"Audemus Jura Nostra Defendere," We Dare Defend Our
Rights
"When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the
prosecution (at Nuremberg)
spoke to the
tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they
were
doing, he said, to paraphrase,
that: ‘We are handing these defendants a
poisoned
chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must
be subject to the same
punishments,
otherwise this whole trial is a farce.’ Well, you can look
at the history
from then on,
and we’ve sipped from the poisoned chalice many times, but it’s
never been
considered a crime. So, that means we are saying that trial was a farce."-
An
Interview
with Noam Chomsky, On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals
by Gabriel
Mattherw Schivone, 8/3/2007
|
Alexander Palace Time Machine C-Span California Laws, Codes & Regulations Canadian Government Information Carnegie
Endowment for
International The Cato
Institute
Governing
Green Party of The United States Heritage Foundation
International Action Center
International Relations International
Association for
Judicial Watch Library of Congress: Country Studies Middle
East Research &
Public Agenda Thomas- Legislative Information
Townhall.com
Wealth and Our Commonwealth: World Bank World
Policy Institute Veterans Organizations
American
Veterans for Equal Rights
Congressional Medal of Honor The
Immortal Chaplains Foundation National Coalition
of Homeless National
Association of Uniformed Navy League of the United States The Retired Enlisted Association Rolling
Thunder Tragedy Assistance
Program Veterans
Against the Iraq War Vietnam
Veterans of America
|
| BenefitsCheckup A free, easy-to-use service that identifies federal & state assistance programs for older Americans. Consumer.gov Disability.gov |
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
& Firearms
Bureau
of Labor Statistics
Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Environmental Protection Agency
FBI Freedom of
Information Act
Reading Room
Federal Aviation Administration
Federal Communications Commission
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal
Reserve Bank of
San Francisco
HazardMaps.gov
Collection of natural hazards,
& supporting data.
The
Office of Homeland Security
U.S.
House Of Representatives |
Senate
U.S. Mint
Centers for
Medicaid and Medicare Services
National Archives
& Records
Administration
National Criminal Justice
Reference Service
Clearinghouse for research, policy, &
practice related to criminal & juvenile
justice & drug control.
National Endowment for the
Humanities
Grant-making agency of the United
States government dedicated to supporting
research, education, preservation, &
public programs in the humanities.
National
Highway Traffic Safety
Administration
National Institute
of Standards
and Technologies
National
Intelligence Council
Center for US Government strategic
thinking and for Intelligence
Community collaboration.
National Transportation Safety Board
Office of National Drug Control Policy
|
|
My country
right or wrong- wrong!! "Through the Looking Glass," Lewis Carroll- Political discourse in America- twentieth and twenty-first centuries and beyond? Words- Bush/Cheney 2000 Presidential Campaign: The Social Security surplus must be locked away only for Social Security. Words- 8/24/02 Bush News Conference: Reality- After a 1.2 trillion dollar federal tax cut and a slowing economy: "The administration's budget shows that it is close to dipping into the Social Security surplus to fund spending, and a Congressional Budget Office estimate due next week is expected to show that the government is already tapping the Social Security surplus."- 8/25/01 Washington Post article by Amy Goldstein. |
George Orwell, "1984"
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
presented himself with propositions -- "the Party says the earth is flat,"
"the Party says that ice is heavier than water" -- and trained himself in not
seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.
Helen Keller
"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose
between two bodies of real, though not avowed autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee."
Andre Gorz
"Wonder each morning how you’re going to hold on till evening, each Monday how
you’ll make it to Saturday. Reach home without the strength to do anything but watch
TV, telling yourself you’ll surely die an idiot... Long to smash everything... once a
day, feel sick... because you’ve traded your life for a living; fear that the rage
mounting within you will die down in the end, that in the final analysis people are right
when they say: ...you can get used to anything."
