Where has the American revolutionary spirit gone?

All American citizens are losing our freedoms while being seduced by fake reality shows and the latest electronic gadgets. While we sit in front of our televisions, blissfully lulled into a false sense of security, our federal government is planning its next tyrannical power grab. Where are our priorities?

High school graduation for me came in late 1960’s while society was undergoing some major attitude changes. With great curiosity and delight I witnessed and was swept up in the changes taking place in music, art, fashion, politics, technology, and lifestyle. People’s voices were beginning to be raised demanding an end to the unfair treatment of black citizens, an end to the war in Vietnam, and to demand full equality for women.

I became especially interested in the war protests, the marches, and the gathering numbers of counter-culture revolutionaries determined to break the bonds of their ‘oppressor masters’. Never mind that my sheltered Mid-West upbringing cushioned me from the sting of oppression, I felt a part of the problem if I was not going to be part of the solution. The energy emanating from the force of these protesters convictions and their sheer numbers, was almost palpable. They were on the front line in the battle against no less a daunting and deeply entrenched foe than the military-industrial complex, and everyone under the age of 25 were at once full-fledged brothers-in-arms and were expected to do their part in bringing down this unrepentant beast.

I was proud to be a part of a generation that was instrumental in forcing this nation to face its moral obligations towards its citizens, and in reminding our public officials that they served at our pleasure. This major shift towards taking more responsibility for each others welfare shook the very fabric of society.

The fire, that internal spark, that was necessary to drive an entire generation to stand up against the power elite has cooled in this generation. It has been dying for some time now and as a result members of our federal government, emboldened by our inattention, are being seduced by the corruptible nature of absolute power.

Our generation fought hard, some died, to get them to listen. Now, it is up to this current generation to recapture their attention and remind them that they serve us, not the other way around.

In 2006, campus police tasered an unarmed UCLA student while he worked at the computer lab. They did this because he did not show them his student ID card. While these ‘guardians of our safety’ crushed this man’s rights for failing to show ‘proper respect’, the entire library full of college students stood around and simply watched. Oh, someone happily took video of it and immediately put it on YouTube so they could brag about being there. If this scenario had played out in the 1960s, given that violent clashes with police took place every weekend over the Vietnam War, I think it is safe to assume these cops would have been pissing their pants.

Another bit of proof that the police do not fear the public or respect our rights: an unarmed man, on his stomach, who was restrained, with his hands behind him was shot execution-style by a police officer, in front of witnesses. Remember this? His name was Oscar Grant and the murder took place at a train station in Oakland. Look it up and try to muster some outrage that this police officer so callously devalued this man’s life. Will you only get pissed off if this happened to you or a friend? Once again, people standing around who witnessed this tragedy videotaped it with their cell phones, but did nothing. Not a single fellow officer raised their gun at the cop who just murdered a person who was in custody. Instead, the cops banded together and tried to collaborate and create a story that would justify the murder.

Really? When your chance came to make a stand, you could do nothing but video it and stay out of the way? God forbid anyone would actually put themselves out there. You will fight tooth-and-nail for a $199 flat screen TV on Black Friday, beating your fellow citizens senseless for something you don’t even need, but when it comes time to protecting your civil liberties you won’t even open your mouth to voice some opposition. And I thought the priorities of the government were screwed up.

How many more of these incidents are we going to witness, do nothing but walk away as we shake our heads and go home and talk on the Internet about what we witnessed, but ultimately did nothing about?

The generation before this one would have rushed the officers in both of these events, rendered them powerless, and let the police know that they won’t stand for abuses of power, excessive force, and murder of citizens.

Why is there no compassion for a stranger who is murdered by those sworn to protect us? We are all Americans. This government has already placed themselves squarely against us, as evidenced by every supposed non-partisan investigation into police aggression being ruled as ‘justified’.

What is it going to take to get people fired up?

This unchecked grab for power, especially under the GW Bush administration, has translated into a net loss of our personal privacy and individual rights to the extent that our standard of living has plummeted and we can no longer afford to live a basic middle-class life. To add further injury to our situation, when the economy tanked in 2008 our financial institutions were the first in line to be bailed out and none of that bailout money has ‘trickled down’ to the very people who foot the bill. We are so far in debt that our American Dream is to make next month’s payments.

The steady erosion of civil liberties, the blatant violations of the Bill of Rights, the complete disregard for the limits put in place by the US Constitution, are all taking place right under our noses. All the while, our military and police forces run around exerting their will, ultimately accountable to no one.

