Even the Israelis gave Eichmann a trial.

It starts out as one of those nagging feelings in the back of your mind.

There’s something wrong here. Something very wrong. But, you keep your mouth shut. You just can’t quite put two and two together. If you criticize the action, you risk a rabid response of being an apologist and a supporter of an accused mass murderer.

Yet, that nagging feeling persists. There’s something very wrong here. Osama Bin Laden is dead. As he should be. But, it just doesn’t mesh with what we’ve been told for our entire lives about how things are supposed to work. The accused are always supposed to be afforded a trial, where they may confront the evidence and witnesses against them.

Then at 5:00am on a Saturday morning, it hits you like a pitcher of cold water, rousing you from a dead sleep.

After World War II, captured Nazi officials and officers were captured and put on trial at Nuremburg. Many were hanged, and others got long prison sentences. But, that’s not the point here.

After the war, a high ranking official named Adolph Eichmann escaped arrest and fled to South America. this was a man, whose bureaucratic efficiency in genocide made Osama Bin Laden look like a rank amateur. He sent millions to their deaths like clockwork. And he was frustrated that he wasn’t killing enough Jews.

The Mossad tracked Eichmann down in Argentina in 1960. They tracked his routine and his movements for weeks. An assassination would have been fairly easy for experienced commandos. Eichmann had a standard routine. He took the bus to and from work each day, and had a walk of several blocks, in the dark, to reach his home. A knife in the back, or a couple of silenced .22 cal slugs in the back of the head, and vengeance is taken.

 

But, the Israeli’s knew they had a teachable moment here. Drag him back to Israel, and put him on public trial for his crimes. Let the world see first hand what a monster was lurking in their midst.

 

They did, and they hung him.  The teachable lesson was, that the rule of law can prevail. Criminals can be brought to justice the right way. Even executed for their crimes.

Now, back to this week. We tracked down Osama Bin Laden to a villa in Pakistan. We monitored the situation from a safe house for months. We sent a team of commandos in, who encountered little resistance, and according to recent accounts, shot and killed Bin Laden. We then flew the body out and tossed it into the sea.

Now what type of an international precedent did we just set? We just told the whole world, that the rule of law does not apply, as far as we’re concerned. It’s like the International Conventions Against Torture. That law is in place to protect our soldiers in case of capture. And we agree to abide by it to avoid retaliation.

Now, just suppose that the Vietnamese, or the Cambodians, or the Timorese, or especially the Chileans, decided to issue a warrant for crimes against humanity against Henry Kissinger. If we fail to turn him over for trial, are they justified in assassinating him?

Suppose a new Iraqi government wants George W. Bush? Suppose Nicaragua decides it would like to hold a trial for Oliver North, John Poindexter, or Elliot Abrams?

Suppose that a dictator like Augusto Pinochet wanted to put Orlando Letelier on trial for trumped up charges? Would that lead to car bombs going off in Washington DC? Oh, wait.

And that’s where that nagging feeling comes from. This isn’t what my country is supposed to be about. We’re supposed to be better than that. We’re supposed to be a beacon of freedom and the rule of law. Not a rogue state that takes the law into it’s own hands.

We’re not supposed to be the new Pinochet. If Israel could afford Eichmann a trial, we should have at least tried to do the same.

 

Wisconsin proves Chomsky right…..again.

“When you’re a criminal state, it doesn’t matter”.

 

The Tea-baggers in charge have just violated every rule, procedure and law imaginable in their never-ending quest to screw working families, and make the richest among us even richer.

And I haven’t seen Barack Obama or anyone from his administration out shopping for “comfortable shoes” to go up there and support working families who are struggling to survive. My guess is, they’re having a Goldman Sachs reunion party in the cabinet room. And they thought the story of the Trojan Horse was just a myth!

Barack Obama is sitting on his ass, not because he’s incompetent, but because the Republicans are enacting the policies he supports on their own. He can sit back and play the inept buffoon while they take all of the heat. I can’t help but wonder how his speeches would sound in German.