Theodore Roosevelt
"To announce that there must be no criticism
of the President, or that we are to stand by
the President, right or wrong, is not only
unpatriotic and servile, but is morally
treasonable to the American public."
| "The disease of modern culture is
specialization. Looked at from
the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable
enough...The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite
standpoint --that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquerie --indeed,
the impossibility-- of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea
of personal wholeness. The first, and best known hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists --people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing... Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competencies and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average --one is tempted to say, the ideal-- American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and "agribusinessmen," the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else --or, perhaps nobody else-- will be responsible. And, not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him." |
"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear
in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of
men, all equal all alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure petty and paltry pleasures,
which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of the
rest,- his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for
the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he touches
them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his
kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."
Alexis
DeTocqueville, "Democracy in America"
"Democracy in America" is, in my opinion, the most brilliant
political commentary ever written on the future of democracy. It was written
between 1831 and 1832. Alexis de Tocqueville, did not merely use his powers of deduction
to see a new age. HE ACTUALLY SAW IT. See also: Democracy In
America- Not
"The intellectual human being must choose between irony and radicalism; a
third choice is not decently possible."
Thomas Mann, "Reflections of a Nonpolitical
Man"
"Vanity; stupidity; duplicity; lack of ability: these need not impede a successful political career." Bagehot, from "The Economist"
"Naturally the common people
don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in
England, nor for that matter in Germany. That
is understood. But, after all, it is the
leaders of the country who determine the
policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a
democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be
brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers
for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any
country."
Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., quote from
Hermann Goering, Nazi wartime criminal and
second man in the Third Reich, following the
October 10th defeat of his Senate battle
against the resolution handing President Bush
unprecedented powers to declare pre-emptive
war and invade Iraq.
"War's cost is exacting. It
destroys families. It leaves behind a wasteland,
irreconcilable grief. It is a disease, and in
the night air I smell its contagion. Justice is
not at issue here: war consumes the good along
with the wicked. There will be no stopping it.
Pity will be banished. Fear will rule. It is the
old lie again, told to children desperate for
glory: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It
is sweet and fitting to die for one's
country)."-
"A Gaza Diary- Scenes from the Palestinain
Uprising," by Chris Hedges. See also,
"War
is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," by Chris
Hedges.
|
"Political language, as used by
politicians, does not venture into any of
this territory since the majority of
politicians, on the evidence available to
us, are interested not in truth but in
power and in the maintenance of that
power. To maintain that power it is
essential that people remain in ignorance,
that they live in ignorance of the truth,
even the truth of their own lives. What
surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry
of lies, upon which we feed."-
Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture, 2005 "In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding- symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages." - Lecture by Princess Irulan to the Arrakeen War College, "The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."" - Addenda to Orders in Council, The Emperor Paul Muad'dib, "There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences." - Muad'Dib on Law, The Stilgar Commentary. The three quotations above are from Frank Herbert's, "Dune" series of science fiction works. |
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." Philip K. Dick
Teledemocracy
|
"I think that we have an
epic fight in front of us. And I absolutely
believe to my soul that this corporate greed
and corporate power has an ironclad hold on
our democracy. And if we don't take that hold away, it will be impossible to have universal health care, energy transformation, trade and tax policy that actually works for the American people and for the middle class."- Senator John Edwards, 12/2007 Free Speech Democracy Groups.org A national directory of social change email lists and forums One Million Black Votes Didn't Count in the 2000 Presidential Election: It's not too hard to get your vote lost - if some politicians want it to be lost "In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them - half of the rejected ballots - were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate." Greg Palast, 6/21/2004 |
20/20 Vision
Organization involved in grassroots
activism. Serves as a Congressional
watchdog.
ACORN
ACORN®, the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now, is the
nation's largest community organization
of low- and moderate-income families.
ActForChange
Allows individuals to speak out on urgent
issues of the day such as gun violence
& environmental degradation.
Adbusters
Global network of artists, activists, writers,
pranksters, students, educators &
entrepreneurs who want to advance the new
social activist movement of the information age.
Their aim is to topple existing power structures
& forge a major shift in the way we will live in
the 21st century.
AFL-CIO: Work in Progress
Weekly e-newsletter of the AFL-CIO with
highlights of recent victories by workers
forming unions &other union movement
news. Subscriptions are free. Submissions
to Work in Progress can be e-mailed to
wip@aflcio.org.
America Coming Together
Large voter mobilization project. Knocking
on doors and speaking the truth, ACT
canvassers