Spring Equinox Visions

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Ralph Metzner

1. Hugo Chavez: After a Charismatic Leader, What?

Some extracts from a commentary by Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. For the entire essay see http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/commentaries

Hugo Chavez was a charismatic leader.What is a charismatic leader? It is someone who has a very forceful personality, a relatively clear political vision, and capable of great energy and persistence in pursuing this vision…

The death of a charismatic leader always creates a void of uncertainty, in which his supporters try to ensure the continuance of his policies by institutionalizing them. Max Weber called this the “routinization of charisma.”

His achievements seem clear. He used the enormous oil wealth of Venezuela to improve significantly the living conditions of the poorest strata of Venezuela, expanding their access to health facilities and education, and thereby reducing the gap between rich and poor quite remarkably. In addition, he used the enormous oil wealth to subsidize oil exports to a large number of countries…

he contributed substantially to building autonomous Latin American institutions – not only ALBA (the alliance of Bolivarian countries) but UNASUR (the confederation of all states in South America), CELAC (all states in the Americas except the United States and Canada), and Mercosur (the confederal economic structure that included both Brazil and Argentina…

One should note in particular the positive appreciation of Chavez by the conservative president of neighboring Colombia. This was because of the important and very positive role Chavez had been playing as a mediator between the Colombian government and its long-time guerilla movement enemy, the FARC…

Has the regime been authoritarian? Certainly. This is what one gets with a charismatic leader. But again, as authoritarian leaders go, Chavez has been remarkably restrained. There have not been bloody purges or concentration camps. Instead, there have been elections, which most outside observers have considered as good as they come…

What will then happen to “21st-century socialism” – the vision that Chavez had of what needs to be pursued in Venezuela, in Latin America, and throughout the world? There are two words in this vision. One is “socialism.” Chavez sought to rescue this term from the opprobrium into which it had fallen because of the multiple failures both of real-existing Communism and post-Marxian social-democracy…

For me, this effort is part of the larger task we all face during this structural crisis of historical capitalism and the bifurcation of two possible resolutions of the chaos into which our world-system has fallen…

Earth on the edge of a cliff. Hang in there!

2. Is Victory at Hand for the Climate Movement?

Extracts from a commentary by Paul Gilding on The Post Carbon Institute’s website http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/1558152-victory-at-hand-for-the-climate

There are signs the climate movement could be on the verge of a remarkable and surprising victory.  It could usher in the fastest and most dramatic economic transformation in history. This would include the removal of the oil, coal and gas industries from the economy in just a few decades and their replacement with new industries

It is more accurately understood as an idea whose tentacles reach into every tier of government, the world’s largest companies and financial institutions, and throughout the academic and science communities.

Far from being at society’s margins it has the support, to various degrees, of virtually all governments, and many of the world’s most powerful political leaders, including the heads of state of the USA, China and other leading economies. It counts the CEO’s of many global companies and many of the world’s wealthiest people as active supporters – who between them direct hundreds of billions of dollars of capital every year towards practical climate action.

It is simply an incredibly big job to turn on its head the global economy’s underpinning energy system. And so it has taken a while. Considering how long other great social movements took to have an impact – such as equality for women or the end of slavery and civil rights movements – then what’s surprising is not that the climate movement hasn’t yet succeeded. What’s surprising is how far its come and how deeply it has become embedded in such a short time.

And now is the moment when it’s greatest success might be about to be realised – and just in time. We are at the most important moment in this movement’s history – in the midst of two simultaneous tipping points that create the opportunity, if we respond correctly, to win – eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy and securing a stable climate, though still a changed one.

An avalanche of new knowledge and indicators made both tipping points clear. The first and perhaps the best understood is the rapid acceleration in climate impacts, reinforcing the view many hold that the scientific consensus on climate has badly underestimated the timing and scale of climate impacts. This Arctic melting is a symptom of accelerating system change.

…we are currently heading for a global temperature increase of 4°C or more, double the agreed target.

The IMF chief and former conservative French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, said that without strong action “future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled”. The World Bank was similarly blunt about the economic consequences of our current path: “there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

These and other reports laid out the evidence that the only option was transformational economic change because the alternative was simply unmanageable. Action was no longer a preferred outcome but an essential one. As the World Bank said “the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur”.  Even the IEA, historically a kind of advocate in chief for the fossil fuel industry, came on board, pointing out that a stable climate and economy requires the majority of the global reserves of fossil fuels to never be burnt.

It is an extraordinary turn around when key mainstream economic institutions lay out the case for dismantling what is arguably the world’s most powerful business sector.

What was predominantly an ecological question is now primarily an economic one. This is a profoundly important shift, as economic risk is something society’s elites take very seriously.

The second tipping point in 2012 was the clear evidence that a disruptive economic shift is already underway in the global energy market. There are two indicators of this, with the first being the much noted acceleration in the size of the renewable energy market with dramatic price reductions and the arrival of cost competitive solar and wind.

Of equal importance, and partly triggered by these market shifts, is the awakening of the sleeping giant of carbon risk, with open discussion in mainstream financial circles of the increasing dangers in financial exposure to fossil fuels…The contradiction between what the science says is essential and the growth assumptions made by the fossil fuel industry is so large it represents a systemic global financial risk. This has been well articulated and more deeply explored by groups like Carbon Tracker who have been taking the argument to the mainstream finance sector.