I’m not trying to play the Democrat or Republican game of comparing the opposition to Hitler. No, it’s far worse than that. It’s not polite to use the “F” word in civil conversation, but, there’s no other way to say it.  FASCISM has arrived! There’s no getting around it. Mussolini not only founded fascism, but he defined it best. “A merging of the corporation and the state”. “A wedding of the corporation and the state”. And we didn’t even get an invitation to the reception. But, like a demonized ex-husband, we’re expected to pay for it. Before you accuse me of hyperbole, just take a look at ALL of Obama’s appointments, and his cabinet. They could all meld seamlessly into a Bush Administration. He did give Elizabeth Warren an appointment, but they’re working overtime to marginalize her.

Enough is enough! Admit it! We’ve got one FASCIST party left in the United States. The two factions just squabble over who gets the lions share of K-Streets goodies. Completely bought. Completely paid for. And a corporate media to act as their PR firm.

Just a little background. I’m a former life-long Democrat. I cast my first votes for George McGovern for President, and Dennis Kucinich for City Council in Cleveland. I still support Kucinich, although I live in Florida now. I had a lot of hope after the 2006 mid-terms, when Democrats took over Congress. I resigned from my county Democratic Executive Committee when they continued funding for the Iraq Massacre. I switched my voting party affiliation to “No Party Affiliation” when they voted to extend the Patriot Act, and give telecoms retroactive immunity for illegal spying. And my former party, and Trojan Horse President have only gotten worse since then.

Well today I change my party affiliation again. We are forming a new political party. The Americans United Party. Or formally, The Party for Americans United. What are we uniting?

We are uniting for:

School Teachers, Laborers, Union Members, Home Owners, Small Business Owners, Waiters and Waitresses, Police and Firefighters, Government Workers, Pilots and Flight Attendants. Normal everyday citizens. People who work for a living. People who just want to support their families, and have a little time to spend with them.

Who are we uniting against?

About 400 of the richest pricks on the planet who have more money than half of the country combined. They have names like Koch, Buffett, Gates, Mars, and Trump. It probably wouldn’t matter if they would just realize that they have more than enough, sit down and STFU. But, that’s not enough for them. THEY WANT IT ALL! And they don’t even want to let us have a few crumbs. They’ve bought our political process, lock stock and barrel.

It’s time to start fighting back.

The attack on working people intensifies

Right after Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker made a complete ass of himself, and revealed that he never had any intention to bargain in good faith (a distinct violation of federal labor law), the Wisconsin General Assembly voted to strip public sector employees of their collective bargaining rights.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41774032/ns/us_news

 

The Ohio School Facilities Commission voted NOT to pay prevailing union rates on school construction. They said they won’t even entertain a bid that includes prevailing wages. If they’re getting any federal funding, they’re violating the Davis-Bacon Act.

http://content.usatoday.net/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?cId=cincinnati&sParam=35878585.story

 

What ever happened to the rule of law? Not to mention common decency?

Noam Chomsky said it best the other day, in an interview with Amy Goodman On Democracy Now!

“When you’re a criminal state, it doesn’t matter”.

In the mean time, I’m heading to the gym to burn off some anger. Then I’m working on trying to set up a website to keep tabs on breaking labor issues around the country. I’ve never set one up before, so this should be fun. I’ll post a picture after I pull all of my hair out. Later.

Oh, BTW, the domain I’ve registered is www.americangeneralstrike.com

Cold Equations, the No-Win Scenario, and the United States

 

 

I borrowed this post from my friend Demeter, in the Stock Market Watch Thread at DU. She’s one of the smart people over there. Some very concise comments below. A prime example of the “Ignorant, arrogant, exceptionalist type” is Rep. Joe Barton (R-Moron), with his pandering apology to BP for having the audacity to inconvenience them in their middle of their destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. Don’t even get me started on Inhofe.

