were calling for an end to what they referred to as British imperialist rule. Revolutionary forces led by Muhammad Mossadegh finallyover
threw the Western supported Government of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi.
The Shah managed, with western help to escaped to Italy and the people of Iran seemed,
at last, to be in control of their own country, but when Mossadegh nationalized the rich oil fields, he signed his own fate. Mossadegh became Premier in 1951, and the first political
move he made was to present the Oil Nationalization Bill.
Responding to the seizure of the AIOC,(Anglo- Iranian Oil Company) the British government
anounced it would not allow Mossadegh’s government to export any oil produced in the formerly
British-controlled fields. A blockade of British ships was sent to prevent any attempts by Iran
to ship any oil out of the country. An economic problem for Iran was created,and an anormous
amount of revenue was lost, causing serious hardship for the people of Iran, as the British ships blocked any oil from Leaving Iran.
The US also immediately reacted .to the Oil Nationalization bill.
Attempts were made to overthrow Mossadegh’s Government, and after three failed attempts,
On August 19, 1953, members of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh’s National Movement of Iran
claimed the intelligence services of "U.S.A. and Britain (CIA - MI6) enforced a more precise
and expensive coup de’tat plan, and succeeded in overthrowing the government.
The Oil Nationalization bill was rendered moot.
These claims, of course, would not be hard for any Realist to believe. On that day, the coup makers
brought mobs into the streets to demonstrate against the national government of Dr. Mossadegh.
They reached the house of the Prime Minister, and entered the house. After plundering it, they
burned it. During the military trial of Dr. Mossadegh, he related for the press the details of
the coups, but the western press put their own spin on it, claiming the British developed the oil.
Mossadegh was found guilty of what his supporters called an "unknown crime." and ordered to
serve three years in an Iranian prison. The British and Americans brought back the Shah, but he
was still not welcomed by the people and repressive measures were enforced to prevent another
revolution.
Throughout the spring of 1963, Imam Khomeini continued to denounce the shah’s regime, and
the US. He pointed to Israel as a puppet of the US, and developed a huge following. The Shah had
to get rid of him and he was expelled to Iraq. Saddam Hussein, annoyed by the Shiite preaching
and political organizing under the Shiite religion expelled the Ayatollah to France. Following the
revolution that deposed Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, for the second time, Khomeini returned triumphantly to Iran in 1979, declared an Islamic republic, and began to exercise ultimate Islamic
authority in the nation. This is the history that Mr Ahmadinejad President of Iran today was born into. in 1956. By 2006 he was already a well educated man with a PHD and a revolutionary who saw the west as an old enemy. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a good student but his history lessons
were written for him in the streets of Iran. Distrust and dislike of the Western Powers was bred into Ahmadinejad as it was bred into Fidel Castro.
Liberals in America were dead in the water. In the face of the enormous blast of hate generated by
the State Department through the mass media, Liberals who tried to explain the real situation in
Iran were shouted down and branded anti-American. I found that trying to explain it was literally
at one’s own risk. The media had whipped Americans into a frenzy of hate and Muslims were beaten
and forced to live in fear.
The conservative Shiite ideology of Khomeini opposed pro-Western tendencies. The West immediately began to demonize him. There was no way the West could again confiscate Iranian oil while Khomeini was in Power. Suspecting another western coup; on November 4, 1979, 3,000 Iranian militants took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. They held 54 embassy staff members as hostages. Ayatollah Khomeini totally supported them. They demanded that: the Shah, be tried for crimes against the people. Trying to pacify the revolutionaries, and develop a rapport with the people, the United States almost apologized for crimes against the Iranian people, and offered the Shah’s assets be paid to them.
The Washington Post reported: March 17,2000
"Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright will announce a major overture toward Iran today, promising steps toward the return of assets frozen since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, lifting a ban on imports of Iranian luxury goods and making it easier for Iranian academics and athletes to visit the United States. While stopping short of an apology, Albright will acknowledge past American meddling in Iran, including the CIA-backed coup that toppled Iran’s leftist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and restored its monarchy in 1953. She also will express regret for Washington’s "shortsighted" support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, according to an administration official who has read the speech."
Liberals saw this as a late and minor victory, knowing that the Savak, the Shah’s secrete police, was known to carry out many crimes. There were 61 SAVAK officials among 248 military personnel executed between February and September 1979, when the organization was officially dissolved by Khomeini. Khomeini supporters always claimed that the dreaded Savak was created with the help of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Realists wonder if any were trained at the School of the Americas.
At his death, June 5,1989. The Guardian added this to his epitaph.
"Ever since he (Khomeini) was swept back to Iran from exile in a demonstration of Iranian people power, railing against the United States as the ‘Great Satan,’ America’s most hated foreign leader tormented and frustrated successive American administrations."
Day after day western mass media hammered Khomeini with hate propaganda. Young people were wearing tee shirts showing a bomb dropping on his head. Government officials talked openly about, "taking out Khomeini." Yet, the Iranian leader made the West pay a high price.
President Jimmy Carter who looked tired and haggard as the hostage crisis dragged on for 14 months lost the confidence of the American people to solve the situation. His reelection chances slipped away as the Iranians thumbed their noses at every threat he made. He was defeated at the poles. As his opponent, and those behind him hammered way at Carter’s impotence Mr. Reagan promised that under his administration America would no longer be, " a pitiful giant. ". President Carter wrote in his biography, "Keeping the Faith," that he asked the Shah whether he could curb the human rights abuses in Iran. The Shah answered, "No, there is nothing I can do. I must enforce the Iranian laws, which are designed to combat communism."
At the UN the president of Iran was speaking from this history.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear
.

insanity in D.C.

2006-09-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

A LOGICAL MIND CAN NOT COPE WITH THE PRESENT AMERICAN ADMINISTRATION
Is there no sanity left in Washington D.C?
As Bush continues his illegal war in Iraq and the military men keep telling him he will not have enough troops to proceed unless he institutes the military draft, he continues to offend returning veterans.
More and more wounded are coming home in need of continuing medical treatment over loading the veteran’s hospitals and the administration keeps cutting the budgets for those services.
A rebellion looms ahead. Lame duck Presidents are impervious to the anger and hate that builds In the country, but Congressional candidates will feel it this coming election day.
BUDGET PROCESS BILL THREATENS VETERANS’ PROGRAMSby Richard Kogan and Martha Coven
The Senate Budget Committee has approved a bill (S. 3521) that would radically alter federal budget procedures and could lead to deep cuts over time in the vast majority of domestic programs, including veterans’ programs Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, has been co-sponsored by 26 other Senators (including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist), and was approved by the Budget Committee with the support of all 12 majority party members — as a "vision statement."[1]
Senator Judd said the President’s budget also calls for cuts in 2009 in other, smaller appropriations accounts that are important to veterans, including:
a 9 percent ($8 million) cut in grants for the construction of state veterans homes, including domiciliaries, nursing homes, and adult care facilities;
a 9 percent ($3 million) cut in grants for the construction of veterans’ cemeteries;
a 6 percent ($10 million) cut in funding for the National Cemetery Administration;
a 10 percent ($5 million) cut in training programs for veterans administered by the Department of Labor; and
a 5 percent ($80 million) cut in the funds used to administer the veterans’ compensation and pension programs. Cutting these funds is likely to lead to delays in eligibility determinations and the appeals process. The funds used to administer veterans’ housing loan programs also would be cut, by 10 percent ($16 million) in 2009.
The bottom of the barrel has been scraped and recruiters can not make their quotas of new military men to fight in Iraq. Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, has given the President an ultimatum. "Re-think your objectives in Iraq or institute the Draft because you will need more troops."

Israel self destruct

2006-08-31T11:03:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist
It seems like just yesterday, I was an enthusiastic, patriotic American looking forward to a wonderful peaceful future. As the song goes, "Oh what a feeling." That was when my mother and father were so proud of the two-star banner they hung in the front window. That banner told everyone that their sons were in the war against fascism.
Will any generation ever have that feeling again? How wonderful to believe, as we did, that we had ended war forever. How wonderful to believe that we had defeated the forces of fascism and racism. Yes, naiveté has its place.
I must confess now, however, that I am one of the most cynical men on the planet. I am very doubtful about the future of the human animal. This same animal, which is by far the most vicious killer to walk the planet, not only kills millions of his own species every year, but also kills and devours millions of other species. He destroys the habitat of most of the other living creatures on the planet, and he is so stupid that he destroys his own environment. He pollutes his own water and fouls his own air, all in the name of greed. He sacrifices his family happiness to make enough money to build a huge house (bigger than his last one to show success) and own a bigger and more expensive car. He accumulates wealth and things that he or she does not use or need. Like everyone else, he will get sick and die and leave the money to be divided by lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, and the off spring who often pass it on to their drug dealer. One cannot help but get the impression in this new century that Capitalism, as we practice it today, has become a brain disorder spreading like a plague around the world.
My sister is at this time vegetating in a New Jersey Nursing home.
She has been there for over a year and her above average resources are being drained away. When I look at that once beautiful women, who is no longer able to communicate, and I think of how hard she worked to develop her rather large holdings, I become very angry. Many of the above-mentioned and others, all suffering from the same brain disorder, are viciously tearing at those holdings.
What a beautiful idea America was. "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." Oh yes, what a hell of a great idea. I remember when I had to memorize that for a sixth grade play celebrating the Fourth of July. How did we let that great idea deteriorate into our present government?
The combination of the controlled media, the taking over of small town political committees along with the structured childhood of little league etc. appears to have bred the leadership gene out of the human animal. Today in every part of the world weak, personal agenda, leaders face constituent’s anger and yield to the likes Of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The man who tops my hero’s list (Uri Avnery) often points out that right wing, blind faith, fanatical Zionists create the very product they so often complain about; Anti-Semitism.
CJP report--: http://www.cjp.org
"It's hardly a new problem that Jewish communities have found themselves being criticized, attacked or even under threat as a result of wars in the Middle East involving Israel," but it's much worse today than in the past, said Robert Wistrich, director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University.
"Today there is a much more widespread antipathy and even revulsion in many mainstream public opinion circles, in Western countries as well, toward Israel that is more intense than it was 25 years ago," said Wistrich, a professor of European history.
Zionists are driven to self-destruction. One wonders what they do with the 3to5 billion American taxpayer’s dollars we send them every year. The division between the haves and have nots grows wider there every year.
Gov't Planning Sharp Welfare Cuts Despite Poverty Report 13:51 Aug 30, '06 / 6 Elul 5766
(IsraelNN.com) Finance Minister Avraham Hirchson is planning a series of welfare cuts amounting to more than $1.7 billion despite Wednesday's report that poverty in Israel has worsened. The government is trying to put together a 2007 budget that has to deal with unexpected costs as a result of the Hizbullah terrorist war, which brought about increased spending demands from the IDF and extra costs for rebuilding the north. Among the proposed cuts are cutting quotas for foreign workers, raising university tuitions, cutting child allowances for the first child, reducing benefits for discharged soldiers and obligating parents to pay school costs.
Globes - Rishon Le-Zion,IsraelThe National Insurance Institute published its 2005 poverty report today, which states that the number of poor rose by 92,200 compared with 2004. The increase was more than expected. The number of poor in Israel rose 6.2% from 1.53 million in 2004 to 1.63 million in 2005.
The most significant increase was in the number of poor children. 768,000 children lived below the poverty line in 2005, an increase of 7.7%, or 52,200 children, over 2004. The number of poor families rose by 4.2%, or 16,500 families, to 394,200 in 2005.

No, I don’t think we are the smartest species on the planet. If there is a life after death I would rather come back as an oak tree.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-08-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Has there ever been a time in history when so many were cowed and terrorized by so few?
Many anti-war voters in Connecticut gave the country and certainly the President a punch in the nose by
Voting against the eighteen year incumbent senator and committed Zionist war hawk Senator Lieberman.
Fearing to speak it out loud frustrated peaceniks were voting against Israeli aggression and the total grip AIPAC (American Israel Public affairs Committee, I prefer to call it the American Israel Political Action Committee because that is what it is.] has on American foreign policy. I have tried to point out to the local media that AIPAC owns Lieberman's Ears, eyes, mouth and heart. The media feels Israel and AIPC are not germane to our elections.
Acknowledging the power of AIPAC the right wing columnist Novak pointed out that" Washington
remains largely a bipartisan, criticism-free zone for Israel."
Important new details of the U.S.-Israeli espionage case involving Larry Franklin, the alleged Pentagon spy, two officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and an intelligence official at the Embassy of Israel emerged last week. Two AIPAC officials—who have left the organization—were indicted along with Franklin on charges of "communicating national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it." In plain English, if not legal-speak, that means spying,
Robert Dreyfuss
Juan Cole-- On the rare occasion when a brave member of Congress dares stand up to this unrelenting AIPAC tyranny, that person is targeted for un-election in the next congressional campaign, with big money directed by AIPAC and/or its analogues into the coffers of the senator's or congressman's opponent. Over and over again, AIPAC has shaped the U.S. Congress in this way, so successfully that no one even dares speak out any more
http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3467
The fact is, all of America seems to be a "criticism free zone for Israel."
Those of us who voted for the first time candidate who defeated Lieberman celebrated the victory. Perhaps the tide is turning we thought. By the next day we awakened to reality. A conspiracy between the Republican Party, AIPAC and Carl Rove in the White House moved to get Lieberman, a life-long democrat re-elected as an independent.
Panicked by the thought and smitten with the political fever, the so-called Peace candidate began making overtures to AIPAC and the Jewish community. He even went so far as to sit down to dinner and discuss, "how, as a US Senator, can I help Israel." With Shimon Perez.
The entire peace community in Connecticut was shocked and dismayed. One can not be against the war in Iraq and support the atrocities of the Israeli military.
How can so few cower so many? One of the reasons is that a large portion of the American population still believes that God gave the Jews the land Of Israel. The other reason is that the guilt of the Christian church’s anti-Semitism of the twenties and thirties seems to be passed down generation to generation.
But the most import reason is the enormous power of AIPAC to raise money and not only to support certain candidate, but also to defeat others.
I do believe that in my lifetime the many will again turn on the few and the cycle will begin again.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Kristlenacht

2006-08-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Standing in front of the train ticket window, my sea bags on my shoulder and still in uniform with my ribbons for all to see, I was about to buy a ticket home and begin civilian life. A Trainman came by and asked me where I was going. I told him and he waved for me to follow him. I told him I didn’t have a ticket but he put me on the train. Later I had to take a bus from the train station to my home. The driver put his hand over the coin collector and again I rode free.
At home I had my mustering out pay, a ten thousand dollar GI mortgage guarantee, free college tuition with a stipend of $50 a month if I attended and the twenty dollars a week for fifty two weeks to hold me over. I was also assured of health benefits at Veterans hospitals. That was the mid forties. That was my America. Today the Bush administration is cutting the Veterans hospital budgets to the bone and he is making more patients every day.
The treatment of our veterans today is a national disgrace.
The question all aging Americans want answered is how did we let our America get away from us?
We thought our America was really a democracy with a government of by and for the people.
As I write this two candidates for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Connecticut have already spent about ten million each and the campaign still has a few days to run. That is only for the nomination. How much will they spend on the election campaign itself?
Michael Bloomberg spent about $73 million of his own money to win the mayor's seat in New York City. One wonders how much more was contributed. He bought the Mayor’s office.
If you have enough money, say around one hundred million, you can yank a duly elected governor out of office and stick in a muscle-bound two bit actor with absolutely no credentials to govern a large state. Of course the actor had to promise big contributors that the first thing he would do is deregulate the energy industry in California and that is what he did.
They did the same thing with Ronald Reagan who soon became known as the de-regulation President.
As a Realist I can see that this is not only happening in America, but around the world. In Moscow I heard Russians use the old expression of money talks when speaking of politics and the election of the boorish drunk Yeltsin and his successor Putin. American Dollars put them both in Power.
In Tel A Viv I heard the same thing said about the election of Begin, and Sharon. Even when speaking to a Chinese journalist at the Book Expo in New York she told me how upset she was that American dollars are at work in Chinese politics and Chinese media. As I grow older and watch history repeat itself I become very angry.
How did we let this happen? What was it Eugene O’Niel said, There is no tomorrow or today, just yesterday, again and again and now.
On November 10,1939 Nazi storm troopers smashed windows of Jewish storefronts, burned synagogues and created mayhem. A total of 110 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 Jewish businesses were smashed, 26,000 Jews were arrested and physically beaten, and 91 died. Later Goering and his henchmen joked about it and called it Kristallnacht. I remember my mother’s tears.
Last night I had tears of my own as I watched Israeli soldiers (be careful not to call them Jews; my mother would be offended) smashing walls and windows of the homes of terrified Palestinians.
Goering’s excuse was that a 17-year-old boy named Herschel Grynszpan had killed Nazi Third Secretary Ernst Von Rath after the Nazis had destroyed his father’s business. Can any honest person not see a parallel today?
In 1966 I stood in front of Martin Luther King at the base of Enid Dam in Mississippi. An exasperated King looked up at the gun-carrying possemen on top of the dam and then stared at the militants in our group screaming for Black power. King said, "I am not interested in white power, green power or black power. I am only interested in moral power, the most powerful force on earth."
Israel was created on moral power, but as the right wing, blind-faith fanatics gained control the moral power diminished. Now there are anti-Israel demonstrations everywhere. These are not anti-Semites who are demonstrating; many are Jews like me.
The Jewish Federation, who ran ads stating, " we stand with Israel" and those members who belong, must decide if they are standing with the thousands of Jewish anti-war demonstrators in Israel and all over the world who are trying to restore the moral power, or if they are with the Kristallnacht troops who have destroyed it and may therefor destroy the state. Older Jews must also be asking How did we let Israel get away from us.