Many of these very issues are what triggered the revolution of the 1960’s. Is there any hope that the youth of today will stand up to our abusive police force, our corrupt and incompetent politicians? It is doubtful.

When did everyone forget that we invaded Iraq and killed civilians under false pretenses? There never were any so-called “WMDs” to justify going in there. Yet we did, and our military killed their citizens, and we completely destroyed a sovereign country. Why haven’t the perpetrators of these crimes been brought to bear for their actions? Where is the justifiable fury over these blatant and atrocious acts against humanity? Right, there were a few token permitted protests following a marching path they got approval for from the city. And like good little citizens, this generation stayed within the lines, went back to their jobs, back to their televisions, back to their toys and patted themselves on the back for ‘taking a stand’. Pathetic.

Let’s look again at the actions of the previous generation. How about the millions of people that marched in the Vietnam Moratorium? Millions of people all over the US stopped going to work and took a real stand. Protests and marches were held in every city, all over the entire country, attended by everyone from student activists, to the 9-5 corporate ladder climber. In Washington DC alone 500,000 showed up without a permit, didn’t follow the designated protest route, and surrounded the capital. They had the government trembling, as they knew they could no longer contain the will of the people. Another example of people who got together, fought for what they wanted, and despite violent and sometime deadly opposition from the government, they succeeded.

Do you all fear that success cannot be repeated? Do you not think marching today on the capitol would lead to anything worthwhile? The power elite are able to get away with crapping on us because we let them. The old saying ‘You have to stand for something or you will fall for anything’ is proving true right now. They will continue to walk all over us if we don’t show them we are tired of it.

The hand of our government is reaching too far. It is up to us to slap it back and force them to remember that the power lies with the people and that they rule by the consent of the governed, not the other way around.

Our liberties are being violated through tyrannical and illegal maneuvers signed into law by our federal government or simply carried out in secret behind our backs. Remember the illegal wire tapping made possible by the cooperation of telecoms?

A more current example of the rape of our civil liberties is taking place at our nations airports in the form of ‘enhanced pat-downs’. Over our objections to full-body scanning the TSA offered an Opt-Out-Day which was their way of heading off an ugly revolt that would have crippled a major industry. This so called “revolt” is just another example of how pathetic the American people have become with regard to confronting authority. But, that ‘victory’ was only temporary. Janet Napolitano has made it clear that the groping and scanning is slated for the American streets. Naturally, it will start at Federal buildings and major public events, and then slowly but surely find its way onto buses, trains, at highway checkpoints, etc.  It seems that these checkpoints have actually already begun. Will this finally be enough to show the American people how threatened our freedoms are?

It’s true that life has become hard for all of us who don’t have daddy’s trust funds or wealthy connections and it is not going to get easier, because the rich are not going to share anything. We are all too eager to crawl into our comfy electronic-gadget caves with our blinders on so we don’t have to deal with how bad off we really are. This type of escapism is not the answer to improve our condition.

Now is the time to take a stand. Our government is hoping we don’t. They are strengthening their positions because they think they are more important than us. Let’s show them they are wrong.

Power to the People, not under this administration

After Benazir Bhutto was brutally murdered last week, the Pakistan People's Party was left without a leader.

She had named her husband Asif Ali Zardari to head the Pakistan People's Party in her will, which was read on Sunday, but he handed over the position to the couple's son, PPP official Makhdoom Amin Faheem said.

How can you ‘will’ political power to another person? And how can you just ‘hand it over’ to another person? This is not the way of true democracy.

Blood is not a deciding factor on the ability of a person to run a country. But, then again, neither is a democratically held election.

I suppose one could say that if the party accepts the person presented as the leader then democracy, in its truest sense, does exist.

This sense of true democracy is struggling in the U.S.

Bush and Cheney have created a stronger presidential office much to the detriment of democratic freedoms. Their own reasoning for their actions, of course, is to protect those same freedoms, but those freedoms are not in danger from anyone other than these two power hungry old men. This is a case of where their egos got in the way of doing what is right for this country. They have lost faith in Democracy and decided they know better than our forefathers on how to maintain and nurture democracy.

In their zeal to appear as if they were putting this nations’ security first, they grabbed a bunch of people of Arabic dissent without solid evidence of any clear terrorist ties and then held them for six years under the guise of guilt. Their guilt has never proven and habeas corpus suffered because these two old men refused to admit they could have made a mistake.