Combined, these two tipping points present the opportunity for the broad climate movement to achieve success, if they are understood and responded to appropriately by the activist, policy and business communities. But first they must be seen for what they are  – indications we are poised on the edge of a truly historic economic transformation – the end of fossil fuels and the building of a huge new industry sector.

…Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” to describe this process and to explain why it’s the underpinning strength of capitalism, calling it:  ”A process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

…The science is clear, the technology is ready, significant sections of the elite are on side and the financial momentum is with us.

And this time, the economics is playing on the same side as the environment. Just in time.

3. Brazil and the Global Battle to Eliminate Extreme Poverty

Extracted from an article by By Rogerio Studart published by The Globalist, an online magazine

Brazil’s current and former leaders have committed to ending extreme poverty in the country within a generation, if not sooner. So far, argues Rogerio Studart, executive director of the World Bank, the results are promising. In fact, Brazil’s policies provide a model for how governments can alleviate poverty in this era of lean budgets.

Brazil is an unlikely success story in that regard. My home country has long been known for having one of the most unequal levels of income distribution on the planet.

This changed when President Lula da Silva was elected in 2002. He ran on a platform not only to boost social and economic inclusion and to fight poverty and inequality — but also to achieve that goal within a single generation.

Instead, Lula — a man who had experienced long bouts of poverty firsthand — made the fight against poverty and inequality the central organizing principle for his entire presidency.

By the end of Lula’s two-term mandate, the results were already impressive. Income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, had declined sharply — from 0.553 in 2002 to 0.500 in 2011. Household per capita income had increased by 27% — from 2003 to 2011. Unemployment rates fell from 9.1% in 2002 to 6.8% in 2011, a record low.

When President Dilma Rousseff, President Lula’s former chief of staff, was elected as his successor, she upped the ante, running on a platform to eliminate extreme poverty not in a generation, but in just five years.

And yet, in Brazil’s case, the target of eliminating extreme poverty is surprisingly close to being achieved. The reform agenda’s cornerstone was a determined expansion of the social protection programs by making sure that all poor households in the country would be reached.

The two key programs are, first, the Bolsa Familia (a conditional cash transfer program that increases the incomes of the poorest families while promoting health and education) and, second, the Brasil sem Miséria (an extension of Bolsa Familia aimed at people living in extreme poverty, with elements for inclusion in the productive sector and access to public services). The per capita transfer is currently 70 reais (or $35) a month.

The two programs now reach 100% of all Brazilians that are listed in the national database used to manage and monitor the social programs of the country. At this moment, there still are 700,000 people that live under the poverty line who do not yet receive payments from either of the support programs because they have not been included in the registry.

Most people, when they look at the challenges of economic development, believe that poverty alleviation is a moral obligation — but that it is also expensive and, even if started successfully, may not be sustainable financially. Brazil’s case shows that this does not need to be so.

The cost of Bolsa Familia has been extremely low. In 2012, the program cost the Brazilian government less than 1% of its budget.

On the social front, the results are solid. While much more needs to be done, Brazil has seen a marked decline in violence and an increase in political activism and cultural movements. In many of the urban areas, ambitious programs were launched to “pacify” areas previously associated with drug trafficking and violence.

A key part of the improved urban environment is that the urban poor now have a sense of destiny and direction. They welcome the government’s focus on investment in families’ futures and especially the smart focus on the young and their education.

There is a quiet confidence in the eyes of young children living in the favelas that has never been there before. Without knowing it, they can sense that their government is giving them a true head start…

4. The wider implications of the Cyprus financial collapse

Ellen Brown in her Web of Debt blog says:

It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors

Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland; and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.  Read more

Written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
 published on The Telegraph and GATA

Cyprus has killed the myth that EMU is benign

The punishment regime imposed on Cyprus is a trick against everybody involved in this squalid saga, against the Cypriot people and the German people, against savers and creditors. All are being deceived.

It is not a bailout. There is no debt relief for the state of Cyprus. The diktat will push the island’s debt ratio to 120 percent in short order, with a high risk of an economic death spiral, a la Grecque.

Capital controls have shattered the monetary unity of European Monetary Union.

The curbs are draconian. There will be a forced rollover of debt. Cheques may not be cashed. Basic cross-border trade is severely curtailed. Credit card use abroad will be limited to E5,000 (L4,200) a month. “We wonder how such capital controls could eventually be lifted with no obvious cure of the underlying problem,” said Credit Suisse.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 20 percent fall in real GDP,” said Nobel economist Paul Krugman. “Cyprus should leave the euro. Staying in means an incredibly severe depression.”

What saved Iceland from mass unemployment after its banks blew up — or saved Sweden and Finland in the early 1990s — was a currency devaluation that brought industries back from the dead. Iceland’s krona has fallen low enough to make it worthwhile growing tomatoes for sale in greenhouses near the Arctic Circle.

The Cyprus debacle has taught us yet again that EMU has gone off the rails, is a danger to stability, and should be dismantled before it destroys Europe’s post-war order. Read more…

5. Is one of the US President’s bodyguards an alien?

The Exopolitics news service has published a video recording from President Obama’s address at the 2012 AIPAC conference at the Washington Convention Center shows a mysterious looking figure among the Secret Service agents protecting him. From one camera angle, the figure looks uncannily like a tall Gray alien; with no noticeable ear, mouth or facial hair. From most other camera angles, the figure appears as a bald Secret Service agent who looks human enough. Not so according to a popular Youtube video that has over 330,000 hits since its March 13, 2013 release. The bald Secret Service agent is a shape shifting humanoid alien, and the video provides detailed analysis supporting its remarkable claim. So was it all just a trick a light, or did the camera capture something we weren’t supposed to see?