,.

Religion

2006-07-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

PRINCE OF PEACE

One would think that if there was a supreme being, be it a he or she supreme being, the first thing that Supreme Being would do is ban religion.
If God sent his son down to be the Prince of Peace then the first thing the Prince of Peace
would have to do would be to get rid of the most deadly weapon man has ever invented. RELIGION.
For centuries humans have been sent off to kill each other, for the benefit of a few seeking power and riches, after they have first been infected with the mind numbing rational that they are doing Gods’ work.

"The Crusades, like so much of the modern conflict, were not wholly rational movements that could be explained away by purely economic or territorial ambition or by the clash of rights and interests. They were fueled, on all sides, by myths and passions that were far more effective in getting people to act than any purely political motivation. The medieval holy wars in the Middle East could not be solved by rational treatises or neat territorial solutions. Fundamental passions were involved which touched the identity of Christians, Muslims and Jews and which were sacred to the identity of each. They have not changed very much in the holy wars of today.
---Karen Armstrong, Holy War, 1988

PROCLOMATION
"The Allied armies through sacrifice and devotion, and with GOD’S help have won from the enemy final and unconditional surrender.
Now, therefore, I Harry S Truman, President of the United States of America
Do hereby appoint Sunday, August 19,1945, to be a day of prayer and thanksgiving."
Harry S Truman
Would God have helped Truman drop one bomb on a city and kill 70,000
people, including the women and children and then a few days later do the same thing again to another city? Was the Prince of Peace really sent here for that purpose? Would he have given us the atom bomb to use?
As congress voted to continue the Day of Prayer South Korean politics of the 1950s was controlled by the ruthless dictator73 year old, Syngman Rhee. His ambition for personal power knew no bounds. He stood in the way of any attempt toward a democratic Korea. He was a new Christian and a virulent anti-Communist .To him they were the anti Christ. He vowed to invade the North
and with help from the US, wipe them out. Hearing that threat, the North launched a pre-emptive strike and the Civil war began. America chose Rhee to lead the fight against the unbelieving Communists. He was to be the President of South Korea.
Rhee instituted "The National Security Law" to put down the opposition
mainly from the Buddhists, and to stop the student uprising against the repression by Rhee’s brother who was boss of the dreaded secrete police, and in charge of enforcing the
oppressive law. Armed with the law, Rhee terrorized the people with a campaign of anti-Communist witch-hunts. The secrete Police rounded up many dissidents who had no connections with the Communists at all, but opposed Rhee’s mad drive to convert and dominate the people.
He was finally driven out of the country into exile in Hawaii, but he continued his
Self serving Christian efforts.
Syngman Rhee, was later elected moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
.
"Our ministry of reconciliation stems from our commitment to Jesus Christ, through whom God has reconciled us to himself," said Rhee in his pre-election speech.
The Results of the Crusade to save American interests in the region:
U.S. losses were placed at over 54,000 dead and 103,000 wounded, while Chinese and Korean casualties were each at least 10 times as high.
Today, more than half a century later the US still has tens of thousands of troops on the North Korean border and the country is still divided.
In the 1960s while marching with Dr. King in Mississippi, some of the older marchers started to sing the second chorus of "We Shall Overcome." The lyrics are "God is on our side." Directly across the street the Klan was holding up a large sign that read, "God believed in the separation of the races." So the younger marchers switched to singing the song," Which side are you on boy, which side are you on," But instead of saying boy they inserted God.
Vietnam
There is ample documentation of the role the Vatican and Cardinal Spellman, along with the Dulles Brothers played in supporting the French Catholics in Indo China and influencing President Kennedy to support the devote Catholic President Diem. in the civil war against the "anti-Christ Communist" of the North. Many leftists referred to the war as, "Spellman’s war."
Cardinal Spellmen made frequent trips to the war zone as the newly appointed Vicar of the American Armed forces. He flew in Air Force planes and gave the impression that he represented the Vatican there. To him the war was a we against them. We being the church and the American forces the "Soldiers of Christ" and they being the "Godless Communists."
The almost Rasputin hold the Cardinal had on the Kennedy family was the major influence that put Diem in power.
As we all know the war was lost and Vietnam is a Communist country. As for Diem and his brother: they were both shot after attending a Mass at Church of Saint Francis in Saigon. I can’t recall who but someone said,
. "Thus died two most devout sons of Holy Mother Church.
And with them died the political regime they had attempted to impose for her sake upon an unwilling non-Catholic—even non-Christian—nation."
Results…All US Forces KIA in Vietnam = 58,169
The Hanoi government revealed on the twentieth anniversary of the war that the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, and 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded.
Which side was God on?
Israel
While sitting at an outdoor café table on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv Israel, the handsome actor son of the then defense minister Dayon said {to paraphrase it was years ago) that he didn’t think the Wailing wall, now the Western wall, was worth the life or limb of any of his comrades. He said that he calls himself a Jew because it is the only rational for taking someone else’s land, water and resources.
I said, Then even though you do not call yourself religious, you still claim that as a person with a Jewish mother God gave you the land.
He told me that the Jews escaping from the holocaust had no other choice and they convinced themselves that God, did indeed, give them the land.
His mother Ruth admits in her book that she furnished her home with confiscated Palestinian furniture. I wondered how far is that from taking the gold out of the teeth of the victims of Auschwitz. With God on your side you can see what you want to see.
Students at Hebrew University gave me the analogy of the Christians taking the land from the Natives in America. They are right, but only if God is on your side can you make two wrongs into a right.
Today the slaughter in the area goes on. Jews are killing Muslims. Muslims are killing Jews. Christians are killing Muslims, Shiites are killing Sunni’s, Muslims are killing Buddhists and Catholics are killing Protestants and Protestants are killing Catholics.
This week I intend to go to a Catholic early mass and attend a protestant service later and during the week go to a temple, mosque, synagogue and I will pray to all the Gods PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS GOD DAMNED RELIGION BUSINESS BEFORE IT WIPES US ALL OUT. Or is that the idea?

Truth does not age

2006-06-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist
David Truskoff's work can be found on Amazon and all other internet books sales.

WAIT FOR ME CHILD (Sidney T. Black Publishing)

“Cannot we women here in the US even interest ourselves
enough to study the possible ways open to us in the world today of eliminating the causes of war and then get behind movements furthering those ends with some demonstrations of our own?”
... Eleanor Roosevelt

Delores Matzak heard the call of Eleanor Roosevelt as a young student, only to find that it’s a long journey from political protesting in the streets to the vice presidency of a major advertising agency on Madison Avenue, but Delores Matzak made that journey.

Wait For Me Child is more than the story of one person; it is the story that could be told of many idealistic Americans who endure the pain of helplessly watching history’s cycle spin before them.

Oh, to feel young again, to have the courage of youth, and to truly believe that you can make a difference.

From the book...
"Martha, the children simply asked me to drop something off for them. I heard them talking in the game room. Remember that day?" Martha nodded and he continued. "I knew they were planning something. I thought that they were going to have some kind of protest and give out leaflets. They explained that if they were seen carrying the boxes to the area the police might stop them because they did not have a permit. I had to stay in town anyway to have the car serviced so what was the harm? I just didn’t see that there was any harm that I was doing to anyone. They said that they would ask Miss Matzak if they could leave the boxes at her apartment because it was very near the place. All I had to do was pick them up there and drop them off further down the drive. I am so sorry if I ..."
"Wait, Knut. Think about this. How did you know that Miss Matzak was going to accept the boxes and that she would be waiting for you?"
"I told you," Val said..."
"No, listen. That day, how did you know that Miss Matzak and the boxes would be waiting for you?"
"I called her and she said that she would leave early for lunch and she would be waiting for me. I asked her if she knew where the place was and she said that she did. I tell you sir, I had no idea that it would be so serious to affect your business. I don’t know what to say."
"Knut, let me understand this. You called Del at the office and you discussed it with her?" Knut didn’t answer. He just looked at Del and then back over at David. He blinked rapidly and turned away.
Del’s eyes glistened. "David please," she said. "You can do what you want. Blame me. Hell, to Hendrix I’m still your secretary and secretaries get blamed for everything. Fire me, but it wasn’t Knut’s fault. He had no reason to believe that there was anything more than anti-war leaflets."
"Will you both stop saying that? I don’t give a damn if it was just toilet paper. It was a dumb thing to do and look at where it has taken us." He slid off the stool and waved his arms. "And to be discussing it on the office phone through that switchboard, it’s incredible." "I suppose that it is," Del answered. "The kids called me first. They were very guarded. If someone was listening I suppose it would have made them suspicious."
"You suppose . . . Del, how could you have gotten yourself and Knut into such a thing." "No . . . no," Knut protested standing to face his employer. "She told me not to go. She said that it was a bad idea to use that car. She said that it was bad enough for you that the kids were involved, but I thought that it was better this way because there was less chance of them getting in trouble."
"Oh no," David groaned. "You thought they wouldn’t get in trouble? I can’t believe that my Val had anything to do with bombing a church."
Del smiled. "They didn’t. bomb a church. They threw what the kids call stink bombs. It is a conference center and office building.The cars parked off the drive belonged to Tommy and one of the others. They reported them stolen that morning. so the police would not be able to place them at Riverside Drive. That’s why they couldn’t carry the things in them. They were afraid if they got stopped the police would find it. Later they walked to the cars and drove away."
David continued to shake his head. "Do both of you agree with what they did?"
Knut pointed one finger on each hand upwards. "To be honest, I do. I do not judge them. The actions are theirs. They are young and they have a right to make mistakes, if it was a mistake, but how do you justify your actions when it hurts somebody else? I don’t know what to do or say accept that I am sorry."
"I agree with that," Del said smiling and nodding at Knut. "I am also sorry that I hurt you and V&W, but I am not sorry for what I did. I was very moved when Knut said that he felt like a man. I felt like a woman, free to do the things her heart and mind tell her to do. I felt young. It was beautiful. I know how much V&W means to you. I am sorry . . . very sorry about that. I didn’t mean to. . . . Well, as I said you can tell Hendrix that you have fired me and that I was the cause."
"Oh, damn it," David said getting to his feet after slamming his hand down on the counter. "I’m not firing anybody. I just want to reason this whole thing out in my mind. Barney was not accidentally killed. He was shot. I am certain that it ties in to V&W somehow. I am sure the police and the State Police all feel the same way. Now lets get the kitchen cleaned up . . . no . . . no, Martha. Del and I will do it. You two go on up to bed."
<<<>>>
Martha burst into tears as soon as their apartment door was shut. Knut patted her back with one hand and held her head against his chest with the other. "I’m sorry . . . I am very sorry, Martha . . . I didn’t want to hurt anybody."
"I know. I know, " Martha said moving her head up and down. "I am not crying about that." "What? What are you crying about?"
"Didn’t you hear her? Didn’t you hear? . . . She sounded just like Ruth."

CHAPTER THIRTY
Our lives are shaped by the people we meet. From the
crib to the grave, it’s the people we meet. The people we meet.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-06-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist
excerpt from the book GOD GO WITH THEM
Part of a discussion about the military draft in 1965 taking place in a seminary someplace in Connecticut.
Wait a minute, Howard said. “Why are we spending so much
time talking about Canada? We agreed that we wouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about the war or the politics of the war because we all agree on that, so the way Cathy and I saw this thing tonight was to move in to much more personal problems with our commitment. I would like to touch again on the subject of parents because I did not agree with Wilfred. I think that most parents do make great sacrifices for their children and do deserve to be considered. I’m not saying that they should keep you from making your own decisions. I am saying that you should do your utmost to include them. I know that Wilfred’s folks do not oppose what he is doing. They are just as much against this war as he is, but he doesn’t give them credit for being revolutionaries like he sees himself right now. When they moved to the suburbs it took great courage, and your Dad did see himself as a revolutionary . . .. When Richard’s father fought the war to end wars, he thought that he also fighting to end fascism, racism, anti Semitism, and oppression. He was ready to give his life for equal justice. That’s what he thought he was doing and all you have to do is peel back the bark and talk to that man. You will be surprised.”
Three people began to talk at once, but Marks voice carried over them. “That’s a misconception that you have. That’s what you want to believe so you can rationalize your own participation in the war and still glory in it. You have been cleansed and now you are official, ‘Man.’ Nobody can point his finger at you and say, Queer, coward, son-of-a-bitch. No not to you. That’s why most men went in so willingly and that’s why we still have wars. Hell, if they could only think of a way to get rid of the atom bomb we would have another beautiful world war by now. That’s what happened to Larry. He just didn’t want to hear, queer, coward, son-of-a-bitch so he went in. I guess I’m trying to find the same thing that Doctor King was reaching for. He had a hell of a time trying to convince young Blacks that non-violence was manly. How do you make non-violence manly so it is palatable to adults who grew up in a, John Wayne, unreal world?”
The squeaking of Wilfred’s chair was caused by his rocking and bobbing of his head “Right, man. I want to see any of you come down to the north end and try to sell pacifism. They will tell you that the man’s billy club isn’t very passive. I don’t think Doctor King could do it. He had a tough time trying it in Chicago.”
“I must admit that this isn’t going the way I had hoped,” Cathy said. “I was born into Quakerism. I know that most Quakers wouldn’t like to hear the ism I put on it, but non-violence is as natural to me as walking. I never think of any of the male members of the Meeting as being unmanly. OK, maybe I do know a few, but…” She paused and grimaced at her own remark. “Sorry. Anyway, is machismo really the key? Do we have to address that before we can speak to the more important issue of tactics? We can waste a lot of time talking about international economics which is always the cause of wars, and we can talk about greed, and Manhood, but we are here this week end to speak to our own personal situations.”
“Wait,” Ritchy interrupted. “I don’t like what Mark did. He attacked somebody and we’re not here to do that. I know that Mr. Weinbaum never criticizes anyone’s motives and I don’t think that it’s fair for anyone to think that he is capable of placing himself in Howie’s shoes when he was seventeen in the forties. I don’t condemn my father for going into the service after Pearl Harbor. I think I would like to stop the analyzing of parents. I must face Richard Simon now. So let’s not attack anyone else. Let’s get on with solving our own problems.”
Mark stood up and faced the group. “I apologize if anyone thought that I was being personal. I didn’t mean it that way. I was referring to many people Howard’s age, not him in particular.”
“Listen,” Cathy said. “We all agreed that there shouldn’t be a chairman or an agenda for this evening and I do not want to appear to be structuring the program, but I would like to stay with tactics for a while. I know that it is easy for me to say because I am not facing the problem, but then again, I can be more objective. I would like to say that more parents, those with sons in and out of the service, would be helped if we put our motivations out front. We are not trying to save ourselves; we are trying to save your sons. I want to issue a joint news release saying just that after this conference is over. Our own personal love for our parents isn’t really relevant here tonight.”
Mat Clark stretched his long legs out in front of him and stared at his sneakers. “Cathy,” he said. “Love is always relevant to any discussion about ending the war, but I agree that we are not babies and all this discussion about parents might give others that impression. I would also like to bring us back to tactics. I have been fighting this battle with myself for months now and it seems I change my mind at least once a week . . . Yesterday, I knew that I made the right decision to stay out, but again I wasn’t sure about how I wanted to stay out. I went to the David Mitchell trial and I almost lost control. When that judge said something about David being an atheist therefore he could not be a C.O. I thought I was going to get sick. I started to sweat because I was fighting back the impulse to shout,’ You dumb, son-of-a-bitch, he never claimed to be a C.O. That’s what scares me. I got the same feeling at my Board hearing. At times I couldn’t even answer their questions. I was so angry and afraid that I would blow my top that I just sat there sweating. I am beginning to feel that it’s wrong to let those bastards have any say over your life at all. They’re not qualified to do it. They’re just political appointees, including, the Judge, and they really don’t know what the hell is going on in the real world.”
“Mat,” Howard smiled. “Anyone who has ever been before a judge on any charge can raise the question about who is qualified to sit in judgment.”
Richard Simon pointed his finger at Howard. “Yes, but I saw your reaction when the Judge told David Mitchell that he couldn’t claim to be more moral than the rest of us because his investigators reported that David was living in sin with some woman. How would you like to put your life before a judge that equates making love with murder and does it from the bench?”
Glancing up toward the back of the room Howard picked out the man he suspected of being the infiltrator, or FBI informer. He knew that there was, at least, one there. “For those of you who did not attend the trial and are not familiar with the David Mitchell presentation, he based his objection on the precedent set by Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg War crime Tribunal. David is Twenty-three years old and he is from Connecticut. For years now he has refused to register for the draft. He gives as his reason, that Justice Jackson set the precedent of individual guilt at Nuremberg. He ruled that those accused of Nazi war crimes could not plead that Hitler, or their superiors made them do it. He said that somewhere along the line a man has to make his own moral decisions. David is saying that he is making his decision now and will not participate in any way with the atrocities that America is committing in Vietnam. He has already been convicted once and this is a re-trial. The government was avoiding a confrontation with him because they can not respond without giving him a chance to prove the atrocities are being committed, which David and his Lawyer, Mark Lane, are fully prepared to do. The Prosecutor kept the trial within the narrow scope that David broke the law by not registering. He kept telling the court that none of the other issues were relevant. How could they not be relevant?” Howard asked smiling at Mary Dombrowski.
“So tell them what happened,” Kieth said, shaking his head from side to side and exhaling with a loud whoosh.
“He was found guilty,” Howard answered. “That put the entire exercise into a sort of surrealistic haze. You see David didn’t come there to be tried. He came to try the government.”
Mat pulled his sneakers back under his chair and turned to look at the others in the room. “That’s what I was talking about. Mr. Weinbaum wants me to go to court in front of a judge like that and present Mat Clark. I don’t understand what that will accomplish. There is no way that damned judge is going to let me explain my case to a jury, nor is there any way that he can understand what I am talking about. If I can not convince my father, how the hell am I going to convince that political appointee of anything? He is there because his political party favored him. I might as well take my case to Cardinal Spellman, or Dean Rusk, or McNamara. What’s the purpose?”
“I think,” Howard answered with a deep sigh. “That the David Mitchell presentation is one of the most important anti-war efforts that has been tried in a long time. It is honest, and ties the past with the present. I think it has been a great help to many of his peers who feel they can not make a strictly religious appeal. He has not only helped them in articulating their presentations but has given many the courage to bring them before the courts.”
“Oh shit, man. Pardon my language. I forgot where I was, but I can’t agree with what you are saying. Do you think anyone is going to be tried for war crimes committed in Vietnam? I mean any of the generals or high-ranking officers. Hell no, they wont. Maybe some of the soldiers that are driven off the deep end might, but not any of those really responsible. The only persons the David Mitchell case is important to is the judge and prosecutor who are scoring career points.” Wilfred paused and stuck his pinkie finger in his Afro hair do. “Look here,” He added, his voice muffled as he bent to slide a book from under his chair and extract a folded newspaper. “ I brought it along because I knew this subject would come up. Look here,” he repeated holding up the paper for all to see. “This here is America. The Hartford Times has a big picture on the front page of these nice, clean-cut, white, shorthaired kids. Under it there is some shit about trophies being awarded to the best junior achievement salesman by the marketing executives in the area. Under that story there is a little blurb about David Mitchell, ‘The draft dodger’, who is going to jail. Now we all know that David didn’t dodge anything. The government did the dodging. The way I figure it, in less than a year these clean-cut kids are going to be on their way to college and they’ll have that picture in a frame or in their scrapbook. If you ask them who the hell David Mitchell is, they won’t know or care. Why should they? Nor will most people in the country know. David’s ass will be sitting in jail and those kids will be screwing in some Co-ed dorm. It just doesn’t make sense to give the man a club and tell him to go ahead and beat you with it and hope that he gets a heart attack doing it. No sir, that just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
Two voices were heard at the same time, but again Mark Edwards prevailed, his low voice causing Nancy to lift her head and look directly at him. “Then, as I understand it, Howie, The feds can ask him to register again when he gets out and if he refuses he can be tried again. Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Wilfred said. “That’s just what I was going to ask.”
“They can do it, and they have done that, but that is still no reason to quit trying. I keep saying over and over that each case is a step forward.”
“I’m afraid that I have a great deal of trouble with that,” Mark said, his eyes bouncing from Mat’s to Ritchy’s and back again. I see each conviction as a loss, a step backward. I’m beginning to see that objectors who take their case to a Board or a court are doing what Wilfred said, ‘just feeding the opponent’s ego.”

