Memorial Day 2012

Memorial Day is today. A lot of thoughts wrap around my head on this day. A lot of individuals support war and others hate war. War is a very destructive endeavor. At times, many folks forget about the complex nature of war. Even great and sincere anti-war activists sometimes omit tidbits about the complicated nature about how wars come about. For example, anyone can say that I oppose war, but we should also know about the social, political, and economic origins of various wars (so we don't repeat the same conscious less errors of the past). Physical wounds are not just experienced by both sides during the course of war. There were emotional or psychological wounds experienced by the soldiers, the civilians, and all participants within the realm of war. These wounds persist today in 2012. Some of the victims of war don't have adequate justice or real social care. This reality is exemplified in the millions of victims and civilians who died during human history. Also, numerous soldiers were unfairly treated when they came home from Vietnam. For example, a lot of younger kids don't realize that Vietnam troops were assaulted, cursed at, thrown objects at, and spat upon by people in America when they've arrived home from Vietnam. That was wrong, because whatever your view of the Vietnam War (I don't agree with the Vietnam War. There were many cases where the war either couldn't transpire or a peaceful negotiated settlement among all parties could exist. Although, the enemies of truth prevented a peace settlement from happening during the late 1960's), all people should be treated with dignity and respect. In fact, tons of the homeless once were Vietnam War G.I.s. Some war veterans struggle to receive labor or other economic opportunities. So, it is our responsibility to not worship war nor worship jingoistic patriotism. It is our responsibility to promote policies that can advance peace in the world, oppose torture, oppose imperialism, and give soldiers opportunities to live their own lives once they come into America from the various theaters of war. Any life lost including soldiers should receive sympathy by us, because a life lost is a tragic situation. Families suffer and we have to execute compassion toward human beings. Likewise, the civilian victims of war ought to have compensation and real respect too. War crimes done in our name are blatantly immoral. The victims of the war crimes (from the Belgium extermination of over 1 million black Congolese via the wicked King Leopold II, the Mai Lai massacre, and the firebombing of Dresden) by the Western imperialism are found in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and even in Europe ironically enough. I pull the cards of my enemy all day and everyday. I can't stop, because I won't stop. During this day, we shouldn't sugarcoat our fundamental thinking. We ought to go out and speak the truth in season and out of season. One of my many experiences is that I see some of the older generation (not all of them) expressing apathy. The good news is that the vast majority of older human beings reject the concept of apathy completely. I am young, so I refuse to express apathy. I have hunger for hope. Hope is a basic tenet of not only faith. Hope is a tenet that all of humanity should adhere to. It took hope to advance the reforms of civil rights, environmental protection, and to stridently & effectively make numerous positive acts in the world society. Hope isn't about bashing men or bashing women (or damning nice people or any individual with a non-conformist social disposition). It's about all of us showing the tolerance of all human beings, believing in the unity of the human family, and the judging of people based on their character (not on their skin color, not on their personality, not on their physical appearance, not on their gender, not on their economic status, and not on their background given to them at birth). I am tired of bigotry and you are too. That is why my eyes are open. Hope means that we can finally end the archaic anti-poor, anti-middle class economic philosophy whose hero is Ayn Rand not Dr. Martin Luther King. Hope is basic and it is about having faith in God not faith in the status quo or doubt. This Memorial Day represents to me about hope for the future. I know that the future will be better. If we can end Jim Crow and we can end various forms of discrimination among folks of all backgrounds, then we can create a better, tranquil society. Internet freedom is great to advance. Various blogs and sites are under attack by various functions. It is great to witness a variety of human thought and human thinking. A continuation of activism and a firm adherence to social justice are great prescriptions for having victories. Yet, I will not beg another man for my freedom. I will embrace my freedom. You know what that means. I don't have to spell it out. Freedom should be free, but that isn't always the case. I am a believer in justice and I am an non-believer in oppression. My freedom is given to me by no one, but my God at conception and especially after birth. I have to be controversial since that is my job. See, I will always make it plain, make it real, make it raw, and make it true on the real. 

