Showing posts with label Green Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green Party. Show all posts

4/7/13

Democrat or Green Party! Should America Dump The Democrats?

Thanks to Sasha Brookner for posting such an interesting letter.

The "Greens" are often put forward as ultra-left, crackpot lefties, but when you listen to Jill Stein and other Greens or read the Green Party Website about their party platform about social and political reform, what you find instead are intelligent, practical, reasonable and sustainable solutions to most of our social and political issues.  Things you never hear about from Republicans and Democrats.

The Green Party is not about super-goofy, tree hugging, nut jobs - but instead makes a strong, reasonable and practical statement about the role of government and the protection and nurture of society.

I don't belong to a political party, but I do really appreciate the perspective and ideas of the Green Party.


From Blue to Green: Why I Left the Democratic Party
The Huffington Post
March 21, 2013
by Sasha Brookner
“Of two evils, choose neither.” ~ Charles Spurgeon
guantanamo1-thumb-400x428In the 16th century, the Eastern Orthodox Christians had a unique aphorism: “Better the turban than the mitre.” They were referring to the preferable conquer of the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks rather than the Western Roman Catholic empire. Today, that lesser of two evil principles isn’t about maintaining freedom of religion; rather it’s used by Democrats to justify genocide, drones, Guantanamo, rendition, kill lists and cutting heat subsidizes for the poor under the past its sell-by date defense that Republicans would double these demons. It is evident that this perpetual comparative doctrine has reached steroid proportions. Although President Barack Obama may wear the “turban” when it comes to certain domestic policies, such as gay marriage and embryonic stem cell research, when it comes to foreign policy, corporate interests, and saying farewell to Magna Carta, both the Elephants and the Donkeys are wearing the Bishop’s hat.
In 2008, I complacently cast a vote for the so-called Marxist, Muslim, crypto-Mau Mau leader. At the time, I thought his rhetoric on hunting down Osama bin Laden and his cadre of non-threatening, Pashtun goat-herding boogie men was simply posturing for xenophobic independents. I mean this was a devoted peaceful father who didn’t spank his children and volunteered at soup kitchens. We’re talking about a man who turned down a lucrative corporate gig for grassroots basement community activism. Goodwin Liu was on his short list for the 9th circuit; hell, he sat in front of feminists and spoke about rescinding the Hyde Amendment. If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could have ever made their utopian government functional, this was the guy who could swing it. Don’t laugh at me. Over the next four years the nausea and culpability I felt for casting that less than prescient ballot and not supporting Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney would take it’s toll on my conscience and nervous system.
“He’s playing chess!” Obamacrats screamed emphatically when it was abundantly clear the Ivy Leaguer was failing horribly at checkers. While Republicans transformed into strategic tacticians taking chapters from Sun Tzu’s Art of War and marching their elephants over the Alps, Democrats were busying themselves reading Iyanla Vanzant. Obama’s bi-partisan agenda skyrocketed to epidemic proportions – apparently a pre-existing condition for which he was previously denied treatment – leaving him perpetually naked every time he walked away from the political poker table. Frustrated amidst even his moderate ideas being obstructed by the GOP, he would come out of his economic meetings and relieve his stress going H.A.M on Kabul. He even felt the need to make the stomach-turning Jonas Brothers drone joke in protection of his precious daughters – who, unlike little girls in MENA, will never come close to seeing glimpses of war. In his autobiography, Obama said, “War might be hell and still the right thing to do.” I’m sure this bit of philosophical reflection holds true only as long as it’s not his family experiencing that “war” or “hell.” Our president only has a predilection for playing commando leader with other parents’ children. And when resistance fighters return fire Michelle offers their families big bear hug condolences and rhapsodizes over how valiantly they died for our freedoms. Watching the Obamas donate money to veterans’ organizations is like watching pimps offer charity to domestic violence shelters.
patriot_poster-acluObama’s political tenure reads like acute moral fragmentation. He has ordered some of the most catastrophic cuts to our civil liberties while throwing in a couple Lily Ledbetter Acts to keep liberals placated. Congressional obstructionism was not the culprit when our president renewed the egregiously Orwellien Patriot Act via non “sunlight before signing” autopen. It was not to blame when he refused to shut down Cheney’s beloved interrogation facility in Cuba even though half the tormented water drown prisoners have been cleared. A few Wall Street bankers received “consent orders,” but no prison buddies named Bubba. Meanwhile, our heroic Bradley Manning rots away half naked in a cell, two more Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas were recently shut down and Obama’s lust for war has extended from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Mali and Yemen. We haven’t even entered into his beloved drone curriculum which makes Bush’s water boarding look compassionate. The current administration’s three billion dollar a week jingoistic kill brown people program could have easily been invested into eradicating homelessness, canceling student debts, rebuilding 98,000 elementary and 25,000 high schools, and providing superlative pro bono job training – all of which pose a much greater threat to our country than desert nomads across ocean divides who draw their diabolical plan of attack against America with sticks in the dirt. Boehner and crew’s impediments were not the issue when our chain smoker president broke his campaign promise to respect state’s rights and started hunting down medical marijuana dealers. Watching a man who consumes a product that leads to the death of 6 million users annually go after the hemp guys was like watching a drunk driver moralize to cranberry juice drinkers. Instead of learning from the preeminent philosophers throughout antiquity who preached mastery of self before mastery others, Obama has used his tenure in office having romantic affairs with the Disposition Matrix, Illegal Wars, and NDAA’s Section 1021(b)(2) which allows for indefinite detention and cold-blooded murder of U.S. citizens at his Tuesday discretion, all of which would have gotten the younger Barack laughed out of his Harvard law classes. But hey, aren’t his daughters adorable? And that Michelle she sure can Hula Hoop. I wonder how her vegetable garden is doing? And Bo! Democrats love them some Bo.
Although George W. Bush was possibly the most repugnant president in United States history next to Woodrow, Harry and Richard, the only U.S. Constitutional passage he was familiar with was the Second Amendment. Obama on the other hand is a constitutional legal eagle, meaning he’s actually heard of George Mason and the Fifth Amendment. This makes his lack of deference to the only legal text that could perhaps arguably make us “exceptional” even more egregious. Regrettably, Obama’s entire candidacy has been viewed through a lens of proportionality, the 112th and 113th Congress have been incomparable secret weapons. Contrasted against a group of anachronistic, pseudo-Christian crusaders with an ongoing agenda to criminalize 12-year-old incest victims who abort embryos, Obama would have to be Pol Pot to fall below the bar set up for him. The “liberal” party has taken to genuflecting in front of a man who can only look decent next to psychopaths.