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-05-22T07:12:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist
The night after the 1948 presidential elections, I played basketball in the adult YMCA league in Passaic New Jersey. I remember it because after the game we all went to our favorite bar to have a few beers and play some shuffleboard. I did not want to go home. While none of us expected Wallace to win, we wanted to make a statement to the world that Realists were still here and unafraid. We wanted to say that we are building a new concept in American politics that would lead to a new America. It was an emotional ride, and we still had the great acceptance speech ringing in our ears. When I re-read it now I feel a sense of guilt. Why didn’t I, and all Realists work harder to make that great man our president and save the world from the insanity of today
On the day Wallace accepted the nomination he said,“ Franklin Roosevelt looked beyond the horizon and gave us a vision of peace, an economic bill of rights; the right to work, for every man willing. The right of every family to a decent home. The right to protection from the fears of old age and sickness. The right to a good education. All the rights which spell security for every man, woman and child, from the cradle to the grave.
It was the dream that all of us had, and Roosevelt put it into words, and we loved him for it. Two years later, the war was over, and Franklin Roosevelt was dead. What followed was the great betrayal. Instead of the dream, we have inherited disillusion. Instead of the promised years of harvest, the years of the locust are upon us. In Hyde Park, they buried our President and in Washington, they buried our dreams. One day after Roosevelt died Harry Truman entered the White House. And forty-six days later Herbert Hoover was there. It was a time of comings and goings. Into the Government came the ghosts of the great depression, the banking houseboys and the oil-well diplomats. In marched the generals-and out went the men who had built the TVA and the Grand Coulee, the men who had planned social security and built Federal housing, the men who had dug the farmer out of the dust bowl and the workman out of the sweatshop. A time of comings and goings … the shadows of the past coming in fast-and the lights going out slowly-the exodus of the torchbearers of the New Deal.”
We did not generate enough votes to make any statement at all. The gloom that permeated my home was coated with fear. We all knew that Dewey or Truman would bring back the kind of war hysteria that put Japanese Americans in concentration camps in the forties. Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor polled 1,157,326 votes, an unexpectedly low 2.3 percent of the total. The young women that I was with that night came from the same kind of a family as mine. We sat up until morning trying to find a positive note to play before we said good night. There was none.
We felt that the felons and the thugs of the “House Un-American Activities Committee” were the winners and the old robber barons were once again let lose upon the world. When we said good night, she cried. I knew that her tears were not due to our parting. Almost all of our friends that played in the WMCA league that night were WWII veterans. In the bar, the main topic was war. We were certain that the re-election of Truman meant that we were heading for military confrontation and her tears were for all the men who would die in the coming wars.
We expected labor to turn out a significant vote for Wallace, but the fear of wasting a vote and turning the country over to Dewey, and the people that he represented, frightened most blue-collar workers who were influenced by the new breed of so-called union leaders protecting their turf with anti-Wallace Communist smears. We expected Northern Blacks to vote for Wallace, (We knew that Strom Thurman would take at least three or four racist states where Blacks could not vote) but we were still young enough and naive enough not to realize that millions of Blacks still did not have the franchise or the motivation, but more than anything else, we were saddened and disappointed by the fact that it was fear that beat us. The unrelenting terror and intimidation of the red-baiters drove so many who agreed with us into looking for a safe circle, as the Women’s Strike for peace did many years later. In 1948, there was no safe circle

what is a Jew

2006-05-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

It is almost comical the way all the “Dump Lieberman” blogs are afraid to ask Why.
Why does he vote the way he does?
Why does he support the war?
Why does he get front-page coverage by condemning child abuse in all forms, but refuses to
Condemn the abuse of Palestinian children by the Israelis?
Why is he the hypocrite that he is?

I am the son of a Jewish mother. That makes me a Jew. My mother was an organizer for the International Ladies garment workers union during the textile strikes in New Jersey and Massachusetts. We lived in an area dominated by the Detroit Radio priest; the anti-Semitic Father Coughlin who often referred to FDR as “President Rosenfelt”
My mother had a difficult time trying to unionize the many polish workers who were brought to New Jersey by the slavers to work in the mills for slave wages. They did not leave Poland, they brought Poland with them. They left the church dominated Poland for the church dominated town in New Jersey.
Their children spoke Polish in the home and I knew them by their Polish names. Vladek, Yushew, Stashew.
The church, always the handmaiden for the powerful, warned the parents to keep away from the union organizers who they claimed were the “godless communists.”
Once Polish workers realized they had been tricked and brainwashed they not only joined the union but also became leaders. It was difficult for them. They had to face down the brainwashing that began in early childhood, but they had to choose between that and feeding their children. They also wanted to be Americans and live the American dream.
Many union meetings were held in our home and Jewish emigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, made up more than half of the members.
I was so proud of them and of being Jewish. They were truly at the forefront of the young labor movement
My older sister’s friends were joining the Lincoln Brigade with many other Jews to go and fight Fascism when it was not a popular thing to do in America even though our beloved Presidents wife supported them.
I can remember my mother taking me with her when she carried a sign along with other union members asking the President to save the Jews of Europe.
Oh yes, I was so proud of being a Jew.
When I heard Presidential candidate General Clark say, “Americans are ashamed of their leaders.” It was an emotional blow that brought all of the wonderful childhood memories back to me.
What would my mother say if I told her that I am ashamed of the leaders of Israel and I am ashamed of the American Jewish community that does not have the courage to say what they feel in their heart.
What would she say about the ridiculous argument in Israel about What or who is a Jew.
I am sure she would say and feel what I feel and what I am saying.

Why is Senator Lieberan the hypocrite that he is, because he does not have the character or the moral strength that the polish workers had back in the thirties. He can not answer the brainwashing with what must be in his heart. He is not a stupid man. He can not believe that the war in Iraq is good for America.
He only believes what he is told to believe and that it is good for Israel. Therefore, he does not represent the people of the state of Connecticut. He represents the ,blind faith, right wing, Zionists of Israel.
He depends on the fear people like me might have of being called “Jewish self hater,” Or worse yet “anti-Semitic” If they speak the truth.
I am neither, Senator. I am an American Realist, born of a Jewish mother who was a better Jew than you.
If she were here today she would be saying the same thing that I am saying to you
I will not vote for you.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-04-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

William Sloan Coffin

Well, Bill finally is at peace. The last time I saw him speak he said he had about six months to live. That was at least a year ago. He would like folks to say that he was a pretty tough guy.
We had our differences about realism and how to apply it. Coffin was an ex CIA agent. He had been a friend of George W.H. Bush since his youth. They both attended Phillips Academy (1942), and he brought Coffin into the exclusive Scull and Bones secrete society at yale. As a CIA agent he spent three years in West Germany recruiting so called anti-Soviet refugees, and bring them to the US and train them on how to undermine Stalin's regime. Some of them were the most ruthless Nazis such as Radislow Ostrowski and Emanual Jasiuk The darlings of the Einsatzgruppen and Major Dimitri Asmowitch the Ruthless Nazi mayor of Smolensk. I could never forgive him for that. The Nazis destroyed my father’s hometown in Byelorussia.
Many left-liberals in the civil rights and anti- war movements never could take Coffin to their hearts knowing about his CIA background.

When I first met him I compared him with Cardinal Spellman of New York.
I often referred to the war in Vietnam as “The Cardinal's War.”Spellman saw the war as a We (Catholics) against the anti Christ Commies and no one had more influence on the Kennedy family than Spellman did. Coffin also put all Communists in the same Anti-Christ, enemy bag.

But like Doctor King,William Sloan Coffin finally grew into a Realist.
It was not easy for him to shed the Yale Seminary anti Communist, anti Christ brain washing, but I think the New Coffin was born when he learned of the C.I.A coup that brought down Mossadegh in Iran and the other clandestine operations that had nothing to do with Christian ethics, but were in fact motivated only by greed.

I used him on two or three occasions once as a keynote speaker at an open air
Anti war demonstration. As an orator he was surpassed only by Doctor King. On another occasion I produced a Public (Then Educational) television program that featured Coffin and the Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh. After the program Bill told me that he was unhappy with his performance. "“Nhat Hanh was talking about love and that’s my business, But I was talking about politics.” The subject was “War and the Church”
I remember the tear gas filled streets of New Haven and Coffin racing around trying to calm the “Crazies”. I remember the long talks in his office about violence and non-violence and the image of man. I also remember the chiding I got for a piece that I wrote titled “The religion of football.”

Yes, he grew into one of the most remarkable Realists I ever met. When I heard him say he only had six months to live I could not help but get very emotional. After the Historic “Freedom Rides,” the many anti- war demonstrations and speeches, the many arrests, are we not at war again? Are our school systems not just as segregated? Are we not just as divided? Rest in Peace Bill.

David Truskoff
Author of Rebirth Of A Realist.

American brain washing

2006-04-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist

HOW THE HELL DID WE GET HERE?
A friend of mine lifted his beer, looked at me and asked, “How the hell could anyone vote for Goopya doopya to be president? How did we get here?”
There is an answer. Shortly after the 1996 elections in Russia, students there were all given new textbooks that re-wrote the country’s history and projected a wonderful new life under a free market system. Today they suffer the same brain numbness that many Americans suffer from.
My friend’s question made me think back to the end of the euphoria enjoyed by all of us after WW2
At a symposium in Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard Economics professor Dr. Seymor E. Harris said on March 24,1947, “Ruling out the rebound that came with the war economy both England and New England are again suffering from a severe economic slump and unemployment.” On April 11, 1947 Brent Spence the ranking member of the House Banking committee complained, “Prices have gotten out of control.”
The train had jumped to a new track and was speeding in the wrong direction. No one has stopped it yet.
At that time, my parents were stressing the fact that I should forget sports and stay in school and study because hard times are ahead. My father was always critical of the fact that I was “Propagandized in high school” He was always giving me books and magazines to read so I, “will learn the truth.”
Remembering how my politics as a youth were formulated, I checked recently at the local high-school to see what kind of history teen aged students were being taught in this new century.
I found that a book titled “The History Of The United States” was being used in the classroom. I obtained a copy and on Page 629 under the heading of “A Growing Economy,” the writer states that from the end of World War II until 1970, the nation enjoyed its longest period of prosperity. It goes on to describe the many automobiles and the highways to accommodate them that were built in those years and while mentioning,“ Brief recessions” it lists the following facts: “Gross national product grew from $335.2 billion in 1945 to $722.5 billion in 1970.
In the same period per capita income before taxes increased (in 1958 dollars) from $1,870 to $3,050. Americans prospered as they shared the highest per capita income in the world.”
The book also adds that there was “A price that Americans had to pay and that was the inflation of the l960s.”All of this, and the unabashed propaganda of the entire book is to make young chests swell with pride in the American system and to instill the idea that if it were not for the “Commies” we would have continued to be a true peace loving democracy with the best economic system in the wor1d.
I shall always be grateful to my parents who saved me from the brain washing that most young American students are fed. The kind of brain washing that creates the blind-faith mentality that racism, nationalism, and fascism thrives on. No where does this propaganda book mention the fact that the international oil companies like Aramco were, during that same period, selling oil to France at 95 cents a barrel and to other countries for a dollar or less, but was selling the same oil to the United States Navy for $1.23 and therefore getting rich on the backs of the American taxpayer. (Still riding the runaway train today’s price is $70.00 a barrel) That same taxpayer saw his taxes continue to diminish his economic gains. Nor does the book mention the real cost of the so-called prosperity.
While the military industrial complex, that President Eisenhower later identified, made huge profits supplying the ominous and world-threatening web of air and sea bases in Europe and Africa and the country that we had “saved,” Turkey, American men were shipped overseas to man those bases. (To protect American interests) The biggest price of all that the high school text book fails to mention under “A Growing Economy” is the 33,686 Young Americans killed in action fighting the North Koreans, or the over two and a half million Chinese and Korean lives spent to use up the expensive military equipment that was so profitable. Asians and Europeans watched the American living standard become the highest in the world. They knew why. Americans did not.
No mention is made in the high school textbook of 58,000 American deaths and 365,000 American wounded and the two million Vietnamese lives that were cashed in for the same purpose. It would do well for the publishers of the textbook to explain to the helpless students that ‘‘Per Capita’’ means, for each person of the population. (Random House) It does not mean that the Navaho Americans or the Black Americans or millions of the white working poor in those years enjoyed the “unprecedented prosperity.”
During a demonstration against the war in Vietnam, I was called a Communist traitor by a group of hecklers for saying that middle class and upper income Americans must realize that their dollars are tainted with the blood of those who needlessly gave their lives in Korea and Vietnam.
It seems that in the 60s many Americans, including a young draft dodger named Clinton, were almost willing to accept the fact that the domino theory was a plot for profits, but they were unwilling to let go of the media propaganda blitz that shaped their thinking vis-à-vis Korea.
I had one advantage over most of my liberal friends. I had no fear of being called a Communist. Indeed, I had become conditioned to it. I heard it when I was just a pre-teen carrying a sign to stop fascism in Spain or when my mother took me to the docks in New York to demonstrate against the shipping of oil and scrap metal to the Japanese. I often wondered if any of those hecklers died in the war against Japan.
The brain washing of young children in our public schools is a major contributing factor to the bleak future of the next generation, Yet it seems to go unchallenged.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-04-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