Is it possible that the Secret Service employs aliens to protect President Obama, and uses some kind of advanced technology to hide them from the public eye? Read more…

Filed under: Current Events, Ecology, Economics & Finance, Green Psychology, Modern History, Politics, Science, UFO/ET | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The enduring mystery of the hereafter – a film and a book

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Ralph Metzner

Philosophical books and films about life–after–death have been and continue to be published – especially in countries, like Brazil, that are not so ideologically committed to the fundamentalisms of either Big Science or Big Religion. Autobiographical accounts of near-death experiences (NDE) continue to appear and regularly land on the non-fiction best-seller lists – testifying to our unending interest in what happens, or might happen, after the end of our life here on this Earth. I want to discuss here the 2010 Brazilian film Astral City – A Spiritual Journey and the 2012 autobiographical Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, M.D., sub-titled A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

The filmAstral City, which can be found and purchased through Amazon, is based on the Brazilian best-selling novel Nosso Lar (Our Home), by the renowned Spiritist medium Chico Xavier (1910-2002). On YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=txa_gBNkvdU) one can watch a 5-min. film about this remarkable man, with only a primary school education, who devoted his life to counseling and serving others through a process known as “automatic writing.”  Through such means he also produced over 400 books, including one of poems by well-known deceased Brazilian poets.  All of the proceeds from his healings, counselings and writings were devoted to charity.  In the YouTube clip you can see him filling page after page of writing with his right hand while holiding his head and shielding his eyes with the other. His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing! The Wikipedia entry for Chico Xavier says his books sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide. “Heavily influenced by works of Allan Kardec, Xavier professed that his hand was guided by spirits. Xavier called his spiritual guide Emmanuel, who according to Xavier, lived in ancient Rome as Senator Publius Lentulus, was reincarnated in Spain as Father Damian, and later as a professor at the Sorbonne.” Chico Xavier was twice nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

Like many others I found the film-story Astral City to be remarkably authentic and convincing – meaning that it is consistent with everything else I have personally come to understand about the possibilities of communication with spirits in the hereafter. In the story, a deceased doctor gradually comes to realize he has a role to play as a healer, working with those who transition in states of severe illness or delusion – but he first has to learn the vastly expanded and deepened possibilities of the astral world. We also see and hear about the lessons human spirits have to learn when first transiting into the after-life,  and the fact that choices exist even here. There is a scene, reminiscent of some of Dante’s descriptions of the hell world, where the confused ghosts of recently deceased individuals are roaming around in a desolate and dark landscape, not having accepted that they are dead. Then, as soon as the individual asks God for help of their own free will, a crew of astral paramedics arrive to escort him to the healing places for rest and recuperation. Some spirits are refusing to acknowledge that they are dead and make desperate and futile attempts to move to the earthly world they have left, but to which they cannot return  – without going through the whole process until their next incarnation.

**********************

The book Proof of Heaven, Dr. Eban Alexander’s account of his NDE, also contains a good deal of  information and description about the nature of the after-death world, from which he returned. But here, the descriptions come from the pen of someone at the other end of the scale than Chico Xavier. He was a skeptical agnostic about life after death –  as expected, perhaps required, from the guild of his professional peers.  Dr. Alexander was a highly trained and experienced neurosurgeon, who had heard accounts of NDEs from patients he had treated, but considered them fantasies produced by the brain under stress.  His nervous system had contracted a rare viral illness that attacked the two higher levels of the brain, leaving him in a comatose, vegetative state – in which he remained for seven days.

On the day when his doctors and family decided they were going to take him off the continuous drip-feed of antibiotics – he unexpectedly opened his eyes and announced that he had come back. He made a complete recovery of all his functions – a process that took several months, during which he also put in writing everything that he experienced during his OBE/NDE  – one of the most complex, detailed and vivid accounts I have read. Raymond Moody, M.D., one of the first physicians to study and report on NDEs writes that “Dr. Eban Alexander’s near-death experience is the most astounding I have heard in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon. He is living proof of an after-life.”

Eban Alexander’s account of the after-death realms is consistent with that of Chico Xavier in several respects. He talks about the first memories he has of being in a realm he later came to call “the earthworm’s-eye view” – a dark, featureless, human-less world of clammy, mud. Reminiscent of other descriptions of the realm of those who do not yet realize they have died. In comparison to other published accounts of NDEs, Alexander’s account is distinctive in that it has no descriptions of going through a tunnel and meeting light-beings who escort him – he was just hurtled straight into a bodiless realm. He eventually learned that all he had to do to bring himself to the higher realms was to think of them (“thought directs energy”) and long for them (“longing leads to belonging”).

During my time out of my body, I accomplished the back-and-forth movement from the muddy darkness of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View to the green brilliance of the Gateway and into the black but holy darkness of the Core any number of times. …Each time I went to the Core I went deeper than before, and was taught more, in the wordless, more-than-verbal way that all things are communicated in the worlds above this one. ..One of the truths driven home to me in the Core each time I returned to it was how impossible it would be to understand all that exists – either its physical/visible side or its (much, much larger) spiritual/invisible side, not to mention the countless other universes that exist or have ever existed.