sunflower8 reasons why I now go Green, not the machine

1) Because Naderization Doesn’t Scare Me
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” ~ Mohandas Gandhi
If I hear another President Roseanne Barr Macadamia Nut joke, I’m going to tell the Taliban people are burning Qurans and start giving out home addresses. Our world can no longer afford to make Green Party jokes; they’re just not funny amidst our current political climate. It is offensive to think I would succumb to Spoiler Controversy extortion by the so-called progressive party whose current claim to fame is attempting to raise the minimum wage by a radical buck and a half. Now there’s a joke for anyone who’s looked at a calendar lately or skimmed through Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Considering our president can’t even pass a paltry $9/hour through Congress, he might have well have opted to start with what economists compute is the 2013 accurate livable wage sum – $21.72. Clearly over the past five years, if we’ve learned nothing at all, it’s that our presidential elect was never gifted in the art of negotiations, continuing to start every bill to exit poverty with the lowest possible numeral, eventually exiting stage left with the number below that.
Democrats have taken to blackmailing wanderers considering Green with an indictment of Ralph Nader who they contend handed over the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, but who actually took 1% of votes equally from both Republicans and Democrats. They might as well blame the Socialist Party, the Electoral College, the quarter million Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush, eco-friendly tree huggers who wouldn’t have touched Gore with a 10 ft. long stick. Or, they could blame the real culprits – Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, O’Connor, and Rehnquist.
DSCN7919In 1996, Ralph Nader spent less than $5,000 in his bid for presidency; yet he won over almost 1% of the American population. In 2000, he campaigned for roughly $300,000 and received 2.8 million votes. Imagine what numbers Jill Stein could pull if she garnered 5% support and qualified for millions of dollars in federal funding. Before clearing our memory cache, remember the original Republicans emerged as a third party back in the 1850′s with only a single issue, abolition. Unlike the early Republicans and Free Soil Party, Greens have an injustice conquer list that makes the Fair Sentencing Act look reactionary. In addition to the biotic crisis, their objectives include supporting grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community based economics, feminist and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal & global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability. How could any sentient being support men obsessed with war over the Green Ten Key Values?
I know, I know this presidential election (like all since 1991) is “too important” to support the Party of Peace. I mean, think about it. If Republicans had taken the Oval Office it would have been conservative pandemonium. The Patriot Act would still be in effect; the Corpus in Habeas wouldn’t have to be produced; Guantanamo would be bustling; drone architect John O. Brennan would be appointed chief counter-terrorism advisor; Wall Street bankers would escape prosecution; Erik Prince would further his million dollar no-bid private military contracts; Planned Parenthoods would be defunded; millions of Mexican immigrants would be deported; billions of our tax dollars and military supplies would be sent to Israel to continue Gaza occupation and we would have militarily invaded and bombed the hell out of six new countries….
Oh wait.
Obama’s charm, wit, wife and ostensible liberal demeanor somehow made Democrats start liking these things again – or perhaps they were anesthetized to them to begin with and Blackwater, Fallujah and Iraqi children were just used as scapegoats when the guy they disliked was in office. Throughout the Bush regime, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary, was a regularly sought-after anti-war speaker at Democratic events; but phone calls abruptly halted when Obama took office. Democrats play the same partisan politics as Republicans, using the ritual sacrifice of brown babies to the U.S. military industrial complex as pretexts when the Grand Ol’ Party is at the wheel. One could witness this pathology on Real Time with Bill Maher when Democrat strategist James Carville practically screamed at conservative political commentator, S.E Cupp, after she brought up her concern over drone attacks. What could be more depressing than when cold-hearted Republicans want to discuss the death of hundreds of babies while defensive Democrats shake their heads exasperatedly to shield their party’s deity from critique? I can’t imagine if the Mormon guy had used his magic underwear to catapult himself into office and left his Inaugural Ball early to bomb Yemen that Democrats and MSNBC wouldn’t be having seizures. Instead news that several Yemeni citizens died in a blast after cocktail hour was far less important than the Jason Wu gown Michele sparkled in at the Ball.
When I hear the regurgitated echo from Democrats that exercising suffrage on behalf of the Green Party is nothing but a “statement vote,” I can’t help but roll my eyes at their myopic vision and obstinate support of this Ineptocracy.
Going Green is a long-term strategy vote.
The Abolitionist and Feminist Suffrage movements knew they weren’t going to win the 13th or 19th amendment the first year, or the year after that, or hell, even 50 years down the road. The time-line of civil rights progress is never swift. How botched have our Poly-Sci classes become when self-identified liberals who denounce war still vote for it in perpetuity like meat eaters who claim they detest the killing animals, choosing to ignore the vision and growth of the Green Party as temporarily unviable. One can even cast aside those lessons from Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli, and consider our foremothers. They didn’t bleed, sweat and cry for sixty years so we would be intimidated into exercising suffrage for a demagogue who works in the shadows of obscurity, killing off our sisters around the globe. I know for certainty Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t march in Selma and Montgomery so we would someday have a black president who would be bombing orphanages in Africa under the guise of safeguarding his beloved middle-class. Statistically speaking, I have a greater chance of being struck by lightening or gobbled up by a Carcharodon Carcharias than blown to smithereens by a man wanting to be Shaheed, according to this skewered logic we might as well pull a Jacques Cousteau and take to the oceans to kill off the great white shark population. We can even force minimum wage workers to fund the excursion, since it’s for their own benefit.
paper-shredderEven the recent drone sightings on American soil and the Congressional passing of the FAA Reauthorization Act projecting that 30,000 unmanned aerial vehicles will be flying our friendly skies by 2020 isn’t enough to get Democrats to tear off their tacky bumper stickers. The trite response “Well would you prefer Romney?” has become fixed in the Democrat echo chamber. No I wouldn’t prefer Romney, I would prefer liberals stop cowardly supporting mass murderers and men running our constitutional pages through Fellowes and Ativas and instead work towards assisting Jill Stein in garnering 4.6% more of the electoral vote so the Green Party can inch closer to overthrowing a corporate duopoly more concerned about catering to Goldman Sachs and Halliburton than the Bill of Rights.
Got it?
2) Because of Obama’s Cognitive Dissonance
“It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous men were thus bound together that in the agonized womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How then were they dissociated?” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Barack Obama is a member of the Chamaeleonidae family, he has more incarnations than Hindu deities and trying to measure his shape-shifting would have driven Euclid to insanity. His two-faced rules of conduct are steeped in a distorted sense of violent patriotism and delusional valiance. Dr. Jekyll’s eyes water up over senseless U.S. violence, like the mistaken identity murder of Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, while Mr. Hyde pre-emptively strikes any breathing foreigner rumored to dislike America with Arabic Hadiya corpses written off daily as mistaken identity collateral damage. This is indeed a strange case.
While American MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predator drones make their 24/7 rounds, Obama justifies Zionist proclivities and Gaza genocide with a straight faced outcry of “No country on Earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” This is a fascinating statement because Obama’s prized UCAV’s have become perfectly acceptable descending upon third worlds, causing severe emotional and psychological distress to families at best, and dismemberment at worst, while Israel is the only region in the Middle East given Western permission to defend themselves.
blog_tomahawkThe existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once summed up “bad faith” as the belief that one individual could operate in two completely different patterns of behavior and find a way to reconcile the duplicity. That paradigm was clearly visible during Obama’s tearful vigil in the death of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in contrast to his callous indifference after he ordered the slaying of 21 children in the Bedouin village of al-Majalah on December 17, 2009. The Yemeni children didn’t even receive an admission of guilt let alone crocodile contrition, proving Obama’s moral compass doesn’t function well when pointed East. Our first black president has taken a chapter from the Antebellum, making it clear that brown foreigners are three-fifths of a person in contrast to American’s full human agency – not even worth body counts.
Obama has become the self-righteous fingerwagger of no return. He loves to moralize to Russia about their imprisonment of feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot, but refuses to discuss his own prison industrial complex which houses more men per capita than 196 countries. Obama was all keen on sermonizing Burma over the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, who is no more remarkable than American political prisoner exile Assata Shakur. On Syria, Obama said: “The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests.” On his 99% constituents tasered and pepper sprayed by militia looking cops during Occupy Wall Street?
Crickets.
Our government’s lectures to the rest of the world’s system of jurisprudence for dissenters seem a little awkward amidst the recent arrest of Organic Consumers Association‘s Alexis Badden Mayer peacefully protesting outside of the White House and the ongoing prosecution of our truth-telling freedom fighters under obscure Acts implemented during Word War 1. Obama seems to have a great deal of outrospection about the failures of foreign governments but utterly lacks interest in curbing our own human rights abuse record.
1350706037760.cachedObama took it to a new low when he used Malala Yousafzai as a scapegoat for the Afghan war, calling her shooting “reprehensible, disgusting and tragic.” Huh? Out of all the Malalas you have been responsible for recklessly depriving life, you want to shine a spotlight on this girl and fund her medical treatment? Our Apaches didn’t land at Al-Majalah or Garani to fly any of those Malalas to top tier UK hospitals on private jets. Spare me the idea America is actually blowing up half of the Middle East on behalf of little girls trying to acquire an education. Remind me how many schools we’ve built over there again? Zero. How many have we accidentally bombed? Good question. Using the Malala logic we’d be in the Democrat Republic of the Congo right now, not best friends with the crypto-leader of the M23′s. And, please, don’t get me started on Susan Rice.
The Obama administration has shown they have a very selective commitment to human rights – not to mention an expensive habit of dropping million dollar bombs on ten dollar tents.
3) Because Insurance Run Healthcare Sucks
“We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies – they’ll get a seat at the table, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN.” ~ Barack Obama
If you don’t recall a single meeting about implementing universal healthcare broadcast to the American public, it’s not because you were on the cable television network’s wrong digit. It’s evident this lack of on-camera discourse was because Obama cut a corporate friendly backroom deal before Michelle had even finished decorating the East Wing. Oh and not even a mere mention of the 2008 Hyde Amendment pledge. Obama’s appropriation of Republican Bob Dole’s aged well-being plan would ultimately be a blow job to United Health, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser and Blue Shield providing them with 30 million additional clients of which they can appropriate 70% of patient profits. Anyone with medical coverage who has ever requested and been denied an MRI is cognizant that insurance run hospitals produce sub-par care. When we make human suffering a commodity, for-profit providers continually block expensive but necessary scans and refuse to let doctor’s inform their patients about cutting-edge modern technological advancements like VNS Therapy as to not upset their brethren anti-depressant pill market. Contrary to popular belief, Obama’s Affordable Care Act won’t lay the groundwork for Universal Healthcare; conversely it will hand over more tax dollars to these billion dollar juggernauts to use as additional funding to lobby against Vermont’s favorable Single Payer system. While Democrats had control of the House and Senate in 2009, Obama could have at least made a good faith attempt to put his campaign promise up to the floor for a vote.
Subsequently, it would be nice if Obama fans could stop perpetually using insurance run healthcare to balance every atrocity committed under this administration. Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Muammar Ghaddafi provided their people with actual universal healthcare, and nobody brought it up when they were using poison gas, instituting forced labor camps or firing rockets into little girls’ bedrooms.
dsc_37614) Because Democrats Are Not Saving Our Birth Canals
“For millions of women, federal programs are their only means of getting healthcare. Abortion is the only medically necessary health service excluded from Medicaid coverage. Failure to provide a service that only women need is discrimination.” ~ Barack Obama (2008)