Rebirth of a Realist
Today (4/9/06) I went to my local feed store to buy bird feed. The owner gave me a cap with the store logo on it. It was very nice and remembering the old adage of never looking a gift horse in the mouth, I waited until I got home to read the label. Yes, it was made in China. I always read labels. It tells me a lot about my country and the world.
In 1996, I was invited to attend a symposium at Moscow University. The university itself is amazingly conservative. Perhaps I should use a better word, for in Moscow the media has confused the public by using the word conservative to describe those on the left.
A great many students there are sent by corporations of other countries to study economics. The host for the gathering was a professor in the economics department. The subject was the future of Socialism and how can it democratically be achieved.
While there, I was asked to speak to a young group of students with Communist backgrounds trying to adjust to the new Yeltsin Capitalism. (I noticed some of them wearing beepers and carrying cell phones) What they wanted me to speak about was the question; "What has happened to the political left in America? Why is it having so little influence in the Government?” I was reluctant at first. How can I do this without criticizing my country while a guest in another country? Remember my patriotism was forged steel hard during the years of World War II and my mission in life is to make that country better, but here is part of what I finally said. As I spoke, I was pretending that I was speaking to liberal America.
I spoke of subjects that no one wants to mention at home. Neither the conformists nor the radicals can find platform for saying what is really the cause of the root rot of liberalism in America.
MOSCOW 6/96
“Standing in front of you is living proof that you can not always believe what you see about Russians on American television. I am wearing a dark suit because you rarely see a “new Russian” on our television who is not wearing a suit and tie. Of course, we only see the “New Russian.” I was beginning to believe that such people wear their suits to bed. I was also led to believe that everyone at Moscow University wears suits and ties every day.
There is a point and a message that I want to present about the way that I am dressed. You see, I am not a rich man. I do not have my clothes custom made, so I buy them off the rack, as the expression goes, from the department store, as most Americans do.
Therefore, my shoes are made in Mexico. My suit carries an expensive American label, but it is made in Bulgaria. My shirt was made in the Philippines, My tie in Italy, Even my socks and underwear were not made in America.
Before I left home, my wife and I had some fun looking about the house for things made in America. We found very few. I have two or more television sets made by Mitsubishi in Japan. I drive a new GT Legacy station wagon made by Subaru, a Japanese company making cars in America. My camera is Japanese. Even the lawn mower that I use to cut the grass around my home was made in Japan. This morning I discovered that the luggage that I brought with me was not made in America.
I buy the best product that I can get for my money. It is not easy for me to admit to all of this, because my mother was an organizer for the International ladies Garment Workers union: My father a charter member of the C.I.O. My brother an organizer for the dockworkers, and I was a local organizer for the National Association of Broadcasters and Engineers. I am union from the tips of my skinny hair to the tips of my toes, but the American labor leaders must bear the brunt of the responsibility for all of the American Jobs lost. I feel they have let the workers down. To me that is the beginning of the liberal malaise in America.
The most explosive subject, of course is the demise of Jewish liberalism. Using the tried and true fear tactic right wing Zionism has made many Jews feel guilty about being liberal. Liberal Jews have not found the door that leads them away from the oppressive Zionists and back to their own beautiful Jewish traditions.
Now what is the point of all this? The point is that Young Americans, at one time accepted the myth of the “Great American Know How.” It was a phrase that we all heard many times. We knew that it was a myth because the only great American expertise was perhaps how the Indian Chief Sitting Bull made his bow and arrows. The rest of the work building America was done buy Italian Americans; Irish Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Russian Americans, and so on. Today, as more jobs are sent abroad many young Americans have lost their national pride. Korea, Vietnam and other military fiascoes have taken their toll. They have demonstrated, marched, committed civil disobedience, and they have been sent to jail and nothing seems to change. There is a feeling of helplessness. It is my belief that the same thing has happened here. It is one thing to wave a flag and pretend, but when the youth of a nation does not have genuine pride in their country, or the actions taken by their country in their name, then that Nation is in serious trouble. It is my belief that Americans and Russians suffer from the same malaise which comes from the mixture of lack of pride and feeling of helplessness.”

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“Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.”
“This President( GW Bush) is the worst President of my lifetime.”
Lowell Weicker Ex Republican US Senator and Governor of Connecticut
For Realists the time has come again to see the future of the Republicrate system in terms of what it has created. The misery of the people in Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, the Philippines, and most of Eastern Europe is due mainly to answer our gathering instincts. Or to put it in Realist terms, our greed.
In our own cities the killing continues. Police are being arrested, and in my own state of Connecticut, millionaires, Priests, teachers, Mayors, State Legislatures and perhaps even Governors are being indicted. There is very little left for our young people to believe in.
It is obvious that what is needed is a new political movement that will reach back and gather the thoughts of Roosevelt and Wallace, refuel them and re-shape them to fit the present day world. It may require the development of new tactics and new methods of presentation but a political philosophy based on international equal justice, which is as relevant today as it was in the forties, needs no changing. All it needs is people with the courage to pursue it. When an idea like that has found its time no military power on earth can stop it. It is time for real patriots to step forward and save the country

Patriotism lost

2006-03-24T11:47:00.001-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
It seems like just yesterday when I was an enthusiastic, patriotic American looking forward to a wonderful peaceful future.

As the song goes,’ Oh what a feeling.’

That was when my parents were so proud of the two star banner that hung in a front window ......the banner that told everyone their sons were in the war against fascism.

The people elected FDR four times. He was our president for more than twelve years. The people trusted him , the people respected him, and the people loved him.

In the face of all the hardship, Americans then still felt positive about the American dream.

Since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, lawyer-legislators have been tearing down the structure he built to protect America from the robber barons and to keep America on an even political keel.

Since 1948, America has been pushed further and further to the extreme right, bringing us to the brink of disaster that we find ourselves in today.

We have become an occupier nation, feared and hated the world over.

The question remains: IS THERE TIME FOR REALISTS TO SAVE THE SOUL OF AMERICA?
To the young I say again, it is your world, you must answer that question now.

Get political

2006-03-15T10:48:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
I feel good. I just sent this email to Molly Ivins.
"I am an old war horse. I have screamed and shouted and marched and demonstrated and paid court costs and the little men in those little rooms went right on nominating the Dodds and Liebermans and the gupya dupya types we now have in the white house." I asked her to use her platform to tell the young people today that if they want change they must move into the local political committees, the State Committees and the National Committees. They are public
and the most exciting thing that happened in the sixties was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party That shook the old guard and the Gene McCarthy campaign I attempted to be a delegate for Gene, but did not get enough support from other activists who thought it was a waste of time to try and use the system. It is not a waste of time. It is the only way.
We can not match them dollar for dollar. We can not create the machinery for change. WE must use what is already there and we can.
In Mississippi while trying to register voters Stokley (He was Stokly then)used to say, "Telling Black folks to use the system is like telling Jews to join the nazi party."
I did not agree. Eventually he changed and MFDP became a powerful force.
If students want to march (and it is exciting to see the wake up on campus) they should all march to Committee meetings.
Visit www.erols.com/suttonbear

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-03-09T10:45:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
Americans are only what the media makes them. We love Saddam..we Hate Saddam. We love the Taliban..we hate the taliban..We hate Arafat..we love Arafat.During the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign of 1988, the scare word was "liberal", the more that it was used (and it was used often) the more degrading the connotation. This may have left older Americans with a new compilation of farragoes to deal with, but for the baby boomers, it was just another case of the media jerking the reins. Middle aged Americans, however, were still reacting to the cold war rhetoric that President Truman began. It escalated months before the war in the Pacific ended when he canceled the "Lend lease Program " to The Soviet Union. That same rhetoric grew into the dementia that America still has not fully recovered from called "The McCarthy Era". The seeds of cynicism were planted at that time and have been growing inside me ever since.

In 1988 meek voices rose to defend liberalism, but they found no support in the camp of the once liberal Democratic Party where most of the candidates and the so-called leaders were all fighting among themselves to prove which one was the least liberal of all. It seems that today they are still doing it. The Democratic candidate for President in 1988 separated himself from the old guard leaders of the democratic House and Senate. Contrast that to 1948 when all the major candidates for the presidency were jousting for the title of "World Champion Liberal."

The following quotations may strike some as astounding in view of the present political climate, but they are as relevant today as they were then. The New York Times, obviously trying to keep the hate mongers from bringing the American psyche to a political imbalance that would lead the country into a blind faith, blank mind, political morass, posed this question to all of the major candidates seeking the presidency in 1948. The Times asked, in it’s magazine section of the Sunday April 18, 1948 issue, " What is liberalism?" Governor Dukakis should have read all of the answers from the podium at the 1988 Democratic nominating convention in the Omni. It might have created the momentum for victory instead of the, tail between the legs, defeatist, campaign that was run.

We shall start with excerpts from the sitting president of the United States at that time, Harry Truman. He did not answer the question directly (He was, after all, a machine politician) but addressed it obliquely as one who had already won the contest and was the Chief liberal of the land. He said, "Our first goal is to secure the human rights of our citizens. Some of our citizens are still denied the equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement and for the free expression of their views at the polls. . . . We believe in freedom and we are doing all that we can to support free men and free governments throughout the world."

Well there certainly isn’t anything there to be ashamed of although I am sure if that statement were given today the president certainly would have added "free women," especially in an election year. Now let us try the answers of the late senator Robert M. Taft, but first we have to resurrect this man who flirted with greatness, but never brought it to bed. Three times, he challenged for the Republican Party nomination for president and three times, he failed. He did come very close to denying Eisenhower the nomination. In 1953, he served as the Senate majority leader in the Eisenhower administration. Yes, this is the same ultra- conservative who was the chief architect of the Taft-Hartley bill and was once quoted as saying that he agreed with Herbert Hoover that, "the best answer (to high cost of food) was that people should cut down on their extravagance and eat less." One has to inject here that in 1948 liberals still had the bit in their teeth. The great depression and the labor wars of the thirties and the global war against fascism, with a Communist country as one of our major allies, freed many Americans from the mental straitjacket placed upon them by the media during the Bolshevik scares of the early nineteen hundreds. So it was politically prudent for a man, whose father was William Howard Taft the very conservative one term president, who served in the White house from 1908 until defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1912, to try and suspend his established image and convince the media that he could be the president for all the people. He said, "Today everyone goes around calling himself a liberal. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to attach the term to anyone who supports any change proposed even if such change would lead to serious limitations on freedom of thought and freedom of the individual. Such a man is a radical, a sentimentalist, not a true liberal. In the United States liberalism means the resumption of progress under those historic American principles of liberty which have kept our people free and our economy free, principles that have made the United States the greatest and most productive country in the world today."

Damn, as a liberal I was busting with pride, but wait, the best is yet to come. Other conservatives have not been heard from yet. The man who was to deprive Taft of the nomination in 1948 was New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey who came as close to being president without moving his underwear into the White House as one can come. Truman (who failed to get a real majority of total popular votes) received 24,105,812 popular votes while Dewey received 21,970,065. It was so close that the Chicago Tribune, which went to press before the final tally was in, happily declared, "Dewey defeats Truman." Dewey was not the winner, but he did not fail because he lost the contest in the New York Times. His answer to "What is a Liberal" borders on holy script. "Liberalism," he said, "derives from the same word root that gave us "Liberty." It seems perfectly clear to me that no man has a right to call himself a liberal unless he believes explicitly, spiritually and concretely in economic, social and most of all human liberty. True liberalism springs from our deepest spiritual aspirations. It is as old as the Ten Commandments and the Sermon On The Mount. It practices brotherhood of all men and places first the dignity of the individual and his opportunity and personal liberty. It fights tyranny and regimentation of any kind and insists that the Government exists to preserve the freedom of human beings."

I am sorry about the long quotation, but as an old battered liberal, I could not find any of it that I wanted to deprive you of. It does make you wonder what the Dukakis people were so defensive about doesn’t it? It should also make you wonder how the media turned "liberalism" into a dirty word and how the political momentum was created to move America so far to the conservative right. (I must add here that, at this writing, right wing. off the wall, talk show hosts around the country on radio and TV are still trying to make LIBERAL a dirty word and smearing Howard Dean with it the way they did to Poor Henry Wallace.)

Well now, if that is what the conservative candidates and the President, who was rapidly losing whatever liberal credentials he had, said about "Liberalism," what was left for the real liberals, or at least those who wore the liberal mantle long before the campaign began? Governor Earl Warren of California who was to be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Eisenhower in 1953 had this answer to the question.

"Liberalism, as I understand it, is the political belief and movement arising out of the belief that the individual should be the all important, precious object of consideration in every phase of social relationships. This belief and movement born of faith in mankind and in the dignity of the human soul has found its finest expression so far in western civilization. Civil rights, representative governments and equality of opportunity are all part and parcel of the liberal tradition. Unfortunately, this great term has been abused and distorted in recent years. If I had a choice of classification, I would place people politically in three groups, reactionary, radical, and progressive. I particularly like the term progressive not necessarily as a party label, but as a concept. I believe that the great body of American people regardless of what party they are in are progressive and liberal. In this sense the finest thing that could happen to our political system would be to have such liberal thought and action dominate both political parties."

Then there was Henry A. Wallace the "Progressive Party" candidate. Vice president of the United States, Henry Wallace was the man who was deprived of the presidency by the southern racist block of the Democratic Party. He was always thought to be the heir of the Roosevelt White House by most liberal democrats. Wallace gave the most direct answer to the question. He said, "Liberalism is the credo of those who have no fear of change. Its core, as I see it, is a willingness to place human rights first and property rights second or as Lincoln put it, ‘I am for both the man and the dollar, but in the case of conflict I am for the man.’ Liberalism demands that there be no price for honest, forthright expression. Free speech is not free if it is limited by the fear of losing a job, by fear of business reprisals or by the fear that frankness endangers naturalized citizenship. Liberalism demands action against the vile practice of segregation and discrimination . . . Today’s liberalism requires that we engage in sufficient government planning to assure the maintenance of independent enterprises and full employment and to guard against excesses in business cycles."

The media giveth and the media taketh away.

From the book REBIRTH OF A REALIST by David Truskoff

Think back to Tomorrow

2006-03-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
I am an old war horse and I recently told a group of students re-organizing an SDS campus group to look back, but do not let old warhorses lead them. We need new ideas and it is your
world. Run with it.
Having said that, I must add the old cliche about those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
In a letter to my cousin (Taken from my book, THE GENES OF GREGORIA) I wrote...
. "When the economy built on a mountain of worthless paper collapsed in 1929, and the ensuing poverty crushed the middle class in America, even the upper middle class, lost their arrogance and gave way to despair. Without the “Rich and Famous” being paraded about to sell the American dream, propagandists turned from a positive to a very negative approach. Instead of trumpeting the success of America they fanned the flames of hatred, and the results were the labor goons attacking strikers who may have been their own neighbors but were painted red by the press.
Undisguised terrorism was let loose in the land. Hired thugs who broke up Union Meetings were only following the lead of the press and the United States Congress. In 1938 a special investigative committee was formed in the House of Representatives to “investigate un-American activities.” The chairman of the committee was Martin Dies. The Congressman from Texas hired a chief investigator named Edward F. Sullivan. That appointment alone told most thinking Americans exactly what the Committee was going to be. Mister Sullivan had already been arrested nine times on charges that included larceny, drunkenness sodomy and impersonating an F.B.I. officer. This was the man that was going to investigate American citizens and determine if their actions were un-American.
I can remember relating this part of our history to a group of students and it became obvious to me during the question period that they had difficulty believing it. I had to document it for them. Sasha, I am sure that when Soviet citizens first learned the truth of Stalin’s purges they had the same problem. We are all products of the media unless we are endowed with the intellectual fortitude to resist. The truth is that chief investigator Sullivan brought in “expert “ witnesses to testify against anyone that the committee wanted to persecute. The so-called experts were Alvin Halpern, who was sent to prison for larceny even before he finished his testimony; Peter J. Innes, a professional Labor spy who was sent to prison for the attempted rape of a small child. There was William C. McCuiston, an “Enforcer” hired to break strikes. He was himself murdered after he was indicted for murder by the court.William T. Gerneay, who was soon exposed as another management agent sent in to infiltrate and spy on the unions; Edwin Perry Banta, an admitted member of a pro-nazi organization who died in jail while serving a sentence for a felony crime; John Koos, a man who sent a telegram to Hitler congratulating him for his “history making efforts in the area of human rights”(Koos was also a member of the infamous Hetman organization, a fascist Ukrainian group); Richard Krebs who came to the United States after serving in the German Gestapo and had also served thirty nine months in San Quenton Prison. Perhaps the most distinguished witness of this band of blackguards was Walter Steel. He was the editor of the fanatical, right wing, pro-Father Coughlin publication. “The National Republic.”
Now, Sasha, I must give you the punch line to this bizarre affair in American History. Congressman Thomas, a member of the Committee, and a very outspoken member, later became the chairman of the committee. He spewed his anti-Communist venom everywhere, but he was himself convicted of defrauding the U.S. government and sent to prison.
Young Americans like myself had to decide who were the real Americans and who was the UN-Americans. I knew that my parents were the real Americans. They were fighting for equality and justice for all people, so the enemy had to be the Government of the United States. After all that bunch of felons and murderers represented the U.S. Government. It was all a shattering experience for a teen-aged patriot who was living in a conservative town and wanted more than anything to belong, as most teenagers do. I found myself becoming more withdrawn with each passing day and each damning headline that attempted to drive a wedge between my country and my family."
Yes, this did really happen and it is happening again today. It is more sophisticated and
new words are added like "terrorist" and ugh "Liberal" but the objective is the same.
Hurry SDS and get your new message out to the streets. The empire is crumbling and you must pick up the pieces.

Second Civil War

2006-02-20T12:32:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
Report from the Manhattan Insitute For Policy Research.

There is a wide disparity in the graduation rates of white and minority students. In the class of 2002, about 78% of white students graduated from high school with a regular diploma, compared to 56% of African-American students and 52% of Hispanic students.
• There is also a large difference among racial and ethnic groups in the percentage of students who leave high school eligible for college admission. About 40% of white students, 23% of African-American students, and 20% of Hispanic students who started public high school graduated college-ready in 2002.