Our country has been through a lot of changes. A Presidential election will come in November of 2012. We have 2 major choices of President Barack and Mitt Romney. We have the right to vote for a third party candidate as well. If the President is reelected, some changes will occur. The Democrats will control at least one chamber of Congress. There might be some economic improvements or continued economic stagnation. The erosions of our civil liberties will continue since the White House isn't going to rescind the Patriot Act, the NDAA, etc. We still have high unemployment, high poverty, and economic inequality. If Mitt Romney is elected President, the reactionary Republicans could dominate either the House or the Senate. The agenda of the 1% will take precedent over the agenda of the 99%. That is why it's silly for the Tea Party crowd to call President Barack Obama as a socialist extremist when he is at best a center-left political leader. Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like "a moderate Republican circa 1992." Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected "creeping fascism." Economic inequality is facilitated by the two party system. This system is funded by big money and the political elite have no vested interests in having true democratic election reform. That is why the masses of people are opposing and protesting the inequality of opportunity, the class war waged by the wealthy, the wars, NATO, and other issues. Even some unions are protesting against the nefarious policies of Wall Street. It is not just to see thirty years of wage stagnation. The events in Wisconsin and the Occupy Wall Street movement prove that real people want to deal with the excesses of capitalism in the U.S. society. There were 15,000 people demonstrating against NATO in Chicago during May of 2012. Some hope that these occurrences can allow a bigger movement for social change to occur.  Mitt Romney is running on the position that the economic crisis is entirely the President's fault. This is inaccurate, because our Great Recession's origin came from the Bush Jr. & Clinton administration. The previous Presidential administrations followed the policies of millionaire tax cuts (except for Clinton), war spending, and huge deficits of Bush Jr. The Clinton administration followed the deregulation of banking and Wall Street causing the winner takes all economic system. Romney's nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise  taxes, he declared: “President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero.... America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.” Romney forgot to mention that the debt only gone up by about half under President Obama. The President is barely a liberal on economic and foreign policy issues. The President supports free enterprise capitalism. Mitt Romney disagrees with the President on healthcare and the Afghan war when both men are nearly identical ideologically on both issues. The President's healthcare plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. Both men agreed with smart growth or the Sustainable Communities plan. If Barack Obama is re-elected, the status quo will continue. If Mitt Romney is President, austerity and war mongering will be on steroids. Frankly, political parties can't make progressive change. It is dedicated efforts of individuals, collective people, and organized mass movements that ended the Vietnam War, ended Jim Crow, created an eight hour work day, and allowed women the democratic right to vote.

The Democrats aren't anti-war as the Republicans believe. They have been growing militarism. For example, the President escalated the war in Afghanistan, supported NATO forces destroying Libya, issued airstrikes that killed thousands of people in Pakistan, he ordered the killing of multiple American citizens living abroad, and he expanded the war on terror in other places (like Yemen, Somalia, etc.). The President issued military squads to fight the drug war all over Latin America. Polls show that most Americans want the Afghan war to come to an end. Most Americans want to cut the war budget. The military budget costs 1 trillion dollars a year. The Pentagon accounts for $642 billion for fiscal 2013. There is still not a radical anti-poverty program to end the suffering. President Barack Obama finally talked about poverty, inequality, and low wages. America is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced industrialized capitalist nations in the OECD or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. pays its lowest wages as compared to the nations in the OECD. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or healthcare. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only "income" for six million of them. The plutocracy and its puppets benefits greatly from this reality. The Obama administration has promoted some stimulus as compared to the Republicans, but it wasn't comprehensive enough. To be fair, the Republicans obstructed even a mild proposal by the President to address stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure. A coalition of liberals and conservatives vote to promote indefinite detention of people. Why does the West claim to advance freedom when it funds the harsh Sunni monarchy in Bahrain? It is hypocritical for the leaders of this nation to love to talk about justice, but they ally with the Saudi Arabian theocrats. The Western elites claim to advance liberty, but it says nothing on the apartheid going on in Israel (that even progressive Israelis and progressive Palestinians don't want). Africom is having a scramble for Africa, which I reject completely. 