 

 

"The Cold Equations" is a science fiction short story by Tom Godwin, first published in Astounding Magazine in 1954. In 1970, the Science Fiction Writers of America selected it as one of the best science fiction short stories published before 1965, and it was therefore included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964.
Summary
The story takes place entirely aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) headed for the frontier planet Woden with a load of desperately needed medical supplies. The pilot, Barton, discovers a stowaway: an eighteen-year-old girl. By law, all EDS stowaways are to be jettisoned because EDS vessels carry no more fuel than is absolutely necessary to land safely at their destination. The girl, Marilyn, merely wants to see her brother, Gerry, and is not aware of the law. When boarding the EDS, Marilyn sees the "UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!" sign, but thinks she will simply have to pay a fine if she is caught. Barton explains that her presence dooms the mission and will result in the deaths of the colonists. After exhausting all other options (such as calling the mothership, The Stardust), he is forced to eject her into space.
The story, first published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding, has been widely anthologized and even dramatized. It is in the form of a cautionary tale, which commonly has three parts. First, a cautionary tale presents a restraint or restriction, in which something is said to be taboo, dangerous, or forbidden. The story's fifth paragraph sets up the first part by including a quotation from "Paragraph L, Section 8, of Interstellar Regulations: Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery." Second, the story introduces a hero figure who disregards—wittingly or unwittingly—the restriction. Readers of "The Cold Equations" learn that Marilyn has not seen her beloved brother for ten years, and because she has not traveled before, she is unaware that "the laws of the space frontier must, of necessity, be as hard and relentless as the environment that gave them birth." The third part of a cautionary tale consists of the transgressor coming to a tragic end. In "The Cold Equations," Marilyn realizes that nothing can be done to save her. She accepts her fate and is ejected into space.
Critic Gary Westfahl has said that because the premise depends upon systems that were built without enough margin for error, the story is good physics, but lousy engineering. Writer Don Sakers's short story "The Cold Solution"(Analog, 1991), which debunks the premise, received the 1992 Analog Analytical Laboratory award as the readers' favorite Analog short story of 1991.
However, the context in which the story was published bears on its premise. Science fiction was still a fairly young field, and was still working free from its roots in pulp fiction. In the story, the girl addresses the distinction, contrasting the frontier she had imagined, which was "a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows" and the frontier she discovered, where the danger was real and proved fatal. The story recognized that if space travel ever did come about, then sometimes there would be little margin of error, and fatalities would happen.
Another trend to which "The Cold Equations" is a reaction is the science fiction sub-genre of the puzzle story, where impending disaster is prevented when one of the characters works out an ingenious application of scientific principles, thereby saving the day. Though pleasing to fans, these stories were seen by those outside science fiction as evidence that the genre was all about escapism. By echoing the conventions of the puzzle story, but focusing on the fates of characters trapped by the puzzle instead of the machinations of solving the puzzle, the story showed critics that science fiction would not always be about "lesser" subjects than other literature.
The story was shaped by Astounding editor John W. Campbell, who sent "Cold Equations" back to Godwin three times before he got the version he wanted, because "Godwin kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl!"

---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations

 

This is the reality that engineers, parents, and those true statesmen preach to so little effect--sometimes you push the limits of possibility so far, there is no way out. Someone must pay for an unfixable error.
This is the "No-Win Scenario” beloved of Star Trek, and rejected by that ultimate hero, James T. Kirk, who usually found an ingenious escape clause to save the day...
But in real life, you'd have to be pretty sheltered not to have faced a no-win scenario of your own. Whether it's an incurable illness, collapse of a marriage, a family, a community, a job, a business, an industry, or even a country, no-win scenarios put an end to people's stability, comfort, or life every day. If one is an unlucky person, the situation developed through no fault of the victim. If he is an ignorant, arrogant, "exceptionalist" type, he probably caused the catastrophe by himself, by ignoring the "keep out" signs and the economics and physics of the course of action, the counsel of wiser heads, etc., and more likely than not, that exceptionalist also inflicted that no-win scenario on a whole lot of unlucky nearest and dearest.
As Spock in “Star Trek” says, it is how we deal with the no-win scenario that determines our character and our ultimate success or failure in life.
Too many people on this planet, too many of them in this nation, are trapped in denial, which if maintained long enough, guarantees that a challenging situation becomes a no-win situation.
The purpose of society itself is to maintain a database of history and technology used to evaluate and ameliorate problems, to avoid or at least mitigate "no-win" scenarios for the people in the community. Before there was any useful history or technology, there was religion, a poor substitute for real solutions.
Those who would destroy society destroy its historical database first, then its technological database (infrastructure), gut it for resources, and then abandon it. We must fight these pirates, whenever and wherever they arise: Egypt, Israel, China, the United States, anywhere. And we must avoid the Religion Trap, thinking that we are powerless, that it is God's will, that we are being punished for something besides ignorance, stupidity and laziness....and that PRAYER will save us, if we only pray long enough, hard enough, and purely enough...