From the book The Second Civil War by David Truskoff

The first time that I met LeRoy Jerome Moton was in March of 1965, one hundred years after the first battle of Selma. He was in his late teens, and the Messiah had come to his hometown. The six-foot four gangling youth glowed in the Messiah’s reflection.
It was all a beautiful dream. Martin Luther King, that very articulate, internationally famous, Black man had come to Selma Alabama to lead them to the Promised Land. LeRoy was ready to follow no matter what the cost; no matter what sacrifice had to be made, no matter what dangers had to be faced.
LeRoy Jerome Moton is an intense person, but he has a smile that could turn the Wicked Witch of the West into Mother Teresa. His very presence added to the excitement of being part of the worlds greatest love in, the 1965 Selma March that seemed to shake this country out of it’s one hundred year long Racist stupor.
When ever he came marching into town singing and laughing with a group of students behind him, you couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement generated by the young pied piper who walked, always, like the Alabama mud was too deep.
The last time that I saw LeRoy we both shared a podium at the University of Hartford on Martin Luther King day, in 1997. His hair was silver and his young son sat in the first row of the audience. He was doing quit well. He had a good job, nice home and he was free of the frightening grip of depression and frustration that plagued him in the seventies and part of the eighties. It was a joyous reunion. I was so glad to see him, but I soon learned that his disappointment about America’s progress in ending racism that he saw as not only alive and well, but also developing new roots among both Blacks and Whites, was the same as my disappointment.
When students ask me the question, what has happened to white liberals in America, and why do they seem to be moving away from civil rights. I told them how I felt when Jessie Jackson called New York City “Hymie Town.” I felt betrayed. If I, as a white man, called New York “Nigger Town” I would be cast out of the society, but Jackson was not cast out. He is still accepted in the Black community as a leader, and he has his own TV program. I shall never forgive him, nor should anyone. If that kind of phrase comes out of his mouth, then it is part of his thoughts. To me he is a bigot. I do not think that Black people have ever assessed the lasting damage that Jackson has done.
I feel obligated to tell the students about the depth of the impact the O.J. Simpson trial had on race relations vis-a-vis white liberal America. I had to put that into perspective for them. I told them that in March of 1965 a Beautiful person named Viola Liuzzo was murdered by a group of cowardly, racist thugs as she drove along the highway in Alabama. She was on her way to pick up freedom marchers that wanted to return to Selma Alabama from Birmingham where the historic Civil Rights march ended.
I knew her and I knew how proud she was to be helping Doctor King and all the young people who she thought would get a better chance at life once segregation was defeated. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the killers were. The FBI. had a paid informer in the car that pulled along side of her car and emitted the fatal shots.
The men were brought to trial in a small segregated county in Alabama. The lawyer for the killers blamed “Communists” for the killing. He also tried to convince the all white jury that Leroy Moton the young black man riding with Viola might have been the killer. The defense lawyer, Imperial Klonsel Matt H. Murphy Jr. said, in his address to the Jury, “The nigger is an African, and everybody knows that the African lived by the tooth and the claw for three thousand years and never built anything on earth more advanced than a hut with a thatched roof.”
It was all a shame and a disgrace to American jurist prudence. The killers walked out of the courtroom free men and signed autographs as they left. Two members of the all white jury, frightened of what the K.K.K. might do to them, could not bring themselves to convict. But wait, I hear you saying isn’t that awful. How could that happen in an American courtroom? Yes, the lawyer who got them off; the racist jury and the frightened judge should all be condemned.
Now I ask you, dear reader, how could I not tell those students to think about what Black attorney John Cochran did in the O.J. Simpson trial? Did he not play the same race card? He even went so far as to have Minister Louis Farrakhan’s body guards come into the courtroom and menacingly stare at the almost all Black jury during the last days of the trial, just as the Klan stared at the all white jury during the Liuzzo trial. I ask you, where is the condemnation? Cochran is a hero in the Black community. He even has his own TV show, as does Jessie Jackson, although I doubt if many white liberals watch either one of them. Many liberals feel betrayed, as I do, and many take their hidden rage into the voting booths with them.
While Black intellectuals talk at each other, and the Black middle class seems preoccupied with escaping Black, the rage among poor blacks increases with each passing day, and the danger exists that when a spark ignites the rage, white liberals will have their own rage to deal with.
It appears that most African American people today cannot determine if they, as a group, are moving forward or backward. In the face of present day media control it is difficult to determine if we, as a nation, have made two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back. Perhaps in the sixties we made one giant step and have been moving in inches ever since. LeRoy had no such problem that day in 1997, his speech was full of pessimism and anger.

Today in 2006 I ask you,Is America moving ahead, back or not moving at all?

Memories of Coretta

2006-02-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

I was exhusted and pretty much burned out. It was just a day or two before the
Mississippi March reached Jackson. Big Leon(We knew few surnames. There was big Leon and Little Leon) came to me and asked me if I wanted to baby sit for Doctor King's kids. I remember wondering what the hell the kids were doing in Mississippi at that time.
WE met at a Motel room and Coretta was her usual regal self. We were all in awe of her. Her husband was our leader and one of us, but she was above us. There were times when we worried about our own lives, butCoretta worried about her husband and her family every day.
It was many years ago, but I remember it very clearly. I remember looking at the children in their beds and asking Leon what kind of a world will they live in. "A much better one He answered.
"Do you think we are making real progress," I asked. "Of course," he said. "If I didn"t I wouldn't be risking my life in Mississippi. "
"Why do you think she brought the kids down here?"
"I know her. She is a mother and a family person. She has no idea what tomorrow will bring and she wants her husband to spend time with the kids."
Leon was much younger than I and still carried that beautiful youthful optimism.
As I said, I was burned out and depressed. We had taken a beating in Canton Mississippi and nothing seemed the same after that. I felt the non violent movement was dead and from here on in it was politics, hate and violence.
That was a memorable night for me. I kept looking at the kids and remembering myself when I was fifteen and asking my father, "why do the German People let Hitler do those things?" His answer was always the same."Fear"
He tried to explain about Rosa Luxenberg, the Communist who was shot by Nazi thugs. He told me that the Communist party was almost the dominant party in Germany at the time. They thought they would be winners, but when they shot her others became frightened." I was too young to understand. School and football were the center of my thoughts then.
When I got older and studied such things I wondered how my father knew what so few Americans knew.
He told me about the atmosphere then and that in 1922 and 1923 it was the fear of socialism
that promted americans like Prescot Bush(Grandfather of G.W. Bush) to support and to help create Hitler.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland `` Bunny '' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush. Yes, the Bush family helped create Hitler.
I remember a moment in that Mississippi motel when looking at the King Children I was overcome with emotion. How can we beat the secret Governments today? Are we risking our lives and marching around while those in the secret Governments are laughing at us?

I watched Coretta's funeral this week and remembering that night in the motel, I got all choked up. The March was so long ago and I just made a talk titled, "Did We Win, and if so what did we win? I pointed out that schools in the north are much more segregated than they were then. The drop out rate is greater than it was then. The income gap is worse than it was then. The fear in the suburbs is worse than it was then. Leaderless Minority kids are shooting each other in the streets. Whites are afraid to drive into town.
Did Coretta know that? Did she die knowing that and wondering what her husband would think about all his efforts and what would he do and say now?

Goopya Dupya in the White house

2006-02-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
In his state of the Union Speech the president said he would encourage the development of nuclear power
to alleviate the energy problem. I turned on the basketball game. I can take only so much of "goopya dupya"
I remember all the reasons I had to oppose the building of the plants back in the sixties.
The danger...the cost.. I remember pointing out at the hearings that the life span was twenty years and the cost to de-commission would be more than the cost to build. (It was) It would not(And did not) lower the cost of electricity to consumers. There is no plan yet to dispose of nuclear waste... uranium will cost as much as oil...all those reasons are still valid.
The real reason to build huge plants is for Utility holding companies to sell ,not more electricity, but wall street paper. It is the boodogle to end all boondogels. We are in a Capitalist society out of control.
The 2/2/06 Asian Tribune reports,

"The Fed's 1998 triennial Survey of Consumer Finances found that the wealthiest 1 percent of families owned almost half of all shares in the country and the top 5 percent owned three-quarters. The richest 20 percent owned an astonishing 96 percent, which meant that the other 80 percent of the population shared a mere 4 percent of all stock on issue. The result? The richest 1 percent of American families banked 42 percent of the market’s gains between 1989 and 1997, and the wealthiest 10 percent took 86 percent" (Peter Hartcher, Bubble Man, pp. 28-29).A tiny economic elite had a lot to lose from a fall in the market and much to gain from its continued rise and was therefore hostile to any action that would halt the share market spiral.According to Hartcher: "The Fed's 1998 triennial Survey of Consumer Finances found that the wealthiest 1 percent of families owned almost half of all shares in the country and the top 5 percent owned three-quarters. The richest 20 percent owned an astonishing 96 percent, which meant that the other 80 percent of the population shared a mere 4 percent of all stock on issue. The result? The richest 1 percent of American families banked 42 percent of the market’s gains between 1989 and 1997, and the wealthiest 10 percent took 86 percent" (Peter Hartcher, Bubble Man, pp. 28-29).A tiny economic elite had a lot to lose from a fall in the market and much to gain from its continued rise and was therefore hostile to any action that would halt the share market spiral."

In one of my books, "The State House," (a fiction version of the days during the building of the original plants)
The lobbiest and lawyer for the holding company(Remember Roosevelt said (Utility Holding companies must be smashed) tells the union leaders what a strike at the site of the new nuke plant would mean.

"Ok. I guess you are all waiting for me to respond," Peter said. "I assume that the company people have heard all of this before. I haven’t. I want to say first that this came as a surprise to me this morning. Our department had been informed that all was going well with the talks and I was informed of this meeting at the last minute. I was worried because I didn’t feel prepared to enter the negotiations at such a late date, but now I understand what is happening and why I was sent here. I could bullshit you people for at least a half an hour and show my boss that I was doing my job. I am, after all a lawyer and one half-hour of bullshit any lawyer can do standing on his head. We are off the record here, so I’m not going to act like a lawyer, but more like your father giving you the facts of life. First let me give you the overview from the political and the general public point of view. The public, the ratepayer, hates this damned plant because they have to pay for it and they are scared to death of it. They are not on your side. Now, we have a fairly new man who is chairman of the board. . No, let me revise that. He is not a man. He is a walking, talking computer. He looks at the figures on this project and his computer brain goes click, click, click, and out comes some troubling answers. Answers that say that teamster’s trucks that are empty are going in and out of the gate and the company is being billed for full loads. Click, click, click, electricians are logging eight regular hours and at least one hour overtime a day and they actually spend two hours on the job. Click, click, click laborers are getting eleven dollars an hour and they are sitting on their ass waiting for a truck load of cement that was purposely delayed because the project was moving too fast. Click, click, click the contractor is billing us for materials that have never arrived on the site.
Now, the Governor knows these things because the state’s attorney has told him about them. He lets it ride because it is not good politics to smear up the labor unions at this time, before an election, and of course, it is always very bad politics to oppose the concentrated political power of the Utility companies. So where does that leave us? Old computer brain knows what’s going on, but it all comes out of the rate payer so he simply doesn’t give a shit, unless it means a problem for the sale of company stock. Then he really will get agitated. The poor customer hears all of these stories and thinks that he knows what is going on, but feels helpless to do anything about it. As I said that customer is mad as hell because he is paying for it and he is looking for somebody to hit. You people could help him get rid of some of his frustrations with a strike.
Now, we have all been riding this gravy train and it has been lovely. The brokers are making money so fast that they can’t take the time to count it. My company is merging and merging and merging. My own salary now, including my override, is twice what it was just one year ago. Paychecks are going out of here that are so fat that my bank is thinking of setting up a branch out there on the parking lot."

The point is there will be many tradesmen who need the money and would support the building of nuke
plants, so would their union, suppliers, banks and of course Wall Street brokers will love the idea.
Prepare yourself, another fight looms.

Ford Gets Dunce cap

2006-01-24T06:42:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
The new President of the Ford Motor Company Made an astounding statement
regarding the tragic layoffs of 30 thousand workers and the closing of 14 plants.
The statement must have been born out of more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of education and years of on the job training. It was a statement that needed a drum roll introduction. He said, "What we(Ford) needs to do now is create a product that the public will buy." As my ten year old grandson would say...DUH.
In one chapter of Rebirth of a realist (actually written more than a year ago) I point out the real cause of the Ford layoffs and also the layoffs of 800 workers in Connecticut at the Stop and shop warehouse.
Rebirth view www.erols.com/suttonbear

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In defining the meaning of his phrase," democracy first," which was in answer to those reactionaries who shouted, "America first," Henry Wallace said, " democracy and freedom also means, that the businessman can be free from the fear of those monopolies and international cartels which use unfair practices in buying from him and selling to him or competing with him."
Beginning this new century, in my home State of Connecticut, there are only a few American owned grocery stores left. The food industry is controlled by out of country, tax evading, investor, holding- companies. Royal Ahold NV a Dutch based company owns hundreds of Stop and Shop Supermarkets in New England, however at this writing they are being called the Enron of the food industry because of their exposed accounting manipulations and the entire house of cards is coming down. A spokesman for the prosecution office in Amsterdam said the investigation focused on the possible "falsification of documents" and the "publication of possible false figures in company reports". Needless to say, the Ahold stock took a nosedive, causing more layoffs in related fields. The workers hurt by that scandal are mostly the poor that Clinton "Freed from the welfare rolls", and have no savings or even health benefits to fall back on. On April 11, 1947, President Truman took the sledgehammer to the braces strengthening anti trust laws put into place by the Roosevelt administration to prevent another depression. Truman first announced the "anti Trust group would concentrate its efforts on major violations of anti trust laws while the Federal Trade Commission would increase it’s effectiveness on an industry wide basis instead of on an individual complaint." He then fired Roosevelt appointee Wendall Berge, Assistant Attorney General; in charge of the anti trust division. The New York Times reported, "Berge has been one of the most aggressive trust busters to hold that position, but it was whispered that he was too much of the old "New Deal " to be comfortable or effective in the new era." Ahold would never have been able to capture such a large segment of the food industry under a man like Wendall Berge.

It is easy to compare the failure of our automobile manufacturing business to our short -sighted foreign policy. For decades, Detroit has paid more attention to the rate of return for their investors than they have to the creation of a better product. When more stock went on the market, they increased the rate of return to the investor by cutting costs on the product development and manufacture. They became immersed in the paper business instead of the car business. Selling the stock (paper) became paramount instead of developing a good product. Dividends are what sell stock. Cost cutting (layoffs) and cheeper production costs pay dividends. The Japanese did just the reverse. They knew that in the end, the better product would sell more and the investors would be much better off. American consumers were not fooled. They bought the better product. A few Americans got very rich maneuvering the paper on Wall Street and tens of thousands of American workers were laid off.
From 1948 to the present, American foreign policy has been only with the investors in mind. Whether you are viewing Mexico, or any South American country and certainly Eastern Europe the emphasis is on the resource drain of those countries. The poverty rate grows in every country where American dollars are invested to steal resources, and in America, another million personal bankruptcies will be filed before the decade ends. We are producing less and less product and stealing more and more. We are sending more jobs out of the country every day.
In India for example we have created a high tech elite with jobs from both the US and Britain. One would think that it is a great arrangement for the Indian people, but while we continue to lay off workers here, we also continue to increase poverty there. Taxes go up for the poor, prices go up, and the cast system flourishes. A small fraction of the population being paid what Americans would call low wages control political decisions to benefit them.
There was not one word from any politician in the fall of 1992 on how this entire philosophic steel plate can be melted down. It would require a revolutionary structural change. There does not seem to be any leader on the horizon with the inclination, the courage or the mandate to radically re-direct the economy domestically, or to seek the wellspring of a creative foreign policy.
On March 17,1965 Willard F. Mueller who was the director of the bureau of Economics on the Federal Trade Commission said, "With Corporate profits the highest in history and still rising and stock prices reaching near record levels the prospect is for continuing pressure for mergers." Dr. Mueller was testifying before the Senate anti trust sub-committee. He told them that since the end of the pre Korean war recession of 1948 to 1949 there has been a post Korean war increase of 17% of total manufacturing assets held by the 200 hundred largest manufacturing companies and the proportion amounted to 54.6% in 1962. If this trend continues," he said, " the two hundred largest companies will own two thirds of all industrial assets by 1975."
The trend did continue for twenty more years. April 8,1997, the Wall Street Journal announced, "Fortune 500 firms list 23% rise in profits." It then goes on to say that they have, "Restructured, re-engineered, re-financed, down sized, laid off, split up and merged their way to prosperity." The key phrase is, "their prosperity." Trickle down mind set cannot separate the "Their" from the country’s prosperity.
They did not do it by manufacturing better products. Consumers are doing a similar thing. They are merging one credit card to another credit card and sinking deeper, and deeper in debt. In February of 1996, the consumer debt was an astounding $1.21 Trillion.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-01-22T11:53:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist excerpts and comments from the works of David Truskoff
visit www.erols.com/suttonbear
Yes, As Yogi Berra once said, " it is deja vu all over again." Folks my age know that spying on Americans by an unsready government is nothing new.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Rebirth Of A Realist
"War preparations create record profits for big business, but only false prosperity for the people—their purchasing power shrinks as prices rise, their needs go unfilled, and they are burdened with new debts." Henry Wallace 1948

