Rest in Power, Joe Hill – Executed by the State of Utah 100 Years Ago Today
America
The Endless Spectacle of Militarism
I love America. Truly, I do. It is the land of great ideals, as well as the land of my birth.
I also respect and applaud self-sacrifice in service to others, and in service to those ideals.
So I was slow to understand the true nature of the constant prompts to “support our troops” and the endless parade of militaristic spectacle over the past couple decades. In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, the knee-jerk jingoism didn’t sit well with me, but I didn’t fully understand why.
Then comes the news this week of a joint oversight report released by Arizona Republican Senators John Flake and John McCain, documenting that over the past few years, the Pentagon spent $6.8 million to pay for patriotic displays during the games of professional sports teams. For me, this calls to mind the 1936 Summer Games.
Here are a couple of articles of interest on the subject.
No, thanks: Stop saying “support the troops” – A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to “support our troops” is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation.
Military spectacle and American sport – Fifteen years after the beginning of the so-called “War on Terror,” no facet of life in the United States—political, legal or cultural—has escaped the dark shadow of the American military-intelligence apparatus. Everything is subordinated to the needs of the state. Personal communications are intercepted and stored, protests are monitored and school curricula are manipulated. Hollywood works with the CIA to produce films like “Zero Dark Thirty” to justify the government’s illegal torture program, and a worker can hardly take his or her family to the ballgame without being inundated with pro-war lies and propaganda.
Old Osawatomie
Let us remember John Brown on the anniversary of his raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry.
“Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the so-called great, every man in this court would have deemed it worthy of reward rather than punishment.”
Congratulations, America
Along with Latvia, Lithuania and Romania, you rank lowest for the material well-being of children in all of the developed world.
As Paul Buchheit reports, the callousness of America’s political and business leaders is shocking once you start looking at the numbers.
Read more: The Numbers Are Staggering: U.S. Is ‘World Leader’ in Child Poverty | Alternet.
Read the UNICEF Report on child well-being in rich countries.
Pentagon Research: Scarcity and Unrest
Nafeez Ahmed writes on Motherboard about the current research priorities of the U.S. Department of Defense.
A major factor for study is how “resource scarcity or imbalance, including food and water insecurity” can lead to state instability. This could cover availability of resources, who owns them, and who can access them; the way in which energy consumption is rising worldwide and how it relates to health and wealth in different countries.
The Pentagon also wants to see modeling of the interplay between demographic trends and population growth, as well as wider economic issues like “wealth distribution.” This raises questions about whether the US military anticipates a risk of civil unrest at home or in other Western countries allied to the US, where some economists are predicting another economic crash.
Read more: The Bleak Science Bankrolled by the Pentagon | Motherboard.
Christianity and America
Benjamin L. Corey writes about the early Christians, and how they might be viewed by American Fundies today.
“If those entrenched in American Christianity could transport back in time to experience Christianity as it originally was, they’d be uncomfortable at best, and at worst, would probably have declined the invitation to join Christianity at all.”
Read the full essay: 5 Reasons Why Many American Christians Wouldn’t Like The First Ones.
Constitutional Scholar Tramples Press Freedom
Glenn Greenwald reports: “Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th. That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana.”
Greenwald quotes former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr.
“The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.”
Read More: U.S. Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings, Worst Since Obama Became President – The Intercept.
We Have A Nice Cell Waiting For You
If you are poor, ill or addicted, don’t worry. We can warehouse you almost indefinitely and you’ll never have to worry.
From a new report by the Vera Institute of Justice:
“Local jails, which exist in nearly every town and city in America, are built to hold people deemed too dangerous to release pending trial or at high risk of flight. This, however, is no longer primarily what jails do or whom they hold, as people too poor to post bail languish there and racial disparities disproportionately impact communities of color. This report reviews existing research and data to take a deeper look at our nation’s misuse of local jails and to determine how we arrived at this point.”
Read More: Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America | Vera Institute of Justice.
A Grand Alliance
In this superb two-minute video, actor- activist Danny Glover champions the need for a vibrant public Postal Service and asks the public to join with him in A Grand Alliance to save it.
Danny Glover: Our Postal Service from A Grand Alliance on Vimeo.
American Reds
The folks at Red Wedge magazine have created a wonderful new series of posters called Inside Agitators.
The series “aims to reintroduce the notion that communism is an American tradition and a powerful, intersectional tradition at that. American communists have been women and men, black and white and red and brown, queer and straight, disabled and able-bodied. That the posters resemble wanted posters is no accident: communism has been and is a crime, for which our brave forebears were hunted, banished, jailed, and killed.”
Some of my personal heroes, including Helen Keller, Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood are among those depicted.
See the posters: Inside Agitators — Red Wedge.