It’s time for the working class to organize or die.

 

The handwriting is on the wall. If all the good citizens of this country don’t get together and force our dysfunctional government to start acting in our interests, instead of the Oligarchy’s, we can kiss our collective asses good-bye.

Working people, especially organized labor, teachers, and government workers are under an unprecedented assault. Senior citizens, who haven’t seen an increase in Social Security in two years are facing cuts. The longest unemployed are starting to lose their benefits. States and cities faced with budget cuts are laying off workers. There are heartless cuts to Medicaid. Cuts to Medicare are coming down the line, as well as childrens services. States and cities, as well as private corporations are trying to screw employees out of their pensions.

In at least three states that I know of right now, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida, they are trying to take away public employees rights to bargain. That Great Hero of the Working Class, our “Democratic” President, Mubarack Obama has already ordered a two year freeze on federal employees salaries.

Their strategy has been brilliant so far. Demonize “lazy” public sector employees. Talk continually about how overpaid they are compared to the private sector (they’re not). Talk about the lottery jackpot they’ll get when they retire with all of those “cadillac healthcare plans”.

Turn charlatans and frauds like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan loose  to demonize teachers. Eliminate tenure. Privatize public education. Save us from those overpaid and incompetent teachers unions. That was just the prequel for the rest of the public sector.

In 2009, during a recess in the fraudulent healthcare debate, billionaires like the Koch Brothers, and Rick Scott funded tea party rallies all across the country. The idea was to get people scared and mobilized for the 2010 mid-terms, when turn out would be low, and it wouldn’t take much to swing a lot of elections. Couple that with the Citizens United decision and the crazy side of the two corporate parties won.

In Ohio, one of the first ideas to come out of the new Governors mouth was to lease the Ohio Turnpike to a sovereign wealth fund for 75 years. As was expected, when Indiana did it, tolls skyrocketed. With all of the profits going to the Saudi’s, Kuwaiti’s, and any other emirate with too much money on their hands. If that asswipe Kasich wasn’t already owned by Wall Street, maybe he could have raised tolls modestly and put the money into the states general fund. But, it’s not just Republicans. “Democrat” Ed Rendell proposed the same thing in Pa, but the legislature narrowly shot it down. There’s always next year.

Late last year, Dear Leader Obama, Hairy Reed, and the rest of the Democrats pre-emptively saved the country from smaller deficits by extending the “temporary” Bush tax cuts for the Kochs, the Scotts, the Trumps, the Gates, and the Paris Hiltons of world. And now, after a drunken New Years Eve, swilling Ayn Rand Kool-Aid, they’ve got out the machete’s to come after everything but the military. And Homeland Security, and oil subsidies, and coal, and ethanol.

It’s time to start over again. The Executive Branch is full of Wall Street con men, and various corporate whores. The only agencies that function are downright evil, such as the DEA. We can really believe gulf seafood is safe, says the EPA. After all they assured us that the air at ground zero was perfectly safe, didn’t they?

The House is full of absolute loons. I think most of them got turned loose back in the ‘80s when Reagan closed down the nut houses.

The Senate is so dysfunctional, I can’t think of an example ludicrous enough to do them justice. They remind me of a guy I knew back in the ‘70s, who liked to drink and play with guns. He shot himself in the leg, TWICE in two days. At my house! A place where all the cows in Montana (they don’t have as many people) have as much say so as all the people in California. It might have worked back in the late 1700’s. Not so much today.

The Supreme Court? ROTFLMAO. Clarence Thomas gets a lifetime appointment? And remember, Democrats had a majority when both he and Scalia were appointed.

Are we 50 separate states, or are we one country? Again, a relic of the 1700’s. And in this case a bunch of neo-Confederates in the south are blocking any move to the future. They’re winning this Civil War.

It’s time to start over.

We either start organizing as working people, or we turn into serfs and die.

 

 

I’ll be updating this blog a lot more in the future. I’m really fucking pissed.