The Syrian opposition is abandoning the UN Peace Plan. Now, the West is outraged at the massacre in Houla Syria. Yet, the West doesn't massively expose the atrocities of NATO along the Afghanistan and Pakistan border for over decades. Hundreds of civilians have been murdered by U.S. drone attacks alone. This murder is downplayed by the mainstream, corporate Western media. This murder is called "killing suspected militants." The problem with this assumption is that innocent men, women, and yes children have been murdered as a product of these drone attacks. Any death in Syria is blamed by the media on the Syrian government when they ignore the crimes committed by the Syrian opposition groups. The Syrian opposition is opposing even an UN brokered cease fire. The Syrian government played host to hundreds of UN monitors. The international community takes all claims made by the opposition at face value. Kofi Annan wants to make a regime change in Syria. The West berated Syria for violating the ceasefire, but they openly arm and encourage the rebels to continue with their rampage of violence. Reuters reported at one point that the Syrian rebels were overtly shifting to indiscriminate terrorist bombings during this “ceasefire,” which have claimed scores of lives, and left hundreds maimed, mostly civilians. Again, the UN and the “international community” gave only the vaguest condemnations, never mentioning or addressing the opposition directly. These bombs have even been directed at the UN monitors themselves, with the West, France specifically, then inexplicably condemning the Syrian government for not doing enough to provide security. The Syrian government is blamed for the violence against Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Kurds including Sunnis. The West wants regime change. This is why they called the UN mission a failure before the first UN monitor stepped foot in Syria. The mainstream media wants the Free Syrian Army and NATO to intervene in Syria. The UN is losing credibility, because they fail to condemn the Syrian opposition's open discarding of the UN's own peace plan. The Western media claimed that the government killed 90 people in Houla, Syria near Homa. Later, they admitted that the death squads mostly killed the victims. Al-Qaeda terrorists are known to work side by side with the Free Syrian Army against Syrian troops. In Libya, the military intervention moved fast. People in many cases didn't know that the Libyan rebels were violent terrorists. People now see that the Free Syrian Army is guilty of atrocities and using terrorist tactics in violation of democratic principles. The UN is hypocritically to ignore the rebels' atrocities (including their refusal to support a ceasefire) and obsess with regime change in Syria. The West aiding the Syrian rebels will provoke bloodshed.

There have been a lot of protests as it relates to the Quebec student movement. The government is trying to repress the Quebec student movement, but people continue with massive protests. There was a huge protest in Montreal on May 22. The protesters wanted student to possess the right for free, quality public education and being against government repression. Some 400,000 people came to protest. It was the largest social protest in Canadian history. There was a huge display of civil disobedience against the special law that was made by the Quebec government (of trying to stop the strike of students in the province). Some banners read the following words: “…100 days of strike, 100 days of (government) contempt!” and “Block the sexist tuition fee hike!” A massive banner of the militant, CLASSE student association was carried overhead by hundreds of marchers and read, “May 22: This is only the beginning!” There was a wide spectrum of people at the march. The contingents included teachers, professors, high school students, public service workers, and other trade unionists. The students used the color red to represent their student movement (or assign student indebtedness). Along with the route of the march, there were the leaders of the three largest student associations held an impromptu press conference. Léo Bureau-Blouin of the association of junior college (CEGEP) students (the FECQ) told journalists, “We are united today in this huge demonstration aiming not only to mark 100 days of the strike but also to denounce the Charest (Quebec) government and the course of events following its decision to choose repression over discussion...” The draconian bill 78 would allow the Quebec to suppress the right of people to strike and protest. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a leader of CLASSE, the largest of the student federations, told reporters that the law is “absurd and unenforceable. The proof of that is here today, where the street is speaking forcefully.” Challenging Quebec's minister of public security, he stated, “If the minister wants to be true to his law, he will have to levy fines on tens of thousands of people.” There is a proposed 75 percent hike in post secondary tuition fees over the seven years. Now, the Quebec government Premier Jean Charest wants to have talks with the student associations on May 28. Some police detained protesters and didn’t give people medical treatment according to witnesses. The protest movement is growing despite the police threats and the police violence. The protesters want access to education and real freedom. They want to express defiance of Bill 78. CLASSE wants to continue with this policy. Some student and union leaders quietly project an eventual, electoral outcome to the struggle over tuition fees and the broader issues it has sparked. The opposition Parti Québécois, which is supported by most trade union centrals, sits well in polls. The bourgeois nationalist party says it would immediately repeal Law 78 if elected. So, the people in Quebec wholeheartedly reject austerity and desire educational reforms in Canada.

By Timothy