Fast forward to Wednesday, January 21, 2009 when Women’s Reproductive Rights became a distant 100th on the Planned Parenthood minister’s “To-Do” list. He only once mentioned the organization’s name on the national stage while campaigning against Romney in 2012 – and even then it was safely in the context of cheering for mammograms and cervical cancer screenings, not abortion. Receiving pamphlets on gestational phases is not the polemic issue for religious nuts and skirting around bio-ethical conversations pertaining to our fallopian tubes has become disrespectful. The moment Democrats begin to justify Planned Parenthood clinics because they uniformly don’t offer abortion services, they appropriate Republican values, deprecating their most important and necessary function. We don’t need conversations in support of mammograms, we need full fledged, third rail electrocution conversations about the elephant in the room: terminating an embryo/fetus to reduce the number of unwanted children in this country flooding the foster care system and being raised by mothers still reading Judy Blume.
Democrats still attempt to blackmail women with the notion that if we don’t go for the lesser of two evils that feminist’s adored family planning clinics will cease to exist. Newsflash: This past month, two Planned Parenthood clinics were shut down in Texas, completely disregarding Norma McCorvey’s historical legal precedent. In Arkansas, a 12-week abortion ban is advancing in the House. In New Mexico, they’re creatively working to criminalize rape victims who abort embryos as “tampering with evidence” while mandatory delightful vaginal ultrasounds are being forced upon women in attempts to guilt them into having unwanted children. This past month, four clinics were forced to shut down in Wisconsin after losing $1.1 million in state funding. Thank god poor women have Obama in office! Even amidst Congress auditing the hell out of everything Planned Parenthood, from their suction tubes to fax cartridges, and the 50+ bills that have been brought to the floor to defund and/or criminalize the termination of pregnancies, Obama has remained mum on the subject. He hoped he could avoid the conversation by throwing $15 Ortho Tri-Cyclen scraps to middle-class women who have health insurance. It worked. And not to fret ladies of the ignored lower socio-economic class, you can continue to obtain free birth control at (yup you guessed it) Planned Parenthood.
5) Because Democrats Also Love Playing G.I. Joe
The grandiloquence War on Terror is merely a euphemism for ruthless ethnic cleansing indulged upon by a group of resource grabbing oil loving drunk with power geopoliticans who could use a good ethics of war reading from Cicero’s De Officiis and the Mahabharata.
Under Article 2 of the Geneva Code, Obama’s wars overseas does indeed constitute Genocide, defined as the “deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” Genocide includes imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group and we can cue Robert Gibbs who justified Obama’s murder of 16 year old Abdulrahamn Anwar al-Aulaqi by his lineage empathetically issuing the quote, “He should have had a far more responsible father.” Genocide is also defined as forcibly transferring children of one group to another which is seen by the estimated 2.3 million Afghan Refugee Camp regulars.
Meanwhile Obama continues to delude the American public of his success, bragging about the 22 men with white turbans tilted over their left ears he’s wiped off the map. The only omission is, as Stanford, New York University and Policy Mic have reported, there is one Taliban death to every 50 civilians killed. When you kill a man’s child you go to war with their father it has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda; subsequently, we’ve engendered thousands more Arabs who now hate America and that 22 number starts looking a little less remarkable. In a region where the U.S. should be trying to win over supporters from jihadist influence, drones prove alienating and the pedantic Quran reader’s most effective recruiting tool. The mercurial rise of the once marginalized Muslim Brotherhood can also attribute their Arab Spring ascension to power as an alternative to Western imperialism. Hassan al-Banna’s descendants are definitely not beneficial to the Malalas. Our politician’s adrenaline pumping game of Cowboys and Indians has also precipitated military suicide rates that surpass combat deaths in 2012, hitting a 349 record number.
It is difficult for men and women who haven’t lived on the outer reaches of empire not to let war become an abstraction. The West may talk about drone warfare being “bad” or “questionable” over Frappuccinos but it rarely conjures up any genuine emotive response, less my beloved Code Pink cheerleaders. It has become abundantly clear over the past decade that a Fatima Akbar will never achieve parity to a Sally Smith.
The Scandinavian Committee who slept on Gandhi but awarded the United State’s 44th president a Nobel Peace Prize should be mortified to find out their compassionate patriarch of mankind runs a torture facility in the Wardak province of Afghanistan and incarcerates their other Peace Prize nominees. Unlike the eight African-American Nobel Peace Prize winners that came before him, Obama’s prestigious accolade has become a white elephant. Contrasted with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1964 took his award as a duty said: “The Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission – a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”
6) Because You Tilt at Windmills
“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
What both parties keep shielded from the American public is that neither the Taliban nor Al-Qaeda own a single armored tank, let alone F-22 frequent flier mileage. Jihadists are often goat herders who reside in dirt huts with no voltage. Their lack of electronic sophistication was transparent upon a glimpse into the King of Al-Qaeda’s “lap of luxury.” Homeboy looked like he could only get reception via tin foil on the antennas of his compound’s 80′s style TV. Bin Laden’s constituents haven’t mastered basic air travel, what are they going to do, ride their camels across the Atlantic Ocean to institute Shari’s Law? In case everyone failed to notice, they had to hijack our planes for 9/11, so wouldn’t a better plan of self-preservation simply be keeping them off flights headed this way? Apparently not, because you see these guys have the combined IQ’s of Ghazali and Khaldoun and the military tactics of Saladin. This is why wardens are too terrified to have them transferred from Guantanamo to federal prison because unbeknownst to science, The Students and The Base have metal springs in their feet so they can jump over 100 ft high electrical fences. They can pass through walls by melting underneath doors then reforming on the other side. And don’t let them touch you with a Quran or you’ll instantly turn to stone, then crack. Mass propaganda has transformed these non-tech savvy nomads into the Voldemorts of the world actually capable of inciting an American holocaust of Third Reich proportions. Over the past 11 years there hasn’t been a single attempt by a Jihadists to sneak a bomb onto a plane from one U.S. city to another (CIA false flags don’t count) while polls show the majority of Afghans didn’t even know what “America” was until we started blowing up their neighborhoods.
More recently, Obama authorized millions of dollars to be sent across the globe to support the Yemeni military, even amidst our country at 10% unemployment, 650,000 estimated homeless and 40 million children not receiving adequate nourishment. Our government cut off head subsidizes for the poor in 2011, closed mental health clinics and cut funding for domestic violence shelters, but suddenly has a Carte blanche to bankroll a third world’s counter-terrorism operations because one underwear bomber hailed from the region. Yes we must defend destitute Americans from the threat of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula living in one of the driest, poorest and least developed country in the world. Patriotism is all about cutting safety nets then assuring the people who need them that our government loves them so much they will be protected from Salafism. Thank you President Obama for defending us from our 1 in 1 billionth chance of becoming victim to Yemeni terrorism – and continuing to funnel money away from struggling Americans for DARPA’s Vulture Program so we can have futuristic war robots – while the Soup Kitchen down the block is having another coat drive. Regardless of if you’re a fan of doing the impossible extermination of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Mujahideen and anyone wearing a burka, the war against “terror” has statistically been completely counterproductive to that goal. Several years ago there were only about 150 members of AQAP. After ongoing strikes from drones, tomahawk missiles and cluster bombs there are currently 1500 members. How can Obama sophists contend this is a “smart war” or a “war of attrition” when playing Whac-a-Mole on the bad guys is doubling their membership exponentially? The misguided War on Terror has been the most dim-witted battle since the domino theory days. It’s like a war on acne and the more you pick and squeeze the more depressing your pimple problem becomes. We torture Osama’s Egyptian friends, he blows up East African U.S embassies, we bomb anti-malarial drug producing pharmacies in Sudan and then act surprised when Al-Qaeda starts issuing “America Die” manifestos. Confucius once said “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Our target countries practices the same Code of Hammurabi as the rest of us – an eye for an eye and the Twin Towers die. Unfortunately, we’re not all as mature as Sweden who handled the 2010 Stockholm Bombings by simply stepping up their self-defense, which according to our Castle Laws, happens at home.
7) Because My Entire Life History is Stored on a Super Computer in Utah
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” ~ The Fourth Amendment
The majority of Obama’s loyal supporters have no clue that he’s ordered AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to systematically turn over their customers’ personal correspondence. Somewhere near the Church of Latter Day Saints, there is a mega computer that has access to every single e-mail/text you’ve ever sent your friends, co-workers or weed dealer. Most simply brush it off as “Well I’m not planning a suicide bomb mission so who cares” but this invasion of privacy has very little to do with 72 Virgins. These correspondences have been handed over to NSA, FBI, CIA and every other government acronym who is now privy to any naked photo you’ve ever sent a lover, perhaps a note telling a friend you cheated on your taxes, psychiatric records that could deny you future government job opportunities and whether you have a library book check-out preference for J.D Salinger, Mark Twain or god forbid the Quran. The interesting detail about the Patriot Act’s “sneak and peak” clause is that it’s been used much more frequently to snag drug dealers than locate Jihadists. So back to those weed dealer correspondences…
8) Because I Hate Personality Cults
A few weekends ago, I was walking down Crenshaw Blvd. in South Central Los Angeles and noticed a woman selling candles with Obama’s face plastered on them, Virgin Mary style. I couldn’t help but think how eerily reminiscent it was to Kim ll-sung. The same lady selling Saint Obama candles also had some First Lady earrings for $5 a pop. I’ll pass. When Michelle’s new bangs conjure up more talk in the African-American community than the National Defense Authorization Act, it’s time to check the celebrity fan club. Personal brand narratives should be inconsequential when electing politicians and I would be embarrassed by any woman voting for Sarah Palin because her X chromosome genetic strain would provide role model status to young girls.
Obama has made war so acceptable to his loyal African-American supporters that when Lupe Fiasco argues otherwise in front of Hip-Hop crowds he’s booed off stage. Remember when anti-war songs were cool in the black community? We can never forget Bob Marley’s “War” or Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Black people were right there in the front row waving their hands side to side. There was never a time where Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops got booed off a stage when he asked why our government was sending kids overseas.” In one era, Muhammad Ali could proudly be remembered saying:
“No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slave masters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.”
Fast forward 50 years later to find the famed boxer saluting the first black president at inaugural soirees. Nowadays anyone who dares sell out by speaking up against Obama’s imperial violence, from Cornel West to Tavis Smiley, are immediately shunned by the same community that is rarely even referenced by their beloved president. This is the same community that once rallied in New York on April 4, 1967 with tearful eyes listening to Dr. King’s anti-Vietnam War speech, “A Time to Break Silence.”
Tragically, our president could bomb Uganda off the map and those who have created a fictive kinship with the first family would get more riled up if they found out Barack was cheating on Michelle with a white woman. There is something diabolical about a black man who refuses to speak on direct issues related to the black community from the Jim Crow neo-slavery prison industrial complex, police brutality, Troy Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal and disproportionate black unemployment levels because his family’s melanin content alone is deemed sufficient. I guess you can’t expect much more from a president that admires Reagan, the man responsible for the iconic “black welfare queen.”
Cynthia McKinney calls Obama “the more effective of the two evils” perhaps because he can encourage extra judicial killings all too familiar to the African-American community and still win hearts by belting out a rendition of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Unlike backing gay marriage for the LGBT community, birth control for Women and The Dream Act for Latinos, he doesn’t need to worry about offering one piece of legislation directly targeting African Americans because he knows he has that vote by design. He can woo Harlem fundraisers through vocal chords, then revert back to telling the black man uptown if he wants anything changed he should “take off his house slippers.” Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass would be so proud.
Jill Stein may not sing love songs from the 70′s, have a fashion savvy husband or chill with Oprah Winfrey, but legislation that directly affects me, my community and my sisters around the globe is far too important to vote for voyeurism over policy. I rather a white woman that fights on behalf of the black community, than a black man who has statistically paid less attention to race in Executive Orders and podium appearances, than John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
*****
When you cast a ballot for either corporate binary it’s inevitable that you’re voting in the interests of Goldman Sachs, DynCorp, Exxon Mobil and Monsanto. As both Democrats and Republicans continue to loot the U.S Treasury to fund armed forces, expand indefinite detention to ordinary U.S. citizens, nonsensically send billions of our tax dollars to corrupt foreign governments while forcing the elderly to work cash registers at K-Mart clutching defibrillators, there will be alternatively only one party left to choose from.
Hillary won’t get my vote in 2016. I’m not riding the donkey anymore.