But none of that mattered, because I had already been taught the one thing – the only thing–that, in the last analysis, truly matters. I had initially received this piece of knowledge from my lovely companion on the butterfly wing upon my first entrance into the Gateway. It came in three parts, and to take one more shot at putting it into words (because of course it was delivered wordlessly), it would run something like this:

You are loved and cherished.
You have nothing to fear.
There is nothing you can do wrong.

There is much more in this fascinating true-life account, which surely delivers a powerful but compassionate blow to the entrenched materialist worldview of modern science and medicine – by a highly qualified member of its intellectual elite.  One of the things I appreciated especially about Dr. Alexander’s book is the Appendix in which he systematically lists and refutes nine “neuroscientific hypotheses I considered to explain my experience.” One of these was a “DMT dump from the pineal.” He refutes this explanation by saying “my cortex was off, and the DMT would have had no place in the brain to act…the hypothesis fails on the basis of the ultra-reality of the audio-visual experience, and the lack of cortex on which to act.”

Filed under: Consciousness, Current Events, Divination, Films, Holistic Healing, Science, Spirituality | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Jan 2013: New Year’s Visions

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Ralph Metzner

Updates from the front lines of the Drug War insanity.

The number of people in prison in America declined last year for the second year in a row, according to a  new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of prisoners at the end of 2011 dropped to just under 1.6 million, a 0.9% decrease over the previous year. Of those 1.6 million prisoners, some 330,000 were doing time for drug offenses, including nearly 95,000 doing federal time. Drug offenders constitute 48% of all federal inmates, or some 94,600 inmates. There were 15,023 fewer inmates at the end of 2011 than a year earlier, but that number is more than accounted for by a single state, California, which reported a decline of 15,493 prisoners due primarily to an incarceration realignment program that has sent what would have been state prisoners to county jails instead. Counting just state prison populations, 2011 saw a decline of 21,164 prisoners, or 1.5%, again with California accounting for 72% of the decrease. (Source: Alternet, December 26, 2012)

From the Department of Inspiration – economic survival

On a trash dump in Paraguay, where a musical instrument costs more than a house, youngsters have made violins, cellos, flutes and other instruments from landfill cast-offs and are playing heavenly music. http://vimeo.com/52711779

Bolivian President Evo Morales on the meaning of the 2012 solstice

In a speech at the time of the Winter Solstice, Bolivian president Evo Morales said December 21 marks ‘end of an anthropocentric life and the beginning of a bio-centric life. It is the end of hatred and the beginning of love, the end of lies and beginning of truth’. In an open invitation to celebrate the day, Morales explained that “the Mayan calendar’s  21 of December is the end of the non-time and the beginning of time. It is the end of the Macha and the beginning of the Pacha, the end of selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood, it is the end of individualism and the beginning of collectivism.”

The Bolivian government has hailed the solstice as the start of an age in which community and collectivity will prevail over capitalism and individuality. Those themes have long been present in Morales’s discourse, especially in the idea of vivir bien, or living well. He has stressed the importance of a harmonious balance between human life and the planet, though some people question its application in Bolivia, where the economy depends heavily on mining, oil and gas industries. Source:  Friday, December 21, 2012 by Common Dreams

2012: Year of Indigenous Resistance in Mexico
In a almost step-by-step replay of their New Years’ Day 1994 uprising, tens of thousands of masked and uniformed members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) marched in military formation into five Chiapas towns. A big difference between this year’s action and the one nearly 19 years ago is that the Mayan Zapatistas of 2012 did not carry guns or utter words. And according to Proceso magazine, their numbers this year- estimated between 30,000 and 50,000 people- were many-fold greater than the several thousand fighters who launched the 1994 revolt on the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect.The emblematic Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, who mysteriously vanished from the public limelight during the past four years, delivered a brief but ironic message issued by the EZLN’s Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command that declared in part, “Did your hear? This is the sound of your world being torn down, and of ours resurging…” Source: http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8769. Posted on: 27/12/2012 by Kent Paterson And: http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8775 Posted on: 30/12/2012 by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez

From the Department of Inspiration – political

An Israeli activist produced a 2-minute video on the Internet,  in which he speaks directly, heart-to-heart, to the Iranian people offering peace, love and understanding. Within days, the video peace offering produced thousands of responses with pictures, from Iranians in all walks of life, as well as citizens from other countries.

Lincoln and Django Unchained – a comparative review.

Two movies hit the big screens this year dealing with the history of slavery in the USA.  Lincoln, made by Steven Stielberg,  is focused on the battle Abraham Lincoln waged in Congress to pass the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing slavery for ever. Django Unchained, made by Quentin Tarantino, situated in time two years before the start of the Civil war on a Southern Plantation, paints a vivid picture of the violence and human degradation endemic to the institution of slavery, through the eyes of an amoral bounty-hunter and a freed slave bent on revenge.  Both movies could be said to be “anti-slavery,” and thus pass the basic ethics test in film criticism.  Viewers and reviewers can then freely appreciate the dramatic flair,  cinematic  story-telling skill and acting, without any deeper reflection on what is being shown and what it means for our  common humanity.