The most disturbing factor to those abroad charged with the task of the selling of American democracy was the continuing practice of tarnishing the product at home. Europeans stood aghast at the undemocratic methods of suppressing dissent in America. It was all too reminiscent of the fascist tactics that they had suffered through just a little more than a decade earlier. It made our brand of democracy a hard sell particularly to third world countries and certainly to the Koreans and the Vietnamese.
In 1954 while diplomats at the Geneva peace conference were planning to insist upon elections that would unify Vietnam in two years (July of 1956) the New York Times was keeping up the drumbeat and increasing the anti-Communist frenzy. On the front page of the Sunday May 30,1954 edition a full column that spilled over into a five column story with pictures of handcuffed "Reds" on page 25 jubilantly announced . . ." F.B.I SEIZES 7 MEN AS RED OFFICIALS FOR CONNECTICUT . . . Conspiracy is charged. 109 rounded up since 1948."
I wish I could include the entire article because it reads like one of those old black and white, J Edgar Hoover promoted, television shows with a description of how the agents raided an art studio and rounded up these supposedly dangerous criminals. They were tried under the 1940 Smith act as "conspiring to overthrow the United States Government." As Yogi Berra once said, " it is deja vu all over again." Only today, "al Qaeda", or "Muslim rebels," is used instead of Communist. The effect is the same.
As I mentioned earlier one of those arrested in 1956 was the sculptor Robert Ekins of New Haven Connecticut. Although Bob was a veteran of World War II he was one of the most gentle, sensitive and creative persons that I was privileged to know. We first met in the 60s when I was planning another bus trip to Washington D.C. to protest America’s involvement in Vietnam. By that time, I had given up the idea that my anti War and Civil rights statements would allow me to survive in the Broadcast industry; given the political climate. I had found safe haven with The American Friends Service Committee.
When Bob called to reserve a ticket on the bus, I recognized the name immediately. Anyone with liberal views who read the papers would remember the name. I did not pursue any conversation with Bob on the office phone. While the protesters were boarding the bus in the driveway of the Quaker Friends Meeting house, I noticed two cars parked out front. I knew that they were from the local and State Police and or the F.B.I. I had been through it all before more than once. This time a bunch of goons arrived and tried to board the bus shouting obscenities at those already seated. I managed to pull one of them off the bus and the police arrived to get the rest of them. An FBI. agent told the driver not to move the bus until he gave him permission to do so. That infuriated me. The agent then asked me to go with them back to my office where he asked for the names of the passengers who were going to demonstrate against the war. I, of course, refused. They left my office, but did not release the bus. Moments later a local police officer came back in and told me that the reason that they wanted the names was because they had received threats against the property of those who were going and they wanted to be able to protect the property. I did not mean to be rude. I never was with police officials, but at that statement, I could not help but burst out laughing. The police officers left and the bus was allowed to go on its way.
A few days later, after I had burned the list, a small figure appeared in my office doorway. Bob Ekins said that he just wanted to stop by to thank me. He said that he was about to leave the bus because he knew that they wanted to prove to the media that the protesters were indeed a bunch of Communists. They could prove that because they had a real live one on board the bus. I told him that I was well aware of that and I was also aware of the fact that we had an informer in our group, and that our phone was probably tapped. He said that he had come also to suggest that what I had said was true and our friendship developed.
Bob had a studio home in a neat, and yes, cozy cottage above a lake in Connecticut, and at times I would go to the cottage and relax. He was a very articulate person with a sense of humor that helped to carry him and his wife Edie through those terrible years. Many of the conversations that we had are very pertinent to the subject that we are dealing with in this manuscript and I feel that I must share them with you.
I shall paraphrase his answers because it was so many years ago and I took no notes, but I remember asking him about the so-called clandestine meeting where he was arrested, and all the aliases that they were supposed to have used. Through his infectious laughter, Bob told me that they did use other names at times because the FBI not only tapped their phones, but also read their mail and contacted their employers. He said that it was a nightmare that few Americans living in the suburbs could relate to or even believe.
As far as the charges of conspiring to over throw the United States Government, he told me that it was so ludicrous that at times he would laugh. That is when he did not feel like crying. Bob said, "Can you just imagine us, at that meeting discussing something like this . . . ‘O.K. Sid, you get the twenty ninth infantry to go along with us and I’ll work on the 82nd airborne. James, you do what you can with the U.S. Marines.’ I mean, David, how can seven people from Connecticut conspire to overthrow the United States Government? J. Edgar Hoover used to say that it only took a few Russians to overthrow their government, but he fails to mention that the people and the army were already in rebellion.
To the State Department, it did not have to make any sense. They got what they were always after and that was the scare headlines. Americans were traumatized and wallowing in the quagmire of suburban life. They just did not give a damn about what was happening to their constitution. Nor were they able to project themselves into an America ten or twenty years down the road."
I asked him to be specific and tell me just what it was that they were discussing at that meeting and his answer was simply that they talked about the same things that the young people who have taken to the streets (it was 1965) were demanding. His answer was, "Honesty in government, civil rights, ending the war economy and moving toward peace. We spent a great deal of time on tactics; how, in the face of the FBI. harassment, can we get our message to the people? One thing that I must say; we never expected America to be able to keep a war economy going for twenty years. We expected 1929 revisited by 1949 or 1950. That would not create a revolution, but it would bring Americans back to reality and perhaps force the government to make the kind of structural changes that are needed. We wanted to be in a position to help them do that. No one else was getting ready to do it. It may still happen before I die and then people will eventually see that democratic socialism is the only way to go."
I told him that there must have been others in the fifties who were fighting back and he responded that, " there were some, but they were mostly the intellectuals who may say the right things, but they always just say them to each other. They read each other’s books and attend each other’s lectures, but when it comes time to act they fall off the tree like autumn leaves." The one time that I saw Bob Ekins get emotional was when I mentioned Howard Fast. Howard Fast produced over seventy-five books, along with mystery novels (under the pseudonym E.V. Cunningham), science fiction, innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, plays, screenplays and poetry. Until his death Fast said, "I’m a lefty. I was born one, and I’ll die one." He was convicted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bob said, "I was at the demonstration at the St. Nicholas Arena, to protest the sentence. Dr. Edward Barsky was sentenced to six months prison and $500 fine and Howard Fast, one of my heroes, and nine others were sentenced to three months and $500 each. They read a statement that said in part, "we were engaged in dispensing help - medical help, food and clothing to those Spanish Republicans who fought against Franco. We established a hospital in Southern France, another in Mexico. Thousands of men, women and children who would have otherwise been dead, lived because of our work and effort." Bob sounded like he was pulling the script out of his mind. He went on to say, "I was crushed when the media claimed that he had condemned Communism and Stalin for crimes against the people. It is true that crimes were committed. Did we not commit such crimes against our own people who are Black? Did we not commit such crimes against the people of other countries in Latin America and Asia? Did we not commit such crimes against me and people like me, and did not the company goons shoot down striking mineworkers? I know we should be against all injustice everywhere, but Howard gave the right wing media a field day. It was all because of Khrushchev’s speech to destroy the personality cult."
The crash did not come in Bob’s time although there were many narrow escapes. The truth is that his thinking was actually matched by many in the western capitalist superstructure. They had the same fear that Bob had about the viability of the economic system. The motivation to continue the open door and wartime policy came, not only from the profit mania, but also more from that constant fear that another depression would be the end of capitalism.

Did we win? What did we win?

2006-01-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

Now that the great show and political performances at Rosa
Park’s funereal are over, it is time for a reality check.
I have worked for human rights and equality most of my adult life.
In March of 1965 I joined Martin Luther King and marched from Selma-to-Montgomery Alabama. I later signed on again to register voters and march in Mississippi. In 1969 I was the liaison person between the city of Hartford and the Black and Puerto Rican caucus when the city was experiencing the out of control violence spreading across America.
It was a time when most of us still clung to Kings dream that America will, at last, grow up. I have since become cynical and not very hopeful of that happening. King said, " It is not enough to throw a coin to a beggar, but one must address the edifice that creates beggars." I thought about those words as I watched the shameless performance at the Rosa Parks burial.
When Opra Winfry made her speech about how Rosa stood up so she could be the billionaire that she is, I wondered what Rosa would think of the great show. Then there was Jesse Jackson and the other regulars basking in the TV lights at the Gala event.
Recently I have been giving talks titled, "Did we win, and if so what did we win?" I tell the audience the fact that schools in America are more segregated today than they were when Rosa kept her seat. The truth is,
poverty among minorities today is worse than it was when Rosa sat down in the bus. The wall between the suburbs and the inner city is thicker than it was then and the fear that exists in the suburbs is worse than it was then.
When the New York Times prints the fact that almost fifty percent of
young Black males in New York are without work we better all stop and ask the question ;did we win and if so what did we win.
In 1969 a member of the Quaker Meeting house brought a young Black friend of his into a meeting I was having on the subject of violence and to warn about the growing anger. The young man said, "to think that violence will come to Hartford is preposterous." Two days later the city was on fire and the mayor clearly not able to touch reality issued a statement that the violence and burning were the result of, " outside agitators stirring up trouble."
She had no idea of the anger growing in her own community. Today in France and other European countries, as well as all over Latin America, we hear the same thing from out of touch so called leaders. Yes, it can happen again in America and it will happen soon if we all do not face reality
and work towards equality in education and equal justice for all. With the frightening high school drop out rate and the proliferation of guns and drugs in our cities we all better act now.

electric bills

2006-01-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist visit www.erols.com/suttonbear

In 1979 I published a book titled The Energizing Of Power politics. In it I tried to point out the danger of the emerging economic threat to our state and the nation created
by the free wheeling Utility holding companies such as Northeast Utilities. I also wanted the public to recognize the powerful force that controls our Connecticut state Government. I called it the protective triangle. It consisted of the political, incestuous, relationship between the insurance companies, the banks, the media (three members of the board were officials of major media outlets) and the Utility companies. They forged the most powerful lobby at the state capital.
As far back as 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt said," Holding companies must be smashed. Their tyrannical power is a menace to the nation." He then proceeded to push through congress the 1935 Holding Company Act. Just one of the many acts FDR created
to "Reign in the robber barons."
The act says that, "It shall be unlawful for any person holding the position of officer or director of a public utility and the position of any bank, trust company, banking association or firm that is authorized by law to underwrite or participate in the marketing of securities in a public utility."
The Bush administration has put the final bullet into the act and let the robber barons
across the nation run free again. The 70-year-old act, already full of holes, is now dead.
As are many of the other constraints that Roosevelt thought would keep the gap between the haves and have nots from again getting out of control
Barbara A. Connors Statement of December 8, 2005 ((202) 502-8680 Docket No. RM05-32)
Says, " COMMISSION FINALIZES RULES ON HOLDING COMPANY ACT REPEAL;
REFORMS WILL BOLSTER ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today finalized rules to implement
The Congressionally mandated repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935."
A brief look at the N.E.U board shows us the structure hasn’t changed all that much. The only missing ingredient from the 1979 board is the powerful members of the media that sat on the board.
RICHARD H. BOOTH, 58, President and Chief Executive Officer and a Director of HSB Group, Inc. and Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection & Insurance Company since January 2000.
The Hartford Society of Financial Analysts, the Society of Financial Service Professionals, the Association for Investment Management & Research and the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council. From 1994 until 2000, Mr. Booth served as Executive Vice President and a Director of Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance
COTTON MATHER CLEVELAND, 52, President of Mather Associates, a firm specializing in leadership and organizational development for business, public and nonprofit organizations. Director of The National Grange Mutual Insurance Company and the Ledyard National Bank. She serves on the Board of the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy and has served as a Director of Bank of Ireland First Holdings
ROBERT E. PATRICELLI, 65, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Women's Health USA, Inc., a provider of women's health care services, and of Evolution Benefits, Inc., a provider of employee benefit services.. Mr. Patricelli was Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Value Health, Inc. (1987-1997) and previously served as Executive Vice President of CIGNA Corporation and President of CIGNA's Affiliated Businesses Group. Mr. Patricelli has also held various positions in the federal government.
In my opinion no other factor is more responsible for driving jobs out of our state than the Northeast Utilities holding company. As an intervener in utility rate cases I petitioned many small business in the late 70’s and early eighties and I heard the same complaint over and over. Mom and Pop stores could no longer afford to keep their coolers going. Owners of plastic companies and foundries told me of their plans to move south and save millions on energy costs, new residents that bought all electric homes came to my home asking for help as their electric bills were, in some cases, higher than their mortgage. Do we not hear the same cries today?
We are not the only state suffering at the hands of utility holding companies. Any one paying attention will tell you that thousands of jobs were driven out of California for the same reasons.
I ask readers to join me and ask congress to fully investigate this matter before it is too late. There have been cries from the National Democratic leaders to "Take back our country." I say we must first take back each state. The present weak lobby laws passed by a red faced legislators stung by our state’s reputation as one of the most corrupt states in the country, are not sufficient to hold back the triangle,
nor is the mouthing about reform by an also red faced congress.

Alito, Roberts and the ghost of nine old men

2006-01-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist ---excerpts from his books and comments by David Truskoff
With the confirmation hearings over judge Alito's appointment to the Supreme court now going on
it is important that we liberals put it in its proper perspective. Republicans launched a vicious attack against President Roosevelt when they claimed he tried to "Pack " the court in 1935.
The Truth is that America could have advanced much faster out of the depression of 1929 had it not been for the resistance of the All male Court that FDR called the "Nine Old Men."
Elected by a hopeful public in 1932, FDR promised a New Deal and a way out of the misery of the great depression gripping the land, but the Republican stacked court, fearing a move toward real social reforms, blocked his efforts, usually by a 5-4 vote.
In May 1935, it killed the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934, a law that had established pensions for railway workers. Next on the kill list came the very important National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. "We have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce," FDR said
The president was later frustrated by "The Nine Old Men (Most 70 or older) When he tried to rescue America's starving farmer, but his efforts were thwarted in January 1936 when the court ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 unconstitutional. Ironically the Justice who fired the last shot at Roosevelts New Deal efforts was named Roberts.
Today Bush appointees Roberts and Alito will stack the court again to block the much needed social reforms and realistic economic planning America needs to regain world respect.

CHAPTER SEVEN --Rebirth Of A Realist by David Truskoff
"We of the Progressive Party must-and will-carry on where Roosevelt, Norris, and La Guardia left off. They preserve for us all that was most precious, the old-fashioned Americanism that was built for us by Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson."
Henry Wallace acceptance speech Philadelphia July 24,1948

Yes, I felt good about calling myself a liberal in 1947 and even better when I moved up to Warrens description of a ‘‘Progressive" and joined the Progressive Party to help get Henry Wallace get elected in 1948. Actually what I joined was the Young Progressives Of America. The YPA had as its honorary chairperson Gene Kelly, who always was and still is one of my favorite movie stars. I still get a thrill out of seeing his old musicals on the cable channels. His brilliant and lovely wife, Betsy Blair, was our leader. It is sad that even today poor Gene Kelly is remembered by Liberals as a "coward" who gave in to the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Like the woman being raped, Gene had to choose between surviving as an actor, or professionally dying. He chose to survive. I still love him for what he was.
I did not enjoy the Conventions in Philadelphia and most of the local meetings that followed. The wrangling was unbearable. During the sixties, I tried to tell my own children who were becoming active in the anti- establishment culture that protest was fine, but being for something and being politically directed was better. While speaking to an audience of young people at a University, I was booed for saying that if I had to chose between Richard Nixon and the "crazies" trashing in the street, and using drugs, or if I had to chose between the media babies like Abby Hoffman and that lunatic that was screaming at Yale University ‘we have to kill our parents,’ I would have no choice to make."
I follow only those who have a plan and a direction for bettering the world. If I agree with their plan I give them all the support that I can, and Henry Wallace had a plan.
In view of the great depression suffered by the people of Russia and most of Eastern Europe today, I am more convinced than ever that if Roosevelt had not been forced to play his political game and caved in to the racists in the southern block of the Democratic Party and fully supported the man that he wanted to carry out his policies, (Vice President Wallace) we, and perhaps the people of the world, would be enjoying a much more equitable and less violent lifestyle than the bloodshed and devastation that has become the legacy of the shallow, "Get tough" policy of Harry Truman.
Now, let us try and make that case. First, we have to recreate the atmosphere that engulfed Wallace when he made his decision to run for the presidency on the "Progressive Party" ticket. Anyone who decides to run on a third party slate gets the knee jerk, oddball, treatment from the media. If you can not practice what wily old Abe Ribicoff (Ex Senator from Connecticut) once described as the "Art of concession" when referring to politics, and you believe strongly in the principle for which you are fighting, the party hacks will see you as a danger and immediately launch an attack. So it was from the outset with Henry Wallace. He could not find, nor did he bother to look for a concession that would save his Vice Presidency and allow Roosevelt to demand that he remain on the ballot in the 1944 election. It wasn’t just his commitment to civil rights that bothered the party regulars and the behind the scene power brokers, it was the extraordinary vision of Wallace that frightened them.
As a young YPA (Young Progressives of America) I can remember being given much literature to read. One piece was a pamphlet of a speech Vice President Wallace made on May 8,1942. He had just been in office a little over one year (January 1941) and he had both political party leaders after his scalp. The anti Communist post war policies were already being formulated by the old robber barons who knew that Roosevelt would not live out his last term. Their plan was obviously to see that America would control the seas and emerge from the war ready to assume full guardianship of the New World. Imagine the shock that must have struck Cordell Hull, then the Secretary of State and old time party chairman, when he heard the man he must have thought of as a loose cannon, the Vice President say . . ." No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older Nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. . . . Cartels, in the peace to come, must be subjected to international control for the common man, as well as being under adequate control by the respective home governments . . .With international monopoly under control, it will be possible for inventions to serve all the people instead of just a few. . . We can not perpetuate economic warfare without the planting of seeds of military warfare."