4/2/13

Can We Have A Humane Economic System?

 I was reading an interesting article in The Nation this morning that discussed how wrong economists, especially highlighting Paul Krugman, were about globalization and how while it is obvious to most "people" that the politics of global trade economics were disastrously wrong (except for the 1%), somehow economists and politicians, including current world leaders don't seem to get it - and won't discuss their utter failure.
After I found myself fairly impressed with the article, I read the comments that followed and was equally impressed by a general consensus that while I was firmly in the intelligent observer camp, I was also helplessly naive about economic history and the general uselessness of (probably) all experts in that field.
Also interesting was the idea that "you can't go back".
This is something that I have no problem accepting in so many areas of life but have never really considered as an unalterable, universal principle - though now I am beginning to consider it might be that way.
Once the factors in an equation have changed, the equation must also change; you can't just go back to what seemed to work before and expect it to work again when things are different.
Pandora's box, as it were, has been opened and all that came out is not going to get stuffed back in no matter how much we want it or how hard we try or how much we pay, pray or envision.
While I do have some specific ideas about Global Trade and Capitalism, which are primarily that we should eviscerate them and return to local production and local consumption, taking the immoral, ill gotten gains of opportunistic capitalism and returning it to the victims of "voodoo economics", put basic services in the hands of "the people", and make the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness a reality for all people instead of just a privileged and corrupt few, I am not planning on going into great detail about that right now.
I do think that considering this article is a good thing, but hope we can recognise that neither the problem nor the solution are an either/or, black/white kind of thing.
Recognising that you have a problem is always the first step to resolving it.
We should recognize that we do have a tremendous problem that is likely to explode in our faces in an astronomical manner.
The solution?
Well, we know we can't just tap the "way-back machine" for that, but we do have to adjust our view and actions to those that retard excess and embrace equality and a restoration of the liberties, freedoms and opportunities that offer a life of opportunity and dignity that includes the prospect of everyone enjoying the expectation that they are free and able to pursue and achieve happiness.
I also recommend the accompanying 10 min. video.
Here is the article.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173593/why-was-paul-krugman-so-wrong?utm_medium=email&utm_source=HeadlineNation&utm_term=&utm_campaign=

Here are a couple of the comments that caught my attention.
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The sad reality is that "experts", all of them, every one, totally suck at making accurate predictions. Krugman is not special that way at all.