There is a world of difference however between the two films in how they present the ethical and human implications of the history of slavery in the US.  Spielberg’s film is framed, at the beginning and the end, by two scenes of masses of dead soldiers in the Civil War. It is as much an anti-war movie as an anti-slavery movie. The rest of the film plays indoors, focusing on the political struggle Lincoln and his allies waged in Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

Tarantino’s film is filled from beginning to end with relentless, dramatic violence – slavers against slaves, liberators against slave owners. Fountains of blood gush spectacularly, in vivid red color, as our pair of amoral heroes go from one deadly encounter with repulsive bigots to another.  The two liberating heroes seem to never get hit themselves, though they regularly and casually shoot dozens of armed men. There is obvious exhilaration in the characters (and in the audience of the film) as really bad evil guys get their just deserts – and the liberated slave hero rides off into the sunset with the liberated female slave that he loves.  To my mind, Tarantino’s film is a prime example of what has been called the “pornography of violence. ” Under the guise of deploring violent abuse and killing of others,  it dramatizes and glorifies it, leaving viewers with a clear conscience to imagine how they too might have found satisfaction killing really bad, evil guys.

Patriotism as the propaganda mask for militaristic capitalism

In an article published January 3, 2013 by Common Dreams  Michael Moore scathingly skewers the hypocrisy involved in offical claims and calls to support our troops. Moore points to the ways our government utterly fails the young men and women it solicits to join the military – issues that are finally hitting the news with increasing urgency:

One – the staggering suicide rate among vets  – an estimated eighteen veterans kill themselves each day.  This figure is likely an underestimate, because the VA doesn’t keep records on those who have been discharged and choose not seek contact.

Two – there are more soldiers killing themselves than soldiers being killed in combat.  Military suicides jumped 50 percent between 2001 and 2008 and reached new highs this year (2012): The 26 suicides in July more than doubled the Army’s total from the previous month.  Fortunately, these numbers have led to alarming reports from Department of Defense and in Congress, and new funding allocated to the VA for suicide prevention and mental health and services.

Three – A staggering number of females in the military are raped by fellow soldiers: 19,000 (mostly) female troops are raped or sexually assaulted every year , and the rapes often officially ignored and unreported.  These figures too have recently become front-page news, and the services have taken some steps to ameliorate  the situation.

Four –  The Huffington Post reports http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/bank-of-america-illegal-foreclosures_n_1118471.html, that banks may have illegally foreclosed on nearly 5,000. This surely qualifies as a most devastating and callous blow to the soldiers and their families: go fight for your country, get killed or wounded, receive inadequate treatment, and while you’re over there, you and your family may lose their home to a bank.

Five –  A staggering number of veterans are homeless: on any given night, at least 60,000 veterans are sleeping on the streets.

The lessons from this situation are clear: One, for those young men and women who are considering joining up – think again, get informed, consult with Veterans for Peace and other groups, to find out what the wars are really like (refer to link on website). Two, as the hippies already said in the 1960s: Support the troops – bring them home! and let’s take care of the wounded and traumatized and help them re-integrate into their communities.

From the Department of Inspiration – cosmic/historical

Click on this link and you will see an amazing 2-minute video portraying, purely in images, the history of the cosmos, evolution and humanity. It was made by a pair of French videographers and is truly awesome. http://marcbrecy.perso.neuf.fr/history.html

The only film I can compare it to is Brian Swimme’s film Journey of the Universe – Epic Story of Cosmic, Earth and Human Transformation  which takes 55 minutes to tell the same story, with commentary of course. ( See review at GreenEarthFound.org)

Filed under: Current Events, Economics & Finance, Films, Holistic Healing, Modern History, Politics, Science, Spirituality | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

The healing virtues and schizoid politics of cannabis

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

More and more reports of the unexpected healing efficacy of cannabis are being distributed in the underground media. In a recent posting on Alternet,  Laura Gottesdiener relates several stories of  “miraculous” (i.e. unexplained by current science) healings with cannabis.

  • A six-year old boy with a rare form of epilepsy that involved daily seizures, inability to eat solid food or walk around, had 40 hospitalizations and was taking 22 pills daily – all to no effect. His parents began to treat their son with a liquid form of medical cannabis, which dramatically reduced the seizures, so he could eat, run and swim.
  • An 8-month old baby had a brain tumor that couldn’t be operated. Before agreeing to chemotherapy and/or radiation treatment, the parents decided to try rubbing cannabinoid oil by rubbing it into the baby’s pacifier. After two months, the reduction in tumor size was so significant, that the pediatric oncologist decided to continue that treatment rather than chemotherapy.
  •  A two-year old boy in Montana with a brain tumor was being treated with chemotherapy that made the boy blind and too sick to eat. His father gave him cannabis oil through his feeding tube, and after two weeks he could eat solid food again.
  • A recent medical research study reports evidence that cannabinoid drugs (similar in structure to cannabis) not only are effective in treating the appetite loss associated with HIV infection, but may deter the HIV virus from turning into AIDS.
  • Two American twin girls had been raised from infancy with their mother’s hate–filled Neo-Nazi ideology and as teenagers formed and performed in a pop-band called Prussian Blue. When they were diagnosed with cancer and scoliosis, they were given a cocktail of medicines that included cannabis, which gave them “a new outlook on life.” They quit crusading for Aryan power and are now working to help legalize medical cannabis.
  •  Cannabis can apparently have psychosomatic healing effects without being ingested in food or medicine, but simply by its aroma. In the 1990s in Switzerland, when regulatory authorities, hemp farmers and cannabis smokers were negotiating back and forth to find a suitable socio-legal framework for their interests in this ancient plant, there was a time when one could legally sell and buy little cloth bags of cannabis sativa leaves and flowers,  called Duftsäckli (“aroma sachets”), to be exclusively used for “aromatizing” a room or a bed. The pot smokers of course bought these and smoked the contents – until the authorities closed the regulatory loop hole. Berlin journalist and friend Mathias Broeckers wrote to me –
  • An amazing story I heard during a visit to a nursing home for senior citizens. One of the hemp activists had persuaded the staff of this nursing home to distribute cannabis aroma sachets into the beds of the seniors and also to hang additional sachets in the room. The seniors did not know that it was cannabis that was making their rooms smell so sweet, but the nursing staff was asked to note whether there was any change in the sleep patterns of the residents. And this was exactly what happened – the residents slept better and requested significant less sleep medication.