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-01-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
I can not imagine what it must be like to be a fourteen year old today.
Each day it seems priests are getting arrested, teachers are getting arrested as are policemen,
mayors, governors, top businessmen, coaches and other so called leaders in the community.
If you do not have football practice or other extra activities you can come home from school,
before your working parents get home, and turn on the computer and watch Porno. Worse yet you can watch the news that will tell you about all the shootings in the city the night before. What do they have to believe in? What kind of world do we want to help them make?
Their world is a world so distant from mine that I can not touch their reality.

CHAPTER SIX...Rebirth Of A Realist...www.erols.com/suttonbear
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Tell me, who is the most liberal of all?

One of the first and perhaps the most painful lesson that I learned when I came out of my cocoon was that we are not holy. We are a nation,"Full of beliefs and empty of religion." The naked truth is that we are a militarist, imperialist, nation, and that we have lifted our standard of living by using our military presence to acquire the resources of other nations, thereby lowering the standard of living for the people of those nations. "That," said one of my professors "Is the way of the world. It has always been that way. Anyone who reaches the age of reason must know that while the propagandists speak to the 18 year olds of democracy and God, the basic reason for almost all wars is anchored in economics.
In 1947, I tried hard not to be tagged with a political label. I shied away from some of my dogmatic friends who were pushing me to the extreme left. To escape I went so far as to play another year of semi-pro football. After the war, there were many minor football leagues. Returning veterans needed a place to play. If you haven’t tried it, don’t laugh. There is no greater escape than to put on your armor, hit somebody, and be hit in return. I once wrote a piece for the Hartford Courant titled, "The Religion of Football." In it I tried to describe the mind washing, sin forgiving, powers of the football field. Today professional football players can earn much more than bank presidents or large corporation CEOs, but I know that is not their main motivation. You get cleansed out there. When you walk off the field all muddy and perhaps bloody, you can congratulate your opponent and know that you are all safe in an innocent child’s world, far from any reality. That is where part of me wanted to be in the fall of 1947. To make a concession to that other part of me that kept tugging toward adulthood, I finally accepted the label of "Liberal."
During the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign of 1988, the scare word was "liberal", the more that it was used (and it was used often) the more degrading the connotation. This may have left older Americans with a new compilation of farragoes to deal with, but for the baby boomers, it was just another case of the media jerking the reins. Middle aged Americans, however, were still reacting to the cold war rhetoric that President Truman began. It escalated months before the war in the Pacific ended when he canceled the "Lend lease Program " to The Soviet Union. That same rhetoric grew into the dementia that America still has not fully recovered from called "The McCarthy Era". The seeds of cynicism were planted at that time and have been growing inside me ever since.
In 1988 meek voices rose to defend liberalism, but they found no support in the camp of the once liberal Democratic Party where most of the candidates and the so-called leaders were all fighting among themselves to prove which one was the least liberal of all. It seems that today they are still doing it. The Democratic candidate for President in 1988 separated himself from the old guard leaders of the democratic House and Senate. Contrast that to 1948 when all the major candidates for the presidency were jousting for the title of "World Champion Liberal."
The following quotations may strike some as astounding in view of the present political climate, but they are as relevant today as they were then. The New York Times, obviously trying to keep the hate mongers from bringing the American psyche to a political imbalance that would lead the country into a blind faith, blank mind, political morass, posed this question to all of the major candidates seeking the presidency in 1948. The Times asked, in it’s magazine section of the Sunday April 18, 1948 issue, " What is liberalism?" Governor Dukakis should have read all of the answers from the podium at the 1988 Democratic nominating convention in the Omni. It might have created the momentum for victory instead of the, tail between the legs, defeatist, campaign that was run.
We shall start with excerpts from the sitting president of the United States at that time, Harry Truman. He did not answer the question directly (He was, after all, a machine politician) but addressed it obliquely as one who had already won the contest and was the Chief liberal of the land. He said, "Our first goal is to secure the human rights of our citizens. Some of our citizens are still denied the equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement and for the free expression of their views at the polls. . . . We believe in freedom and we are doing all that we can to support free men and free governments throughout the world."
Well there certainly isn’t anything there to be ashamed of although I am sure if that statement were given today the president certainly would have added "free women," especially in an election year. Now let us try the answers of the late senator Robert M. Taft, but first we have to resurrect this man who flirted with greatness, but never brought it to bed. Three times, he challenged for the Republican Party nomination for president and three times, he failed. He did come very close to denying Eisenhower the nomination. In 1953, he served as the Senate majority leader in the Eisenhower administration. Yes, this is the same ultra- conservative who was the chief architect of the Taft-Hartley bill and was once quoted as saying that he agreed with Herbert Hoover that, "the best answer (to high cost of food) was that people should cut down on their extravagance and eat less." One has to inject here that in 1948 liberals still had the bit in their teeth. The great depression and the labor wars of the thirties and the global war against fascism, with a Communist country as one of our major allies, freed many Americans from the mental straitjacket placed upon them by the media during the Bolshevik scares of the early nineteen hundreds. So it was politically prudent for a man, whose father was William Howard Taft the very conservative one term president, who served in the White house from 1908 until defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1912, to try and suspend his established image and convince the media that he could be the president for all the people. He said, "Today everyone goes around calling himself a liberal. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to attach the term to anyone who supports any change proposed even if such change would lead to serious limitations on freedom of thought and freedom of the individual. Such a man is a radical, a sentimentalist, not a true liberal. In the United States liberalism means the resumption of progress under those historic American principles of liberty which have kept our people free and our economy free, principles that have made the United States the greatest and most productive country in the world today."
Damn, as a liberal I was busting with pride, but wait, the best is yet to come. Other conservatives have not been heard from yet. The man who was to deprive Taft of the nomination in 1948 was New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey who came as close to being president without moving his underwear into the White House as one can come. Truman (who failed to get a real majority of total popular votes) received 24,105,812 popular votes while Dewey received 21,970,065. It was so close that the Chicago Tribune, which went to press before the final tally was in, happily declared, "Dewey defeats Truman." Dewey was not the winner, but he did not fail because he lost the contest in the New York Times. His answer to "What is a Liberal" borders on holy script. "Liberalism," he said, "derives from the same word root that gave us "Liberty." It seems perfectly clear to me that no man has a right to call himself a liberal unless he believes explicitly, spiritually and concretely in economic, social and most of all human liberty. True liberalism springs from our deepest spiritual aspirations. It is as old as the Ten Commandments and the Sermon On The Mount. It practices brotherhood of all men and places first the dignity of the individual and his opportunity and personal liberty. It fights tyranny and regimentation of any kind and insists that the Government exists to preserve the freedom of human beings."
I am sorry about the long quotation, but as an old battered liberal, I could not find any of it that I wanted to deprive you of. It does make you wonder what the Dukakis people were so defensive about doesn’t it? It should also make you wonder how the media turned "liberalism" into a dirty word and how the political momentum was created to move America so far to the conservative right. (I must add here that, at this writing, right wing. off the wall, talk show hosts around the country on radio and TV are still trying to make LIBERAL a dirty word and smearing Howard Dean with it the way they did to Poor Henry Wallace.)
Well now, if that is what the conservative candidates and the President, who was rapidly losing whatever liberal credentials he had, said about "Liberalism," what was left for the real liberals, or at least those who wore the liberal mantle long before the campaign began? Governor Earl Warren of California who was to be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Eisenhower in 1953 had this answer to the question.
"Liberalism, as I understand it, is the political belief and movement arising out of the belief that the individual should be the all important, precious object of consideration in every phase of social relationships. This belief and movement born of faith in mankind and in the dignity of the human soul has found its finest expression so far in western civilization. Civil rights, representative governments and equality of opportunity are all part and parcel of the liberal tradition. Unfortunately, this great term has been abused and distorted in recent years. If I had a choice of classification, I would place people politically in three groups, reactionary, radical, and progressive. I particularly like the term progressive not necessarily as a party label, but as a concept. I believe that the great body of American people regardless of what party they are in are progressive and liberal. In this sense the finest thing that could happen to our political system would be to have such liberal thought and action dominate both political parties."
Then there was Henry A. Wallace the "Progressive Party" candidate. Vice president of the United States, Henry Wallace was the man who was deprived of the presidency by the southern racist block of the Democratic Party. He was always thought to be the heir of the Roosevelt White House by most liberal democrats. Wallace gave the most direct answer to the question. He said, "Liberalism is the credo of those who have no fear of change. Its core, as I see it, is a willingness to place human rights first and property rights second or as Lincoln put it, ‘I am for both the man and the dollar, but in the case of conflict I am for the man.’ Liberalism demands that there be no price for honest, forthright expression. Free speech is not free if it is limited by the fear of losing a job, by fear of business reprisals or by the fear that frankness endangers naturalized citizenship. Liberalism demands action against the vile practice of segregation and discrimination . . . Today’s liberalism requires that we engage in sufficient government planning to assure the maintenance of independent enterprises and full employment and to guard against excesses in business cycles."
The media giveth and the media taketh away.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-01-06T07:26:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist
As an old warrior I sometimes think that I am looking though the wrong side of the binoculars. I have heard it all before. The Vietnamese will welcome us. ..They are marching with their feet to democracy...we killed a thousand of them and lost only one...we have now established a democratic governmwent and we can soon bring our troops home...we can not turn tail and run.."
It was all said before and we got our tail kicked in Korea and again in Vietnam. The question always remains
why did so many people have to die.
Please read Rebirth of a realist see it at www.erols.com/suttonbear.

Our repetition of the runaway, disastrous and painful " Trickle down" economics can be traced directly
back to the media war on the Roosevelt constraints placed on the robber barons of the twenties.
That war raged from April of 1947 when Harry Truman, obviously intimidated by the power of the conservatives, announced, "There is more of a need for co-operation by business rather than
regulation," until the remnants of the Roosevelt Realists surrendered to Ronald Reagan in 1981
and allowed him to tear down what ever was left of the regulatory structure. He gutted the major agencies. Reagan’s firing of the striking air controllers severely wounded all of organized labor. It was a near fatal wound that still has not healed. On August 5,1981 a petulant President Reagan fired the 11,359 air-traffic controllers; he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Agency, and on August 17, the FAA began accepting applications for new Air traffic controllers. On October 22, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO. The Controller’s union. Those behind the throne of Reagan smashed the Union and deprived trained workers of ever returning to their life occupation. The Reagan administration was filled with "Trickle down" devotees who did all they could to deregulate big business. He became known as the, "de-regulation President." His reverting back to 1920 economics caused horrendous results.
Unemployment shot up 10.6% by the end of 1982. On Oct.19, 1987 the stock market plunged 508 points on the Dow Jones average. It was another one of those close calls with economic depression that America has from time to time. It took a Herculean effort from banks and bankers to save the market and the system.
Conservatives still claim that Reagan was a great president because of the fall of Communism during his administration, "He won the cold war" they claim, but the facts are that Ronald Reagan should have been impeached and had there not been so many cowardly Democrats turning a political blind eye to the illegal acts of the Reagan administration he would have been impeached.
Reagan authorized direct sales of weapons to Iran. National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter and
his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, were convicted of criminal acts that included North purchasing weapons at cost, selling them with huge profits that he diverted to the Contras, who were waging a civil war in Nicaragua. North ran the Contra operation out of the White House, despite a congressional ban against funding their operation. In the fall of 1986, it all blew up when a Lebanese journal wrote about the sales to Iran and when a plane carrying weapons to the Contras was shot down in Nicaragua. The pilot was captured and admitted that he was a CIA pilot. Laws were broken, many on the white House staff were convicted,
but North had his conviction overturned on a shrewd legal maneuver while others were pardoned by President Bush and went on to other administration jobs. Reagan escaped unharmed as easily as he escaped overseas duty when he was made a captain in the army in charge of making movies for the army during World War II. Real stars of his time like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart worked no such deal. I can remember those days clearly. I can remember my anger and the anger of many of my friends. President Ford had already pardoned one president that should have gone to jail, Richard Nixon. On September 8,1974 Ford said, "The facts, as I see them, are that a former President of the United States, instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society."
What he said was that Presidents were above the law. I was no longer on the scenic train viewing the beauty of America. I was on a train of cynicism traveling at increasing speed toward the political left.
Americans my age were called, "The Great Generation." Those patriots, who were born in the depression and who joined their parents in the labor wars of the thirties, fought the great war against fascism, and came home to build a new America, were trying hard to save the system. They wanted to make the place of Roosevelt’s promise for their children. The JFK assassination, the murder of King, and Bobbie Kennedy Caused many of them to pull the blankets over their heads. The revolutionary spirit that made the nation great began to disappear. The confidence that the American worker had that in union, there is strength and the union will protect them began to wane and with it went the pride we all had in the forties.
President G.W. Bush, in 2003 is still riding on the momentum of those horrendous anti-labor acts. He like Nixon and Reagan before him lied to the congress and the people about the danger of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the evil Saddam Hussein. There are many who speak again of impeachment. That would make the fourth president who faced the possibility of impeachment in my time. It is hard to keep the faith under such shaky leadership. G.W. Bush ordered an end to all labor-management partnerships in federal government. He urged Congress to overturn standards adopted to protect workers from stress injuries on the job He destroyed the unions ability to insist that Government contracts are awarded only to Companies that have protected their workers. On September 11,2003 business pages across the country reported that many corporations are rescinding family insurance coverage and rewriting retirement plans, all part of the Bush Republican agenda. One would think that organized labor would have people out in the streets protesting. They did not, mainly because organized labor is no longer organized.
. The union membership rate has steadily declined from a high of 20.1 percent in 1983. Union membership dropped to 13.4 percent in 2001 Many dues paying union members feel let down by union leaders who are much more involved in the investment of pension plans than they are in protecting workers. I say again, labor has not yet recovered from the Reagan years.
According to a report from FAIR, "workers being brought into the U.S. labor pool through the so-called L-1 and H-1B visa programs (L-1 visas, which allow multinational firms to transfer overseas workers to their U.S. facilities,) have nearly doubled since 1995. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, "In 2002, 13.2 percent of wage and salary workers who were electrical and electronics engineers lost 241,000 jobs in the past two years and computer scientists lost 175,000 jobs," the report states.
When a person in a position of power such as a President or a Governor takes a dictatorial, anti-labor position and receives no resistance, the Nation, or the State, will suffer the consequences for many years. Roosevelt tried it with the striking miners during the war. He threatened to send the National Guard in to end the strike. Head of the miners Union John L. Lewis told the president he can try to dig coal with bayonets, but the miners will strike for better conditions. He knew that to give in at that time might very well mean the end of the union. John L. Lewis made peace with Roosevelt eventually and both sides benefited.
"I have pleaded (labor’s) case, not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled," John L. said. In 1981, there was no John L. Lewis to speak for labor. In 2003, there is still no John L. Lewis type of labor leader, and labor is floundering. Thousands of jobs are sent out of the country every year and the labor response is meek.