Read Future Babble by Dan Gardner for good evidence of this thesis.

"In 2008, as the price of oil surged above $140 a barrel, experts said it would soon hit $200; a few months later it plunged to $30. In 1967, they said the USSR would have one of the fastest-growing economies in the year 2000; in 2000, the USSR did not exist. In 1911, it was pronounced that there would be no more wars in Europe; we all know how that turned out. Face it, experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. And yet every day we ask them to predict the future — everything from the weather to the likelihood of a catastrophic terrorist attack. Future Babble is the first book to examine this phenomenon, showing why our brains yearn for certainty about the future, why we are attracted to those who predict it confidently, and why it's so easy for us to ignore the trail of outrageously wrong forecasts."

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Greider steps back into the past and lives there. The refurbishing of American industry is not going to happen to any great extent, the game of the planned industrial economy as Germany has used is over because economic growth is over. In fact using real inflation rates the US hasn't grown since 2000.

Growth is over because the "powers that be" in the US, the EU and Japan have decided to save the oligarchs with zombie economies rather than write off unpayable debt. This has worked well for the 1% as their wealth and income since 2009 has soared. Not so good for the rest of us consumers.

Growth is over because the world has reached peak energy, (especially oil,) water, soil and the ability of the earth to provide ever increasing commodities while trying to absorb ever increasing amounts of pollution. The price of fuel and climate change are soon going to starve many in the less wealthy countries.

Greider needs to get up to speed on the realities of the 21st century before he starts recommending any sort of economic plans to be adopted. Greider still thinks the growth party will make a roaring comeback while debt gets piled ever higher, climate change gets even nastier and oil gets ever more expensive and harder to find ...
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And here is the video.



In this RSA Animate, celebrated academic David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?

This RSA Animate was taken from a lecture given as part of the RSA's free public lecture programme. The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to driving social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information, visit http://www.thersa.org

2/13/13

Dr. Jill Stein of Green Party Weighs In On 2013 State of the Union Address

The end of the 2012 Election did not slow down Jill Stein.

She is still very active and appears to be continuing as the Green Party's Presidential Candidate.

Dr. Stein, before, during and after the last campaign was constantly in the streets, connecting with the American People, getting arrested, jailed and basically standing up for her beliefs as no other candidate would even consider.

She is the only candidate for President that stands out as committed to resolving the real issues affecting "the People" with real, workable and novel solutions that no one else in government is considering.

Dr. Stein is not a polished, trained political entertainer, but she is clear, honest, committed and intelligent.

Here is her response to President Obama's 2013 State of the Union Address.

Unlike the GOP and TP responses, she offers real solutions instead of critical political posturing.

Stein's participation here lasts about 40 minutes.


Watch live streaming video from greenpartyus at livestream.com

1/21/13

Martin Luther King Jr. On Violence, Peace, Revolution, War and Principles of Civil Order




MLK

unions

Today, we remember and celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. and the voice he gave to all who were victims of injustice and oppression here in the United States and around the world.
As I have been preparing to make a statement about the current political noise and social hysteria being made regarding potential "gun control" legislation and what the intent behind any such legislation may be or how any legislation may overreach the Bill of Rights in its content or be perverted in its application to somehow defeat liberty and freedom of Citizens, I find that as is not unusual, the conversation is being focused on entirely the wrong issues.
Instead of just starting to write, I decided that I must get a few statistics on my side and so my report on these issues has been delayed while I ruminate over some specifics of my proposition before marching ahead.
Today, while still considering these things, I was pleased to receive mail from Jill Stein of the Green Party of America drawing my attention to a speech by Dr. King that presented some of my feelings in a manner that draws attention to a similar belief concerning the foundation or cause of and remedy to - not just war, and I consider Dr. King's remarks to apply to our current wars just as much as they did to Vietnam of which he was directly speaking, but also to the senseless murder and social violence that we witness with regularity now at home in the USA to which he also generally though not directly  alludes.
Since I am still not prepared to continue my own report, I find it fitting to share with you, as Ms. Stein suggests, this great sermon of Dr. King which will serve to benefit us all should we give it our full consideration.

If you would prefer to listen rather than read this sermon, go here.  


From Jill Stein,
This speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech was delivered one year to the day before his assassination, and it signaled a change in approach toward what King only weeks earlier had called the "triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism."

We have reposted this text from the archives of the Black Radical Congress, and encourage you to forward or repost it yourself.


THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW: BEYOND VIETNAM
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
  1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
  2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
  3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
  4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
  5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

12/2/12

Todays Welfare Queens and Their Gigantic Destructive Enonomic Impact

This article represents some of the best and most relevant economic reporting by anyone in years!

I hope the NYT will promote this series of articles indefinitely, to a wide audience at no charge as a National Public Service.

I just can't express how impressed I am!

Government really needs to have the guts to put a stop to this corporate welfare scheme and begin to support their own people and small business that have local roots and a personal incentive to stay put and prosper over the long haul.

As the article demonstrates, much of these huge subsidies go directly to executive income and bonuses and are not relevant to any actual business costs or benefit to workers or the community.

By the way, the Green Party proposed a jobs plan that encouraged a rational investment in local, small business and education that would eliminate unemployment right away and undo the harm caused by these fear-mongering, money-grabbing, anti-American Corporations and the Politicians who serve them.  Find their proposals on the Green Party Webpage.

Thank you New York Times!

I was blown away by Michigan's extensive list of Corporate Welfare Queens - topped by General Motors.
All states are explored in this Corporate Welfare Map. Michigan spends 30% of it's State Budget on Corporate Welfare with no promise of any benefit to the state and very often a very obvious loss as corporations fail, relocate or take other actions to improve their bottom line at the expense of...well...anything.

Check out the State by State Map (click on a state for an extensive, ranked list of Corporations benefiting from these "incentives")  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/01/us/government-incentives.html?smid=FB-nytimes&WT.mc_id=US-E-FB-SM-PIX-USO-120212-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click&_r=0

As Companies Seek Tax Deals, Governments Pay High Price
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-bankroll-corporations.html?smid=FB-nytimes&WT.mc_id=US-E-FB-SM-LIN-ACS-120212-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

In the end, the money that towns across America gave General Motors did not matter.

When the automaker released a list of factories it was closing during bankruptcy three years ago, communities that had considered themselves G.M.’s business partners were among the targets.

For years, mayors and governors anxious about local jobs had agreed to G.M.’s demands for cash rewards, free buildings, worker training and lucrative tax breaks. As late as 2007, the company was telling local officials that these sorts of incentives would “further G.M.’s strong relationship” with them and be a “win/win situation,” according to town council notes from one Michigan community.

Yet at least 50 properties on the 2009 liquidation list were in towns and states that had awarded incentives, adding up to billions in taxpayer dollars, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

Some officials, desperate to keep G.M., offered more. Ohio was proposing a $56 million deal to save its Moraine plant, and Wisconsin, fighting for its Janesville factory, offered $153 million.