This administration has condoned torture. Sure it cannot be proven in a court of law because the very people we need as witnesses are all involved. But citizens of this country and of the world know the U.S. participated in it and perpetrated it.

I present this question to the world: which is worse, Saddam Hussein, who we all despised for his use of torture to control his citizens and ensure his reign of power, or a democratically elected president, by the way that election was disputed and not decided by the public, who looks the other way as long as torture is used for our purposes?

If any other country took American citizens and held them in prison as “enemy combatants” without proof, without any clear date set for prosecution, and used torture to extract information from them, would the American government sit back and not do anything?

This president and vice president have seen fit to set up an illegal spy network on its own citizens that reflects the FBI era of J. Edgar Hoover. This was done in the name of ‘protecting’ our freedom. As U.S. citizens learned they had their privacy invaded by this illegal network and wiretapping practice, lawsuits were filed against the communications companies that this administration used to realize their plan. The response from the administration is to change legislation to protect the communications companies! Unbelievable, but typical, Bush/Cheney tactics.

If we extend the Bush/Cheney ‘reasoning’ for warrantless wiretapping to every law enforcement entity in this country there would be spying taking place on every U.S. citizen based on whatever reason law enforcement would choose. A giant leap towards George Orwell’s 1984.

People who believe in the ‘freedom’ that our forefathers granted us should be outraged that these practices are taking place and even more outraged that they are not being stopped.

The expectation of freedom in this country has diminished greatly since these two took office.

The main danger with granting power to someone is that they don’t want to give it up. The main danger of granting power to egotistical, delusional madmen increases the danger of us losing even more of those freedoms that we have cherished for so long.

Given the general trend that this country seems to be following, that being that people are becoming more unethical, more immoral and more willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want and to hell with everyone else, will only solidify the bleak Orwellian prediction and may very well place George Orwell as a greater prophet than Nostradamus.

Presidential double-speak

Remember Hurricane Katrina? Anyone? If you ask this question to a room full of politicians you are likely to receive stone silence, because they seem to have forgotten. After asking this question, this is what you would see: our ‘representatives’ standing around with their heads bowed, hands in their pockets, shuffling their feet.

The rest of the country remembers. And what we remember is Bush flying down there in the aftermath and giving a fine political speech about how he is going to put the full force of the federal government behind cleaning up this mess and getting victims lives back together.

Well it has been two years, and what has been done?

On the federal governments side, nothing more has been done than the awarding of high dollar contracts to large companies that have supported the Bush administration. Those small, Gulf Coast businesses that were promised the lion share of the contracts, well, a few 'token' businesses were awarded small contracts but the money was taken away due to the Department of Homeland Security ‘re-writing’ their contracts.

The review of federal contracts from five government agencies, conducted by the House Small Business Committee, is the latest to document 'missteps' in the award of billions of dollars of lucrative government work since the 2005 storm.

'Missteps'. You have to admire the number of ways these people come up with euphemisms for theft and mismanagement.

The federal government has failed us: The committee’s review found that small businesses in Louisiana had an overall net loss of $8.9 million in contracting dollars since April of this year, when the agencies reaffirmed their commitment to give smaller companies a share of the work. The loss was due in part to a decision at the Department of Homeland Security to modify several existing agreements instead of awarding significant new contracts.

And, they have lied to us: In addition, the review found the five agencies — Homeland Security, General Services Administration, Defense, Veterans Affairs and Small Business Administration — had claimed falsely that 259 contracts were awarded to small businesses when in fact they went to large companies or ineligible recipients. That created the false impression that more than $95 million in contracts was awarded to small companies, when they actually went elsewhere.

Only 7.4 percent of Katrina contracts have gone to small businesses in Louisiana, down from 12.5 percent in April.

Representative Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., who chairs the House panel said “There is absolutely no excuse for failing to use local companies that are responsible for this region’s recovery. I can assure you that this committee will continue to hold the federal government accountable for making sure this money is properly invested in the region.”

Well, Mr. Velazquez, your threat to hold the federal government ‘accountable’ is weak. It’s been two years and they are still dragging their feet and mis-directing and lying. What are you going to about it besides threaten them?

Russ Knocke, a DHS spokesman, responded that the department has been working to fix errors but could not immediately say how many. He said the committee had not provided its information to the department despite requests by DHS; the committee said the data on which it based its analysis was available publicly.