An extraordinary healing transformation also happened with one of the residents of this home who suffered from a kind of Tourettes syndrome. Anyone who passed by her as she sat in her wheelchair was berated with a stream of curses and obscenities. Normally, the staff dealt with her by keeping her heavily sedated, so that she sat in a kind of permanently somnolent daze. The staff then came upon the idea of serving her breakfast toast spread with herb-butter. This herb-butter was made according to a traditional Eastern European recipe with hemp-flowers – and the effect on the old lady was dramatic: instead of bickering and cursing anyone who approached her, she became very  friendly and even began to flirt with the mail-man who came daily. I was traveling once with the producer of this hemp-butter, when an urgent phone call came from the staff of the nursing home: they had run out of their hemp-butter supply and urgently requested more, since the old lady was driving everyone nuts with her cursing and berating.

Meanwhile, while the evidence accumulates of the therapeutic and psychological virtues of cannabis, the American political class at the federal level is turning ideological cart-wheels in order to somehow reconcile the irrefutable evidence of medical value and the increasing trend for states to legalize not only medical but recreational use – with the archaic prohibitionist mind-set inherited from decades of a so-called “war on drugs” which is blindly maintained by the hugely bloated and out-of-control military-industrial-medical-prison complex.

A tremendous contribution to popular education about the true potential medicinal virtues of cannabis is made in the recent film by Len Richmond What if Cannabis Cured Cancer?  To my mind, the most significant point made by the film is the recognition and identification of the endocannabinoid system as an integral branch of our immune system, evolved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, as far back as invertebrates. The following quote is extracted from an internet article  - http://norml.org/library/item/introduction-to-the-endocannabinoid-system.

The endogenous cannabinoid system, named after the plant that led to its discovery, is perhaps the most important physiologic system involved in establishing and maintaining human health. Endocannabinoids and their receptors are found throughout the body: in the brain, organs, connective tissues, glands, and immune cells. In each tissue, the cannabinoid system performs different tasks, but the goal is always the same: homeostasis, the maintenance of a stable internal environment despite fluctuations in the external environment. Cannabinoids promote homeostasis at every level of biological life, from the sub-cellular, to the organism, and perhaps to the community and beyond.

Raphael Mechoulam, the Israeli scientist whose research  identified tetrahydrocannabinol as the chief psychoactive ingredient in the cannabis plant, has summarized the action of cannabis in the body: stimulating the endogenous cannabinoid system, as relaxing (promoting rest and sleep), increasing appetite (countering nausea and wasting) and forgetting. He particularly emphasizes the importance of forgetting – since it is important to survival to not remember every detail of all of our daily experience.

One might say the capacity to forget is integral to the healing and stress-relieving virtues of cannabis – common observation supports the notion that evening pot-smokers feel relieved and relaxed with the forgetting of the stressors that bombard us all day long. Of course, this also means that you would not want to consume cannabis when you are a student in a learning situation, where you need to remember details of facts and figures. Whether or not cannabis suppresses actual dreaming and the REM sleep associated with dreaming has not been definitely established.  It lessens dream recall, though this apparently comes back, when one stops smoking weed, as I have also confirmed.  I remember Terence McKenna telling me that when he discontinued his almost daily consumption of cannabis, he would be experience a veritable barrage of remembered dreams on awakening.

From personal and shared observation I would add two further aspects to the list of cannabis actions on the human body-mind complex – sensory pleasure and humor. The enhancement of sensory enjoyment is recognized in the heightened taste pleasure with eating, and also the heightened sensual pleasure of erotic contact. The heightened auditory pleasure induced by cannabis is well known to jazz musicians, who were perhaps the first to introduce the plant into popular culture. This effect may be caused by a sense of time dilation, giving the listener seemingly more time to appreciate the subtle variations of tone and rhythm in a piece of music.

The stimulating effect of cannabis on humor and laughter is too well known to require much proof. In the film Can Cannabis Cure Cancer, some of the interview subjects can barely contain their veritable fits of laughter. Whether thus implies stimulation of a humor center in the brain, is unknown,  but we can definitely assume it is connected to the stress-relieving and healing effects. “Laughter is the best medicine” as the old saying goes.

In an old R. Crumb cartoon that appeared sometime in the sixties, two very stoned-looking dudes are sitting on a porch in a small Western town, and a motorcyclist who has evidently just roared through town, is on the way out. One of the dudes turns to the other and says – “Man, I thought he’d never leave.”