Rebirth of a Realist

2006-01-04T12:25:00.000-08:00

Rebirth of a Realist

CHAPTER TWO rebirth of a realist..www.erols.com/suttonbear
REALISM . . . Webster’s third new dictionary
Preoccupation with fact or reality; objective procedure not influenced by idealism, speculation or sentimentalism: disposition to think and act objectively and unemotionally and to reject what is impractical.
REALIST. . . . An adherent or advocate of realism.
Letter from Hubert H. Humphrey (Senator and US Vice president 1964, Presidential Candidate 1968) to Henry A Wallace 4/12/1945
[The handwritten postscript:]
"5:05 P.M. I’ve just heard of the death of our great President. May God bless this nation and world. I scarcely know what to say. It is as if one of my own family had passed away. If ever we needed men of courage—stouthearted men, it is now. I simply can’t conceal my emotions. How I wish you were at the helm. I know Mr. Truman will rise to the heights of statesmanship so all-important in this hour. But, we need you as you have never been needed before. HHH"
Reply from Secretary of Commerce to Hubert H. Humphrey April 21, 1945,
"With you, I share the faith that President Truman will rise to the heights of statesmanship which the present hour requires. He has gotten off to an unusually fine start."
Henry A. Wallace
(University of Iowa Library)
The month of attempted merry making in California did not leave me very merry. Day after day, I was surrounded with people all striving to re-capture their youth. It was a national plague. I came back to New Jersey to find some of my friends going to political meetings instead of our favorite bars. I was bewildered by the sudden change that seemed to come over everyone. I still heard the echo’s of the High School band playing Anchors Aweigh when I left for the Navy, and I had a clear memory of the emotion that I felt snapping my final salute to the ensign flying aft when I left the ship for the last time. I was still so full of patriotism that any of John Wayne’s hero characters would be slackers by comparison. I hated to hear my own father refer to the President of The United States as the world’s worst mass murderer, and war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb on the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Facing political reality for the first time, I was actually dragged kicking and screaming into the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign by my other self. I fought hard against getting involved in the distasteful machinations of politics. The pushing and shoving of one huge ego against another and the constant bickering and posturing of staff people tested my commitment.
I actually contributed very little to the campaign in my home state of New Jersey. My efforts consisted of handing out literature and making a few speeches, mainly to Black community groups, but what the Navaho Council chief started, Henry Wallace finished. The metamorphosis was now complete.
CHAPTER THREE
"Working for peace and the general welfare is the essence of all true education and all true religion. It is the Sermon on the Mount in action."
Henry Wallace, Commencement Address, Connecticut Colledge1943
All through my teens and into adulthood my President was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My family loved him and I loved him. He brought my worlds together. He ended the anti Bolshevik madness that threatened the lives of so many Russian émigrés when in the face of media criticism he recognized the Soviet Union. There was also the warm relationship with the Soviet Union during the war that made my parent’s family feel safe, and like full-fledged Americans for the first time since coming here from Byelorussia. It all ended abruptly when F.D.R. died. No person can be a leader with the international stature of FDR without making some enemies. He had his detractors. They were mostly men of his own economic class who wanted America and the world to revert to the pre-war absurdity of divine right. They felt that Roosevelt, born into wealth, was a traitor to their breed. Off the wall, right wing extremists railed, that Roosevelt was creating a "Welfare State." In 1933, America surely needed welfare,
and it was the conservative right that created that need.
The extreme left knew that Roosevelt’s main purpose was to save the system and they wanted to change it. They claimed that Roosevelt was in the same leaky boat as Winston Churchill and drifting America into England’s war.
My parents had not fully recovered from the trauma they suffered during the anti-Red madness that engulfed America following World War 1. My father’s greatest fear was that another ship like the Buford, which sailed out of New York harbor in 1919 with its cargo of 249
Deported, men and women accused of being red spies, with no evidence to prove the case, would sail again. It was a new kind of senseless lynching in America. Roosevelt did not stop the lynching of Blacks in the south or completely end the media induced anti-Communist hate that threatened to split America during the depression, but he did create a positive aura of a growing democracy that smothered much of the hate.
<<<>>>
I tried to ignore the daily headlines in the summer of 1946. I suppose that is when I started planning my escape to California. The shrill media became more depressing day by day. Each day they seemed to tell us how America was deteriorating. The department of labor statistics showed that living costs had risen 18 percent since June of 1946; Millions of Americans could not find adequate housing. The "Communist menace" was rising again. Left politicians were calling for price controls while the conservative politicians, supported by greedy businessmen claimed that would open the door to dreaded Socialism.
The one thing that brought the most dismay to my family and recreated our mistrust of the government was the Taft-Hartley bill, passed by the 80th congress in the fall of 1946. That bill threatened to roll back all the gains for the American worker that my parents fought so hard to achieve.
1947 was not the best year of my life, nor was it the best year for American workers. In fact, it signifies the spot on the chart when America went off course and sailed into the economic, thick fog that we still find ourselves in today. Michael Quill, then president of the transportation workers called President Truman, "The number one strikebreaker for the American bankers and railroads." He then went so far as to accuse the president of treason. Phillip Murray, president of the CIO called the anti labor laws of the 80th congress and the Truman administration, " The first step toward fascism in the United States."
Truman himself called the 80th congress a, "Do nothing session by a do nothing congress." Senator Taft leader of the conservative Republican members of that congress said that Truman wanted to, "fix wages, fix prices, expand government spending, increase Federal taxes, socialize and nationalize medicine, and generally regiment the life of every family, as well as agriculture, labor and industry."
The air was not being let out of the balloon for the American workers; the balloon was exploding in their face. The Roosevelt created dream of a semi-controlled, or as Henry Wallace phrased it, " a Progressive Capitalism" that American labor leaders clung to, was turning into a nightmare for labor."

I am sure that if Hubert H. Hunphrey were alive today he would be saying the same thing. OH how we need an FDR or a Henry Wallace today.

The Garden Of The Prophet

2006-01-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

When I was in school I remember hiding the book THE GARDEN OF THE PROFIT in my football playbook so no one would see me reading it. I aced the book report and my pretty young teacher, that I had a crush, on was very pleased. The book,as the expression foes made avery lasting impression on me. It was the first thing I thought of when I started my bookREBIRTH OF A REALIST. Gilbrans words were very prophetic and can certainly be applied to today's America.

CHAPTER ONE
Out Of The Womb

And Almustafa was silent, and he looked away toward the hills and toward the vast ether, and there was a battle in his silence.
Then he said: "My friends and my road-fellows, pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not, save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Garden Of The Prophet----- Gilbran --- Knopf

I ask you is that not Bush's America.

At the end of WWll I sold my old Harley and decided to hitch-hike across the country. I had two objectives. One was to visit an old girlfriend at UCLA and the other was to stop in Indian Country to say hello to a shipmate.
All of that happened more than half a century ago and I hardly need my notes to remember it because I have gone over it so many times. I remained on the reservation for three days and two party filled nights because the family insisted that I stay and ride into Gallup with them at the end of the week for the Indian Rodeo. I spent another day with the family in Gallup and watched Willy’s younger brother win a black and silver saddle for the best roper in the junior class. That evening Willy and I had our last beer together. I remember telling him how glad I was to have been able to meet his father and how impressed I was.
It wasn’t until I reached Flagstaff Arizona that I had a chance to sit down in a truck stop and bring my notebook up to date. As I did, I could feel myself being transformed. The metamorphosis that began when I was discharged from the Navy was nearing completion. The chief, who stripped the cocoon off me with every angry word buried my youthful naiveté in the sands of New Mexico As I hold this yellow pad in front of me and read from the blurred pencil notes, I can re-capture the emotion that I felt at that truck stop. The night before we left the reservation, I learned that the chief, as far back as the late twenties, helped to organize the "Returning Students Association." They were a group of Navahos who came back to the reservation after acquiring a high school and in some cases a college education. They were all welcomed as leaders in the community and were very important links to the Anglo world.
Draft records show that at the time of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, 88 % of the Navahos drafted were considered illiterate. To resurrect that vision of hell on the sands of New Mexico, still ignites the anger and the shame I felt then. The poverty, the frustration, the despair that smothered young Navaho minds in 1947 washed over me like an icy shower. I had left a white world still celebrating their victory and planning their futures in a peaceful and prosperous America, but this too was America.
As a small child, my mother took me to a demonstration where I carried a sign to free the Scottsboro boys (a group of young blacks accused of rape). I knew a great deal about racism and anti-Semitism in my country, but I never expected to see the bland acceptance by the Navaho people of the degrading circumstances in which they were forced to live.
I have reflected on those hours that I spent in Flagstaff many times in my life. In jail, in Selma Alabama, I compared Willy’s experience with young Blacks who were being sent to fight for free elections in Vietnam and getting arrested for trying to help their parents register to vote in America. In Mississippi, while working with the impoverished farm workers who were little more than slaves while their government paid huge subsidies to their masters, and in a poverty stricken Connecticut city when the plants closed and the dreams ended leaving the poor freezing and hungry in high rent fire traps. I became the person to be actively involved in fighting against all of those injustices that blistering day in Flagstaff Arizona.
As I turn the pages of my note pad, I still have to blink back the tears. I remember offering to pay for my meals to Willy’s mother who, of course, would not accept. I offered to pay for the gas for the trip to Gallup and again they refused. Before I left, I wrapped a twenty-dollar bill around the gearshift of the family pick up truck when I took my things out and headed west. As I write this in 2003, I know that high school kids can spend twenty dollars on the game machines in the local pizza parlor. In 1947, a gallon of gasoline was only fifteen cents, but the per capita annual income for the Navaho living on the reservation was about one hundred dollars. White America had a victory to celebrate, but the Navaho did not. There were no jobs for returning veterans and the Navaho war plant workers, who had little education to fall back on, were the first fired once the war ended.
Time magazine of November 3, 1947 stated, "Great numbers of the Navahos are facing starvation . . . From 25,000 to 30,000 are lingering in the state between malnutrition and starvation. By January many of the old men and many of the children will be dead."
I thought that I was an astute young man then ready to take on the New World. The icy shower in July of 1947 drove off the fantasies and left me sitting in that truck-stop promising myself to at least try and be like Willy’s father and my own parents and try to be a REALIST.

Wasn't That a Time

2005-12-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

From the book Rebirth of a Realist - www.erols.com/suttonbear

It seems like just yesterday, I was an enthusiastic, patriotic, American looking forward to a wonderful peaceful future. As the song goes, "Oh what a feeling." That was when my mother and father were so proud of the two-star banner they hung in the front window. That banner told everyone that their sons were in the war against fascism.
Will any generation ever have that feeling again? How wonderful to believe, as we did, that we had ended war forever. How wonderful to believe that we had defeated the forces of fascism and racism. Yes, naiveté has its place.
I must confess now, however, that I am one of the most cynical men on the planet. I am very doubtful about the future of the human animal. This same animal, which is by far the most vicious killer to walk the planet, not only kills millions of his own species every year, but also kills and devours millions of other species. He destroys the habitat of most of the other living creatures on the planet, and he is so stupid that he destroys his own environment. He pollutes his own water and fouls his own air, all in the name of greed. He sacrifices his family happiness to
make enough money to build a huge house (bigger than his last one to show success) and own a bigger and more expensive car. He accumulates wealth and things that he or she does not use or need. Like everyone else, he will get sick and die and leave the money to be divided by lawyers,
doctors, real estate agents, and the off spring who often pass it on to their drug dealer. One cannot help but get the impression in this new century that Capitalism, as we practice it today, has become a brain disorder. My sister is at this time vegetating in a New Jersey Nursing home.
She has been there for over a year and her above average resources are being drained away. When I look at that once beautiful women, who is no longer able to communicate, and I think of how hard she worked to develop her rather large holdings, I become very angry. Many
of the above mentioned and others, all suffering from the same brain disorder, are viciously tearing at those holdings.
What a beautiful idea America was. "We the people of the United States, in order to form
a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." Oh yes, what a hell of a great idea. I remember when I had to memorize that for a sixth grade play celebrating the Fourth of July. How did we let that great idea deteriorate into our present government? The combination of the controlled media, the taking over of small town political committees along with the structured childhood of little league etc. appears to have bred the leadership gene out of the human animal. Today in every part of the world weak, personal agenda, leaders, face constituent’s anger.
There is little knowledge of how the world works among young people today. Television saps their brain with propaganda, sex and violence, and with each generation trying to outdo its predecessor, our culture making process deteriorates even further. Yes, I also ignored the warnings of my father when he predicted the moral decline of America.
Once I asked a group of college girls at an exclusive school for women how it felt to be slave owners. They giggled and laughed and one said, "We got rid of slavery way, way back before my father’s time; back in the 1960s. There is no more slavery in America." Even the two Black students among them nodded in agreement.
I pointed out that they could go to a nearby department store and buy a sweater for only ten dollars. "Now," I said. " If the folks that shipped that sweater made a profit, and if the owners of the company made a profit and the store made a profit, how much of that ten dollars do you think was left for your slaves in Bangladesh that made that sweater for you? Read the label. Many of those sweaters are made in Bangladesh. That is what living in, what has become, one of the most ruthless, militaristic, empires the world has ever known means. We take the resources and the cheap labor from other lands and return very little. We control over 60% of the world’s wealth and we are a small fraction of its population." I told the young women, "If their parents have one hundred thousand dollars a year coming into the home they can buy many such sweaters for the whole family and even for the neighbors. They feel rich, but the slaves that made the sweater cannot afford to buy it. That is what slavery means. We have such slaves all over the world. That is why we have troops all over the world. Such slaves contribute to your family’s wealth."
One need not wonder why we Americans are hated. One need not wonder why terrorism becomes the only response against the power of a nation that has troops stationed in every corner of the planet, and the most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction that sick minds can create. We do not hesitate to use those weapons as we have in Japan and Vietnam, but other empires have had military power and still collapsed when the slaves’ hatred reached the limit. September 11,2001 indicated that some politicians in high places may believe the limit has been reached. Much has been made of the fact that the Iraqi army "Melted away," when the huge American military machine invaded their land, but so did the Russian Army melt away when Napoleon invaded. They also melted away when the Germans invaded. If I read my history right, both the French and the Germans were eventually defeated.
Israelis, that my Jewish mother once vigorously supported, not only enslaved the Palestinian people, but have blown up their houses, taken their land, and practiced blatant ethnic cleansing; all in the name of God, Capitalism, and "Greater Israel." The removal of the Palestinian State would be a short cut to some of the richest Iraqi oil fields in the world. We Americans also plan to benefit from Iraqi oil. Naturally, we can disregard our Christian- Judaic heritage and support the ethnic cleansing if it helps to feed the empire. One can condemn the killing of innocent children by both sides in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, but one must keep in mind of how he would feel, and what he would do if an American Indian came to blow up his house saying that he was there first and God gave him the land? Present day Zionism has no defense other than the idiotic, "God gave us the land." The dream of "Greater Israel" or Eretz (land Of Israel) is madness. One would have to re-locate or exterminate over a million Palestinians. As I write this, Prime Minister Sharon is telling the press that he is ready to give up the idea of Greater Israel, but as Uri Avnery says, "Sharon often lies." One also has to look at the odds. Americans pride themselves in justice and fair play, yet the sight of Israeli tanks and bulldozers smashing Palestinian homes bring little outcry. My mother’s labor group demonstrated and carried signs in early1941, asking the President of the United States to save the Jews of Europe. I remember it well because I was a young boy in a tough neighborhood and after my Mother’s name was in the newspaper the kids started calling me the "Jew Boy." I believe that of she were alive today my Mother would be carrying the same sign for the people of Palestine. I am sure she would be as ashamed of a Jewish state that has become a military outpost for another nation as I am. Anti Zionism is now growing into a blazing fire in many Capitals of the world.
A Member of the British Parliament made the following astounding statement on June 12,2003. She said,
"The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature -though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto.
I have sadly come to the conclusion that, given the scale of the atrocities and collective punishment waged by the Israelis against the Palestinians, I have no choice but to boycott Israeli products. On reflection, whether Jewish or not, you might decide to do the same."Oona King Labour MP.
Zionists have run out of their moral power. No longer can they use the guilt of the Christians for allowing the Holocaust to happen while continuing to collect $3 Billion a year of American taxpayers dollars and using it to build the biggest and best equipped army in the region. Many Americans, like the British MP, are beginning to see Israel as creators of their own brand of a holocaust. We, in the United States cannot escape the finger of blame placed upon us by people the world over.
It is very painful for me to say these things; because each time I do, I remember how proud my mother was of the creation of a Jewish homeland. It was to be the cultural center of the world; a place for the homeless Jews of a war torn Europe. I remember my own feeling of pride when I landed at Ben-Gurion airport and saw the Israeli flag flying. Never could I have imagined then that Israel would become what is has become and never did I ever dream that my own country would be a hated invader.
Americans do not want to hear any of that. They want to believe that most Americans are the residence of the heavenly kingdom and good people. Perhaps we do want to be, but we need leadership to show us the way. I do not believe that we have had such leadership since Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Our decaying system prevents the people from choosing such leadership. The very fact that the 2003 occupant of the White House was appointed not elected proves that point. Very few American citizens had anything to do with choosing him as a candidate or electing him as President. He was packaged and forced on the American people. The system is breaking down. It would do well for every American to read the Declaration of Independence and see how many of the things we accused the British of; we are now doing to others.
The people elected FDR four times. He was our president for more than twelve years. The people trusted him; the people respected him and the people loved him. In the face of all the hardship, Americans then still felt positive about the American dream.
On May 26,2003 the Washington Post carried a story by Thomas B. Edsdall. The story was about liberal groups getting together to see what they can do to defeat G.W. Bush in 2004. The emphasis was on raising money. "Bush can raise $250 million if he wants to and the Republican National Committee can match that," said one Liberal. It illustrates the thickness of the blank wall that pseudo-liberals continue to bump their heads against knowing they cannot make a dent.
Do they not realize that they are legitimizing the frightening idea that the one who raises the most money rules the world? In that case, they cannot win. Mike Bloomberg spent tens of millions of dollars just to be the Mayor of New York City. After a shooting at City Hall, He said, "this is a blow to democracy." What kind of democracy is he talking about, one in which a person can buy the mayors seat in one of the largest cities in America?
If you have enough financial backing you can yank out a governor and put in a muscle bound actor with no credentials at all to govern a state.
I can remember one night in Philadelphia Mississippi when Stokely Carmichael and I were resting. A white Marcher said to Stokely, "Don’t you think the "Black Power" chant scares whites from your cause? Don’t you think it is important to teach them how to bring about change working in the system?" Stokely smiled (as he usually did) and said, "asking Mississippi Blacks to work within the system is like asking Jews to join the Nazi party. What we need to do is change the system." I agree with him except I think what is needed is to change the system back to what it was supposed to be when it was created.

The illegal invasion of Iraq has not only divided this nation, but it has divided the world. It can be a major step in the destruction of the US Empire.
Now, if you still want to read the rest of this book let me say that while I want to show you how I became such a cynic, I also want to point out that I have been a competitor all of my life and I will not quit now. America is my country. My activism pointed toward making the country and the planet a better place for the next generation shall continue.
If you are angry enough and fighting back your own cynicism join me and let’s take a trip through the years from the end of world war two to the present year of 2003 and see how such a cynic was created. Perhaps together, we can find a new positive attitude.
David Truskoff