But their overtures were to no avail. G.M. walked away and, thanks to a federal bailout, is once again profitable. The towns have not been so fortunate, having spent scarce funds in exchange for thousands of jobs that no longer exist.

One township, Ypsilanti, Mich., is suing over the automaker’s departure. “You can’t just make these promises and throw them around like they’re spare change in the drawer,” said Doug Winters, the township’s attorney.

Yet across the country, companies have been doing just that. And the giveaways are adding up to a gigantic bill for taxpayers.

A Times investigation has examined and tallied thousands of local incentives granted nationwide and has found that states, counties and cities are giving up more than $80 billion each year to companies. The beneficiaries come from virtually every corner of the corporate world, encompassing oil and coal conglomerates, technology and entertainment companies, banks and big-box retail chains.

The cost of the awards is certainly far higher. A full accounting, The Times discovered, is not possible because the incentives are granted by thousands of government agencies and officials, and many do not know the value of all their awards. Nor do they know if the money was worth it because they rarely track how many jobs are created. Even where officials do track incentives, they acknowledge that it is impossible to know whether the jobs would have been created without the aid.

“How can you even talk about rationalizing what you’re doing when you don’t even know what you’re doing?” said Timothy J. Bartik, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.

The Times analyzed more than 150,000 awards and created a searchable database of incentive spending. The survey was supplemented by interviews with more than 100 officials in government and business organizations as well as corporate executives and consultants.

A portrait arises of mayors and governors who are desperate to create jobs, outmatched by multinational corporations and short on tools to fact-check what companies tell them. Many of the officials said they feared that companies would move jobs overseas if they did not get subsidies in the United States.

Over the years, corporations have increasingly exploited that fear, creating a high-stakes bazaar where they pit local officials against one another to get the most lucrative packages. States compete with other states, cities compete with surrounding suburbs, and even small towns have entered the race with the goal of defeating their neighbors.

While some jobs have certainly migrated overseas, many companies receiving incentives were not considering leaving the country, according to interviews and incentive data.

“If you’re looking at the competitiveness of a region, the most important thing a region can do is to focus on education. And this use of incentives is really transferring money from education to businesses.”

Donald J. Hall Jr., Hallmark C.E.O.

Despite their scale, state and local incentives have barely been part of the national debate on the economic crisis. The budget negotiations under way in Washington have not addressed whether the incentives are worth the cost, even though 20 percent of state and local budgets come from federal spending. Lawmakers in Washington are battling over possible increases in personal taxes, while both parties have said that lower federal taxes on corporations are needed for the country to compete globally.

The Times analysis shows that Texas awards more incentives, over $19 billion a year, than any other state. Alaska, West Virginia and Nebraska give up the most per resident.

For many communities, the payouts add up to a substantial chunk of their overall spending, the analysis found. Oklahoma and West Virginia give up amounts equal to about one-third of their budgets, and Maine allocates nearly a fifth.

In a few states, the cost of incentives is not significant. But several of them have low business taxes — or none at all — which can save companies even more money than tax credits.

Far and away the most incentive money is spent on manufacturing, about $25.5 billion a year, followed by agriculture. The oil, gas and mining industries come in third, and the film business fourth. Technology is not far behind, as companies like Twitter and Facebook increasingly seek tax breaks and many localities bet on the industry’s long-term viability.

Those hopes were once more focused on automakers, which for decades have pushed cities and states to set up incentive programs, blazing a trail that companies of all sorts followed. Even today, G.M. is the top beneficiary, public records indicate. It received at least $1.7 billion in local incentives in the last five years, followed closely by Ford and Chrysler.

A spokesman for General Motors said that almost every major employer applied for incentives because they help keep companies competitive and retain or create jobs.

“There are many reasons why so many Ford, Chrysler and G.M. plants closed over the last few decades,” said the G.M. spokesman, James Cain. “But these factors don’t mean that the companies and communities didn’t benefit while the plants were open, which was often for generations.”

Mr. Cain cited research showing that the company received less money per job than foreign automakers operating in the United States.

Questioned about incentives, officials at dozens of other large corporations said they owed it to shareholders to maximize profits. Many emphasized that they employ thousands of Americans who pay taxes and spend money in the local economy.

$9.1 million - Amount local governments give up for business incentives every hour

$80 billion+ - Amount local governments give up to businesses every year

For government officials like Bobby Hitt of South Carolina, the incentives are a good investment that will raise tax revenues in the long run.

“I don’t see it as giving up anything,” said Mr. Hitt, who worked at BMW in the 1990s and helped it win $130 million from South Carolina.

Today, Mr. Hitt is the state’s secretary of commerce. South Carolina recently took on a $218 million debt to assist Boeing’s expansion there and offered the company tax breaks for 10 years.

Mr. Hitt, like most political officials, has a short-term mandate. It will take years to see whether the state’s bet on Boeing bears fruit.

In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican in his first term, has been working to eliminate most business tax credits but is bound by past awards. The state gave General Motors $779 million in credits in 2009, just a month after the company received a $50 billion federal bailout and decided to close seven plants in Michigan.

G.M. can use the credits to offset its state tax bill for up to 20 years. “You don’t know who will take a credit or when,” said Doug Smith, a senior official at the state’s economic development agency. “We may give a credit to G.M., and they might not take it for three years or 10 years or more.”

One corporate executive, Donald J. Hall Jr. of Hallmark, thinks business subsidies are hurting his hometown, Kansas City, Mo., by diverting money from public education. “It’s really not creating new jobs,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s motivated by politicians who want to claim they have brought new jobs into their state.”

For Mr. Hall and others in Kansas City, the futility of free-flowing incentives has been underscored by a border war between Kansas and Missouri.

Soon after Kansas recruited AMC Entertainment with a $36 million award last year, the state cut its education budget by $104 million. AMC was moving only a few miles, across the border from Missouri. Workers saw little change other than in commuting times and office décor. A few months later, Missouri lured Applebee’s headquarters from Kansas.

“I just shake my head every time it happens, it just gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” said Sean O’Byrne, the vice president of the Downtown Council of Kansas City. “It sounds like I’m talking myself out of a job, but there ought to be a law against what I’m doing.”

Outgunned by Companies

For local governments, incentives have become the cost of doing business with almost every business. The Times found that the awards go to companies big and small, those gushing in profits and those sinking in losses, American companies and foreign companies, and every industry imaginable.

Workers are a vital ingredient in any business, yet companies and government officials increasingly view the creation of jobs as an expense that should be subsidized by taxpayers, private consultants and local officials said.

Even big retailers and hotels, whose business depends on being in specific locations, bargain for incentives as if they can move anywhere. The same can be said for many movie productions, which almost never come to town without local subsidies.

When Oliver Stone made the 2010 sequel to “Wall Street,” in his mind there was only one place to shoot it: New York City. Nonetheless, the film, a scathing look at bankers’ greed, received $10 million in tax credits, according to 20th Century Fox.

In an interview, Mr. Stone criticized subsidies for industries like banking and agriculture but defended them for Hollywood, saying that many movies can be shot anywhere and that their actors and crew members pay state income taxes. “It’s good,” Mr. Stone said of the film subsidies. “Or like basically the way business is done. I don’t understand what the moral qualm is.”

The practical consequences can be easily seen. The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative group, found that the amount New York spends on film credits every year equals the cost of hiring 5,000 public-school teachers.

Nationwide, billions of dollars in incentives are being awarded as state governments face steep deficits. Last year alone, states cut public services and raised taxes by a collective $156 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning advocacy group.

Incentives come in many forms: cash grants and loans; sales tax breaks; income tax credits and exemptions; free services; and property tax abatements. The income tax breaks add up to $18 billion and sales tax relief around $52 billion of the overall $80 billion in incentives.

Collecting data on property tax abatements is the most difficult because only a handful of states track the amounts given by cities and counties. Among them is New York, where businesses save an estimated $1.1 billion a year in property taxes. The American International Group, the insurance company at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, continued to benefit from a $23.8 million abatement from New York City at the same time it was being bailed out with $180 billion in federal money.