Filed under: Current Events, Films, Holistic Healing, Politics, Psychedelics, Science, Spirituality | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Flash mob dancing in Red Square

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

Filed under: Current Events, Films | 2 Comments »

JFK, Mary Pinchot Meyer and the Leary Connection

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

Over two thousand books have been written about the life and death of John F. Kennedy almost 50 years ago and 60% of the American people don’t believe the “lone assassin” theory espoused by the official Warren Commission report. It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that if the real assassins have not been brought to justice, they have been and still are, if alive, “hiding in plain sight.” A fractious consensus among assassination researchers points to multiple, complex conspiracies involving elements in the CIA, the military, the mob and Cuban exile groups – all of whom had demonstrated antagonism against the President, thus the motive and the means to carry out the crime.

I am going to discuss two recently published books: (1) David Talbot’s Brothers – The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007) and (2) Peter Janney’s Mary’s Mosaic – The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2012). Both are extensively documented and annotated books of over 400 pages, telling complex stories impossible to summarize. I will follow the example of Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, and state out front the view that I have come to hold, so that the reader can know what my bias is, rather than trying to pretend I don’t have one. I have come to believe that the multiple assassinations of leaders (JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X to name only four of the most prominent) that occurred in the 1960s signaled the end of the American republic and the establishment of a military-industrial empire, governed according to increasingly secretive, fascistic and militaristic principles, with the formerly “free press” reduced to being the propaganda extension of the controlling elites.

The assassination of JFK brought about the end of the American republic analogously to the way the assassination of Julius Caesar by a cabal of wealthy land-owner senators, whose power and influence Caesar had started to break up, brought about the end of the 500-hundred year history of the Roman Republic and was followed by a totalitarian empire. For a fascinating fresh look at that event, read historian Michael Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003).

David Talbot’s Brothers focuses on the relationship of JFK and Robert Kennedy, who became not only his attorney general, but his most trusted advisory as it became clear that, because of the debacle of the botched Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion he could not trust the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, who were always itching to go to war (that’s what the military always want) and had become his sworn enemies. He also could not trust the CIA (which he said he wanted to “splinter into a thousand pieces”) when he realized they were always pursuing their own subversive agendas in various parts of the world, without any oversight or even truthful disclosure, as required by law. The CIA and their Cuban exile allies wanted to take Cuba back from Castro and were deeply resentful of what they perceived as Kennedy’s failure to follow-up their Bay of Pigs invasion agenda by “sending in the Marines” even though Kennedy had assured them beforehand he had no intention of doing so.

During the Cuban missile crisis, when the entire world came within a hair’s breadth of exchanging nuclear missiles and terminating civilization as we know it, JFK only managed to defuse the situation through his personal back-channel connection to Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet Premier who was similarly being pushed by his military commanders breathing down his neck to let fly the missiles. The two men talked directly, but secretly, by telephone and agreed to turn their respective countries away from war and toward peace. Kennedy and Krushchev thereafter started taking the first, small steps toward a negotiated, gradual disarmament process. As a life-long peace activist, this was to me the most moving and dramatic revelation of Talbot’s book – to know that at the height of maximum tension in the Cold War, these two warriors at the heads of their respective imperial armies reached out and agreed to take steps to avert and avoid war for ever. Immediately after the assassination, Robert Kennedy, who was of course aware of his brother’s plans and activities, took pains to use his own back channel connection with the Kremlin to assure Krushchev that he and the Americans were not blaming the Soviets for his brother’s assassination (knowing that the CIA and the military would have attempted to do just that).

Peter Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic is about Mary Pinchot Meyer – a woman whom Kennedy really loved (unlike the numerous bimbos his sex addiction brought to his bed) and with whom he came to share his vision of turning the world toward a lasting peace. Mary Meyer was assassinated in a Washington park where she was walking, a few months after the JFK assassination. An uneducated black man walking nearby was arrested and tried for the murder – but acquitted for lack of credible evidence. Since Mary Meyer came from an upper class family and had relatives and friends in high places (her former husband was Cord Meyer, who was a high CIA official) her death occupied the rumor mills for quite a while, but then receded into oblivion as yet another unsolved murder case. Peter Janney, who spent forty years researching this book, had a personal connection to Mary Meyer since he was best friends with her son, who got killed in an automobile accident as a child. And Janney’s father was also a high-ranking CIA official, making with Cord Meyer and James Angleton, a trio of CIA spooks who feature repeatedly in the various conspiratorial scenarios that swirl around the assassinations of the 1960s and beyond.

I found his book incredibly interesting and powerful, blending a poignant story of personal tragedy with stories of outrageous criminality in the highest corridors of the American imperial court. The Mary Meyer murder story, which features briefly in David Talbot’s book and hardly at all in most other Kennedy books is the central focus of Janney’s book, because of his personal connection to her family. My old friend and colleague Tim Leary also features in the Mary Meyer story, although I personally never heard him talk about this connection. (It does not surprise me at all that Leary would keep his contacts with Mary secret, at her request). In his autobiography Flashbacks, Leary relates that Mary came to see him in 1962-63, seeking guidance on how to guide LSD sessions for a small group of Washington insider wives, who were wanting to turn the world system to world peace. They had a few meetings, Mary reported that things were going well – but then something happened that alarmed her, her peace conspiracy had been discovered. She warned Leary to lie low, they lost contact. Then in November 1963, JFK was killed, three or four months later Mary Meyer was killed. Many people believe that Mary kept a diary of her meetings with JFK, which the CIA and others were anxious to retrieve.

