rebelpleb

My friend would have turned 42 yesterday. Instead, she passed away before her 39th birthday. It was not inevitable . I am supposed to turn this situation into  something positive . I am supposed to be happy for the joy she brought to so many people's lives, to believe she is looking down upon all of us and smiling, to know she is in a better place and at peace. What I know is that her life was taken too soon. Not because of some inherited genetic deficiency , but because of cultural negligence and complacency . I am befuddled at a society that refuses to ackowledge and address the obvious causes of such an epidemic while so many of our friends and family members perish. (Though here, I speak of cancer ...  you can substitute what you will, and it will still likely fit... ) We are the architects of our own doom . Will we ever learn? How many others will be lost prematurely?

Tens of thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of people -"a cross section” of America, said NBC - protested against their best interests and for the interests of the multi-trillion dollar “health” insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries today. Besides the fact that this event speaks to the profound infiltration of the inaccurate and fallacious mainstream corporate media messages into the highly impressionable psyche of Americans, it speaks to the fact that many (perhaps most?) white Americans are simply racist. People are and have been losing their homes, going bankrupt, and dying because of inadequate health insurance and rejected claims for service for which they paid for decades, while industry insiders (including insurance employees, pharmaceutical employees, and even doctors) have raked in the dough. We just rid ourselves of a President and Vice-President who lied about erroneous links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, who lied about torture, who committed war crimes...

As Bill Maher so accurately noted, the Democrats have moved to the right and the Right has moved into a mental hospital. As it stands, Democrats now simply affirm all of the ideologies that Republicans used to. Need proof? Look into history. Look into the policies and bills that have passed through Congress and the White House over the past couple of decades. Hell, Richard Nixon passed more progressive legislation than almost any federal Democratic official in the past twenty years. Barack Obama’s administration has continued nearly in lock-step with the previous George W. Bush administration, with few exceptions. So, then, these facts beg the question: Why do Republicans disapprove of Obama, considering that he is promulgating their own agenda? Their answers are that he is a: Socialist Communist Liberal Progressive Terrorist Fascist Illegal Alien Racist The fact that these characterizations are contradictory notwithstanding, they are also completely inaccurate. W...

With all the revelations about U.S. government-sanctioned torture, of how Cheney claims torture brought important information to light, and of how those claims are refuted by actual facts, it is easy for us to fall into some common traps. For one, Cheney’s claims might lead us to believe that there is merit in talking about whether or not torture is useful. This canard plays into the fiction spun by the torturers. We can argue and prove that torture does not produce good intelligence, but what if it did? Would that excuse it? The entire subject is moot since torture has but one purpose: to force prisoners to say what torturers want them to say. It does not extend beyond that and never has throughout history. In the Medieval period, the Church or the secular state could confiscate land of all who were hanged/burned/drowned after confession under torture. This was quite profitable for the powerful. To increase profits, they not only obtained a confession of guilt for witchcraft...

Much of the American public used Barack Obama as their mirror throughout the 2008 election cycle. They wanted an end to war, equality for minorities, universal “socialist” health care, tougher environmental regulations, corporate accountability. They looked at Obama and saw what they wanted, even though he never professed to espouse these values and never committed to any promises in these veins. Just like Bill Clinton in 1992, the disgruntled masses projected their hopes, fears, and aspirations onto the candidate for change, and he happily obliged by appealing to their needs with all rhetoric and little substance. Here was a bright, intelligent, attractive, somewhat self-deprecating and enormously charming man from a difficult background who no-doubt faced tremendous challenges on his path to power. Here was a man who could understand all of us who did not fit into that infamous “base” of George W. Bush’s. Here was the antithesis to the last eight years. How could we possibly elect th...