Since 2000, The New York Times Company has received more than $24 million from the city and state.

“The management owes it to their stockholders to try to get the best economic deal that they can.”

Marilyn P. Nix, former G.M. real estate manager

In some places, local officials have little choice but to answer the demands of corporations.

“They dictate their terms, and we’re not really in a position to question their deal terms,” Sarah Eckhardt, a commissioner in Travis County, Tex., said of companies she has dealt with recently, including Apple and Hewlett-Packard. “We don’t have the sophistication or the resources to negotiate with a company that has the wherewithal the size of a country. We are just no match in negotiating with that.”

Local officials can find themselves across the table from conglomerates like Shell Oil and Caterpillar, the world’s largest maker of construction equipment.

Shell has been offered a tax credit worth as much as $1.6 billion over 25 years from Pennsylvania, which competed with West Virginia and Ohio for an energy production facility. Royal Dutch Shell, the parent company, made $31 billion in profits in 2011 — about $3.5 million every hour. The company’s chief executive made $13.1 million last year, according to Equilar, an executive compensation firm. Pennsylvania predicts that the plant will create thousands of long-term jobs, but it did not require them in exchange for the tax credit.

Caterpillar has received more than $196 million in local aid nationwide since 2007, though it has chastised states, particularly its home base, Illinois, for not being business-friendly. This year, Caterpillar announced a new plant in Georgia, which offered $44 million in incentives. Local counties chipped in free land and other aid, including $15 million in tax breaks and $8.2 million in road, water and sewer repairs.

The company, whose profits are soaring, recently froze workers’ pay for six years at several locations, arguing that it needed to remain competitive. A spokesman for the company, Jim Dugan, said it employed more than 50,000 people and invested billions of dollars nationwide.

Local officials typically have scant information about the track record of corporations, like whether they lived up to job assurances elsewhere. And some officials acknowledged that they did not know to what extent incentives were a deciding factor for companies.

“I don’t know that there’s a way to know other than talking to the businesses, and the businesses telling us that that was a factor in creating jobs,” said Ken Striplin, the city manager of Santa Clarita, Calif., which gives tax breaks in a designated enterprise zone. “There’s no box that says ‘I would have created this job without the enterprise zone.’ ”

California is one of the few states that have been cutting back on incentives. But that does not mean its cities are following suit. When Twitter threatened to leave San Francisco last year, officials scrambled to assuage the company.

$170 billion - Combined amount federal and state governments give up for incentives

Twitter was not short on money — it soon received a $300 million investment from a Saudi prince and $800 million from a private consortium. The two received Twitter equity, but San Francisco got a different sort of deal.

The city exempted Twitter from what could total $22 million in payroll taxes, and the company agreed to stay put. The city estimates that Twitter’s work force could grow to 2,600 employees, although the company made no such promise.

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company was “very happy to have been able to stay in San Francisco.” City officials did not respond to inquiries.

Like many places, San Francisco has been cutting its budget. Public parks have lost about $12 million in recent years, though workers at Twitter will not lack for greenery. The company’s plush new office has a rooftop garden with great views and amenities. Enjoying the perks, one employee sent out a tweet: “Tanned on Twitter’s new roof deck this morning as some dude served me smoothie shots. This is real life?”

A Zero-Sum Game

It was the company every state had to have. In 1985, General Motors was looking for a spot to manufacture its Saturn, a new compact car that would compete with Japanese imports and create thousands of American jobs.

Incentives were not in wide use, and several states had only recently begun to allow more of them.

In fact, when G.M. announced the search, its chairman, Roger Smith, said the perks would not be a predominant factor. “Tax breaks can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” Mr. Smith told The Detroit Free Press. He said G.M. planned to avoid states that had large debts or lackluster schools.

Undeterred, some 30 states stepped forward in what became a full-out competition. One official, Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, traveled to Detroit offering income tax credits and sales tax exemptions worth nearly $200 million.

Mr. Smith essentially kept his word and chose Tennessee, which had put together a relatively small package. Reid Rundell, a retired G.M. executive, said in a recent interview that it had come down to geography. “The primary factor was distribution for incoming parts, as well as outgoing vehicles,” Mr. Rundell said.

But the gates had been opened. In 1992, South Carolina lured BMW with a $130 million package; the next year, Alabama got Mercedes-Benz at a price tag that topped $300 million.

“What the auto incentives did back then was really raise the profile of economic incentives both within companies, in government and in the public’s eye,” said Mark Sweeney, who worked for the South Carolina Commerce Department in the 1990s and now advises companies on obtaining government grants.

By 1993, governors were regaling one another at a national conference with stories of deals beyond the auto industry, including a recent bidding war for United Airlines that drew more than 90 cities. The airline had set up negotiations in a hotel, and its representatives ran floor to floor comparing bids, said Jim Edgar, then the governor of Illinois.

Mr. Edgar said he had called for a truce, concerned that the practice was unfair to companies that did not receive incentives. But many states would not sign on, he said, particularly those in the South, where businesses were moving.

“If you’ve got some states doing it, it’s hard for the others not to do it,” Mr. Edgar said. “It’s like unilaterally disarming.”

Soon after, economists at Federal Reserve branches were questioning the use of incentives. One, in Minnesota, used mathematical proofs and game theory to show that competition between states did not increase overall economic value. Several other economists have since called the practice a zero-sum game.

A group of taxpayers in Michigan and Ohio went as far as suing DaimlerChrysler after Ohio and the City of Toledo awarded the automaker $280 million in the late 1990s. The suit argued that it was unfair for one taxpayer to be given a break at the expense of all others.

The suit made its way to the Supreme Court, and G.M. and Ford signed on to briefs supporting Daimler, as did local governments. The National Governors Association warned the court that prohibiting incentives could lead to jobs moving overseas. “This is the economic reality,” the association said in a brief.

The governors offered no hard evidence of the effectiveness of tax credits, but the Supreme Court did not consider whether they worked anyway. In 2006, the court concluded that the taxpayers did not have the legal standing to challenge Ohio’s tax actions in federal court.

The tab for auto incentives has grown to $13.9 billion since 1985, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group in Ann Arbor, Mich. G.M., the top recipient, was awarded $3.3 billion of the aid. Since 1979, automakers also closed more than 267 plants in the United States, about half of which still sit empty, according to the center.

The auto industry and some local officials have long argued that auto companies create so many jobs and draw in so many supporting suppliers that all taxpayers benefit. Even if companies shut down years later, as Saturn did in Tennessee for a few years, the trade-off is worth it, they said.

“I do believe that if a state ever is going to create incentives,” said Lamar Alexander, who was Tennessee’s governor in 1985 when Saturn selected the state, “the auto industry would be by far the No. 1 target, because an auto assembly plant is a money target.”

Still, Mr. Alexander, now a United States senator, said that recruiting a large factory today would be more expensive. “It has changed a lot,” he said. “It’s almost become a sweepstakes.”

G.M. Gets Into the Act

G.M. may have initially minimized the role of local dollars, but as the company’s financial problems grew, incentives became a big part of its math.

“These economic development deals with a company just serve to guarantee that the nation’s largest companies can receive tax breaks wherever they go.”

Sarah Eckhardt, county commissioner, Travis County, Texas

The actions of the company were described in more than two dozen in-depth interviews with former company officials, tax consultants and governors and mayors who have dealt with G.M.

The automaker’s real estate division, Argonaut Realty, oversaw the hunt for the most lucrative deals. Up and down the corporate ladder, employees were encouraged to push governments for more, according to transcripts of public meetings and interviews. Even G.M. plant managers knew that the future of their facilities depended in part on their ability to send word of big discounts back to Detroit.

Union representatives were enlisted to attend local hearings, putting a human face on the jobs at stake. G.M.’s regional tax managers often showed up, armed with tax abatement wish lists and highlighting the company’s gifts to local charities.