You are at best ineffective in your work to ‘fix errors’ and you don’t know how many errors? Who are you anyway? The House committee hasn’t given the requested data to your department yet it has given the data to the public? Where is the respect? Is the House Small Business Committee telling you that you cannot have the data whenever you want it? Are they saying they will give it up when they are good and ready? Is this just more ‘power game’ playing that Washington politicians have become so famous for?

For many weeks after the 2005 hurricane, small and local companies were shut out of Katrina work in favor of large concerns with extensive government and political ties. I guess these ‘small businesses’ in Louisiana should have been ‘paying off’ and ‘sucking up’ to federal government officials just ‘in case’ they ever needed assistance. Just being American companies wasn’t enough. They had to have a lot more money too. And they had to give a bunch of that money to the political machine.

Following public criticism of the way FEMA handled the awarding of contracts, they pledged to rebid four large trailer contracts and give the work to small companies. FEMA ultimately rebid only portions of the work. Government investigators later found FEMA did not take adequate legal steps to ensure that the new companies were small and locally operated, resulting in a questionable contract award to a large company with ties to the Republican Party. Right, so the plan is tell them what they want to hear and do whatever we want to do and hope we don’t get caught. And, actually there’s no big worry about being caught because this government is so inept at every level that nothing will ever come of it.

Even after the public criticism and after the GSA testified in Congress about their screw-ups, Homeland Security still handed out 43 new contracts worth nearly $12 million to large companies or ineligible recipients. What it did to small companies in the gulf region was to modify their contracts which resulted in a loss of $9 million for them. So, they took away from the small businesses that Bush promised to help so that the money could be given to large companies that backed the republican party.

What a country! What a fine definition of what this government has become. The Department of Homeland Security has become the poster child of everything that is wrong with this administration.

They completely and totally took advantage of a natural disaster that destroyed millions of lives and reaped millions of dollars from these peoples misfortune.

I’ll bet the department was told when they were first formed that they would have the total and un-prosecutable right to do whatever they wanted with the money they received from the federal government. And they took it to heart.

Paul Schneider, DHS undersecretary for management, acknowledged in April that “there clearly has been errors in coding” and pledged action to fix them. These were not ‘errors’ sir. They were criminal acts of mis-appropriation of funds.

Knocke said Wednesday the department believed they have corrected those ‘errors’, but contended it couldn’t fully address the committee’s concerns without its data. That’s right hide behind the lack of respect the House Small Business Committee has shown you by not giving you that data.

Out of the $95.6 million in total contracts that were inaccurately claimed as going to small business, more than $77 million, or 81 percent, were awards by the Defense Department.

This is very disturbing proof that this government cares more about its own political backers than about the public who gave them the money in the first place through forced taxation.

It is also very telling in that this government knows it can award money to whomever it pleases without any backlash or penalty.

This government is more and more out of control everyday and absolutely shuns the notion of government ‘for the people’.

Turns out that ‘cruel and wasteful storm’ was even more cruel to the citizens of the Gulf Coast than any of us realized.

See the text of the Katrina Speech here.

On the other side of all of this deceitfulness by the federal government is the fact that contractors are setting up multiple ‘levels’ of subcontractors so that they can get even more money awarded to themselves rather than trying to save the taxpayers dollars and trying to make it last longer. And guess who is actually doing the ‘grunt’ work, Spanish-speaking crews who are paid the least. These contractors sit back and collect millions from the government by marking up the actual cost of the job by 40 percent to as much as 1,700 percent.

If we had ‘honest’ government officials to oversee these companies that money could be spent in a much more beneficial method that would help society as a whole rather than buying new cars and homes for these short-sighted ‘slugs’ who think it is okay to steal from the rest of us.

These contractors actions drive the cost of cleanup higher than it needs to be. Their greed is costing us taxpayers, and ultimately themselves as taxpayers, ever more and more money. They say this is the way the system works. They know the government is screwing them out of money and so this is a chance to get some of it back.

What is the answer? This greed and mis-handling of money will never change. We are all screwing ourselves right into the ground and pretending we are blind to it.

The federal government sets up ‘oversight’ committees, one of their favorite answers to combat these problems, but are so ineffective that they become just another ‘mouth to feed’ at the giant lucrative tit that has become this government.

Honest people, trying to do the right thing, get the worst end of everything.

All in all, we, as a race of people, have turned out pretty poorly. Or is it just Americans?