“We knew what our investment of X amount meant to the community, and we knew we needed to partner with the community to be successful,” said Marilyn P. Nix, who worked as a real estate executive at G.M. for 31 years until retiring in 2005.

At the top of G.M., executives reviewed the proposals from various locations and went where the numbers added up.

“I know people like to blame the industry for taking advantage of the incentives, but you go back to what your fiduciary responsibility is to the stockholders,” Ms. Nix said. “As long as you’ve got people that are willing to better the deals, the management owes it to their stockholders to try to get the best economic deal that they can.”

For towns, it became a game of survival, even if the competition turned out to be a mirage.

Moraine, Ohio, was already home to a G.M. plant in 1997 when the company pushed hard for additional incentives. G.M. said it was looking for a place to accommodate more manufacturing.

Wayne Barfels, the city manager at the time, said a G.M. representative had told officials that Moraine was competing with Shreveport, La., and Linden, N.J. After the local school board approved property tax breaks, The Dayton Daily News reported that the other towns had not been in discussions with G.M.

The school board considered rescinding the deal, but allowed G.M. to keep it after a company official apologized. In 2008, G.M. shut the Moraine facility.

In towns where General Motors remains, local officials praised the company. “I can say they have been a great partner to us,” said Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Mich. “It would do something to the psyche of this community if they were not here. I mean, I just praise God every day.”

100 - Percentage of years since 1995 that General Motors got local incentives

The company was awarded incentives in at least 16 states

Looking to lure businesses beyond automakers, states have routinely bolstered their incentive tool kits. In 2010 alone, states created or expanded about 40 tax credits and exemptions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The nature of the credits has also changed. New ones are geared toward attracting technology and green energy companies, but it is hard to know whether 15 years down the road they will thrive or wind up stumbling like the automakers. And many modern companies, like those in digital technology, can easily pack up and leave.

“I don’t see anything that suggests that Twitter and Facebook are better bets in the long run,” said Laura A. Reese, the director of the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University. Ms. Reese advises local governments to invest in residents through education and training rather than in companies where “it’s hard to pick winners.”

Yet states try to do it all the time. In 2010, Rhode Island, which has the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate, recruited Curt Schilling, a former Red Sox pitcher, to move his video game company from Massachusetts. The company, 38 Studios, had never released a game and was not making money, but the governor at the time had the state guarantee $75 million in loans.

The company failed and dismissed all of its roughly 400 workers this May. Rhode Island taxpayers are now on the hook for the loans.

Officials said part of the difficulty was that communities do not get much say in a company’s business strategy.

“We, as communities, stake our futures with these people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, and sometimes they don’t,” said Arthur Walker, a businessman in Shreveport and former chairman of the city’s chamber of commerce.

Mr. Walker and other officials in Shreveport know firsthand. In 2000, they were worried that G.M. would close a plant in their area and responded with a generous proposal: the city would cut the company’s gas bill and provide work force training grants. In addition, G.M. would benefit by a recent increase in one of the state’s income tax credits.

Eager to encourage innovation, Shreveport officials suggested ways the city could assist G.M. in building electric cars. “We wanted to be part of the future,” said Mr. Walker, whose brother worked at the plant.

G.M. took the city’s incentives but not its business advice and began building the giant Hummer there.

“We knew they needed to build green cars — I mean, who builds a Hummer for the 21st century?” Mr. Walker said. “It was a losing proposition that we found ourselves in. We couldn’t win because those people weren’t making the correct business decisions, in my view. When it didn’t work, we’re the ones left holding the bag.”

The Hummer was discontinued in 2010, and the Shreveport factory closed this August, the final victim of G.M.’s bankruptcy.

Ypsilanti’s Losing Battle

For much of the last 20 years, Doug Winters has been agitating for General Motors to be held accountable.

Mr. Winters, the attorney for Ypsilanti Township and several other places around Ann Arbor, has lived in Ypsilanti all his life. His grandmother labored at the local plant, Willow Run, during World War II, when it made bomber planes. People in town still proudly point out that a woman known as Rosie the Riveter worked there as well. After the war, when G.M. moved into the plant to manufacture its automatic transmission system, his father got a job.

Mr. Winters loves the history of Willow Run but hates what he views as corporate hypocrisy: G.M. asked for government help on the one hand and then appealed to free-market rationales for closing shop.

Over the years, Ypsilanti granted G.M. more than $200 million in incentives for two factories at Willow Run, Mr. Winters said. “They had put basically a stranglehold on the entire state of Michigan and other places across the country by just grabbing these tax abatements by the billions,” he said. “They were doing it with a very thinly disguised threat that if you don’t give us these tax abatements, then we’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“We’re their own private ATM. When they need money, they come begging, but when they don’t want oversight, they say ‘get out of the way.’”

Doug Winters, attorney for Ypsilanti Township, Mich.

Ypsilanti first sued G.M. in the 1990s to prevent the company from closing the factory at Willow Run that made the Chevrolet Caprice.

The town had granted the company tax incentives after the factory manager argued that G.M.’s ability to compete with other carmakers was at stake, documents in the lawsuit show. The tax break and “favorable market demand,” said the plant manager, Harvey Williams, would allow the automaker to “maintain continuous employment.”

Nevertheless, G.M. shut the factory. A lower court found in favor of Ypsilanti, but the ruling was reversed on appeal. The judge said that a company’s job assurances “cannot be evidence of a promise.”

In 2010, when the company closed the remaining factory at Willow Run, Mr. Winters sued again. This time, Ypsilanti argued that the automaker should have been forced to close overseas factories instead, especially since American taxpayers had bailed out G.M. In addition, Ypsilanti sought to recover money from G.M., saying the company had agreed to reimburse the town for some incentives if it left.

So far, Ypsilanti’s claims have not been addressed. They were complicated by G.M.’s bankruptcy, which allowed the carmaker to emerge as a new company and leave some of its liabilities and contractual obligations behind.

When asked whether the new G.M. has civic responsibilities to its former factory towns, Mr. Cain, the company spokesman, said: “Our obligation to the communities where we do business is to run a successful business. And when we prosper, it allows us to do more than just turn the lights on and make cars.”

He also said that since the bailout, “G.M. has invested more than $7.3 billion in its U.S. facilities, and we’ve created or retained almost 19,000 jobs in communities all over the country.”

Matthew P. Cullen, who oversaw real estate and economic development for G.M. until he left the company in 2008, said the automaker was aware of its impact on communities. He said that what happened with G.M. was the result of an entire industry changing and that there had been no bad intentions.

“If you go forward in good faith doing everything you can and make the investment, then you’re partners,” Mr. Cullen said. “Sometimes partnerships in business work, and they work for 60 years. And in some cases, they don’t, and it doesn’t make you a bad partner.”

Some towns that are still dealing with the fallout of plant closings might disagree. In Pontiac, Mich., tax revenues have fallen 40 percent since 2009 after the old G.M. knocked down buildings on its property, resulting in lower tax assessments, according to the city’s emergency manager.

In Ypsilanti, an entity set up to sell off G.M. property is marketing the plant as valuable. At the same time, it has been arguing for lower property taxes on the grounds that its plant is not worth much.

Ypsilanti’s supervisor, Brenda Stumbo, said the township would be stung hard by further revenue cuts. Ypsilanti has already slimmed down its Fire Department, and city workers are juggling multiple jobs. There are seven to 10 home foreclosures a week, giving the township the highest foreclosure rate in the county, Ms. Stumbo said.

“Can all of it be traced back to General Motors?” she said, listing auto suppliers that closed after G.M. did. “No, but a great deal of it can.”

Nonetheless, Ms. Stumbo said that if G.M. would bring jobs back to town, she would be willing to grant the company more incentives.

But Mr. Winters is not so sure. He said he would never support more incentives without stronger protections for Ypsilanti. “They’ve done a lot of damage to a lot of people and a lot of communities, and they’ve basically been given a clean slate,” he said. “It’s a ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

Lisa Schwartz and Ramsey Merritt contributed research.

louise@nytimes.com, @louisestory