Regardless of whether there was a diary in which Mary described her affair with the President and/or his designs for peace – a supposition that I for one find unlikely, given the woman’s obvious understanding of the explosiveness of their thinking if it was revealed prematurely or at all. Janney’s book includes a description of a never-before published two-hour interview of Tim Leary and what he knew about Mary Meyer, conducted by Leo Damore (himself an assassination researcher who died of a sudden brain tumor before he could finish his own book) in 1990 (i.e. more than forty years after the assassination) confirming much of the story Leary told in Flashbacks, and adding details.

The conclusions emerging from this book are staggering –Kennedy and the only woman he truly loved took LSD together in the White House, conceiving and birthing their vision for world peace and how to bring it about. As Janney writes, explaining his concluding understanding of why she was killed, –

After Dallas, amid utter horror and shock, Mary had taken it upon herself to to discover and make sense of the truth of the conspiracy that had taken place – only to realize the magnitude of the second conspiracy, a cover-up taking place right before her eyes.. It was her own mosaic of people, events, circumstances, and exploration that informed her understanding – not only of the evil that had taken place in Dallas, but of the villainous darkness that was now enveloping all of America. She had furiously confronted her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, possibly Jim Angleton as well, with what she had discovered, not fully realizing the extent of their own diabolical ruthlessness. The Warren Report was nothing but a house of cards; once ignited, it would be engulfed in flames. If Mary courageously went public with who she was, and what she knew, making clear her position in the final years of Jack’s life, people with influence would take notice; the fire of suspicion around Dallas would erupt into a conflagration. She had to be eliminated (p. 391).

This book shines a brave and brilliant light of truth into a still dark and somber chapter of American history (irrespective of whether the story he tells is precisely true in all its details), a crucial turning point on the pathway from republican democracy to military empire, a pathway on which he are still marching, blinded by fear and ignorance. May these two books (and others now coming out about the Kennedy era) contribute to our awakening and a returning to sanity.

Filed under: Current Events, Modern History, Politics, Psychedelics, Roots of War & Domination, The Sixties | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

The American Imperial Project – Who Benefits and Who Pays?

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

An article by Paul Craig Roberts published on the Global Research website (www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29988) makes some insightful comments about the American empire in comparison with empires of the past.

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance…The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

The ruling elites in empires past and present invent a myth justifying (to themselves and their own citizens) their imperial domination project in terms of the alleged civilizing benefits they bring to conquered and subservient peoples. Roberts quotes a book by historian Timothy H. Parsons – The Rule of Empires (2010), which replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. In my book Green Psychology (1999) I wrote about the self-justifying stories told by invaders and dominators, going back to the Indo-European pastoralist tribes that invaded settled farming communities in Old Europe during the Neolithic.

In his blog, Roberts cites the historian Parsons as wondering

whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations. America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars.

So what is it all about? Cui bono – who benefits -  is the question any criminal investigators seeks to answer. The answer to this question that Roberts, Parsons and others, including Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn provide is obvious once clearly stated. Paul Craig Roberts continues -

The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty (my italics – RM).
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end, another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined. Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens (my italics – RM).

Here is the reason why the “bloated budgets” and “obscene profits” of the military-industrial-security complex, while the government expenditures on health, education, social welfare, environmental preservation keep being “slashed” in the name of some fictitious theory “balancing” theory.

Roberts concludes his comments by saying -

It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are also the victims of the American empire.

Filed under: Current Events, Economics & Finance, Green Psychology, Modern History, Politics, Roots of War & Domination | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

CIA, LSD and Chemical Warfare – Part II

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

In my blog dated Jan 23, 2012, I reported a story from the UK Telegraph, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli,  on covert CIA experiments with LSD, which allegedly resulted in an incident of mass ergot poisoning through contaminated bread in the French village Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.

I should have known better than to uncritically accept a story involving the CIA, the undisputed world masters at disinformation propaganda. Dieter Hagenbach, co-author of the recently published authoritative biography of Albert Hofmann, wrote to tell me that they investigated this story. Here, in extract, is what he and his co-author Lucius Werthmüller,  found. (Albert Hofmann und sein LSD, published by AT Verlag, 2011, has not as yet come out in an English translation).

The authors relate that Albert Hofmann and Werner Stoll,  the two Sandoz scientists most knowledgeable about ergot alkaloids and toxicity travelled to France in 1951, and talked to French research chemist Henri Olivier in Marseille, as well as physicians and psychiatrists who had investigated the epidemic and several of the patients who had suffered the symptoms of the pain maudit, the “cursed bread” as it was called. The chemical analyses and medical symptoms had led to a provisional conclusion of an ergot toxicosis.

Hofmann and Stoll took several kilograms of the flour and 600 grams of the bread that had been consumed in the episode in order to subject it to exhaustive chemical and toxicological analyses. The results were contradictory: a chemical analysis suggested the toxicity came from a mercury-containing seed-stock disinfectant, while a psychiatrist concluded the psychological symptoms resembled ergot poisoning. Albert Hofmann wrote in his concluding report to his superiors that “on the basis of the colorimetric analyses of the three samples, none of them contained ergot alkaloids.” Thus, the effects found in Pont-Saint-Esprit “remain a mystery. Neither LSD nor mercury produce the kinds of symptoms that had been reported. LSD does not produce intense toxic, organic reactions nor do the intense hallucinations reported correspond to any known forms of mercury poisoning.” (op.cit. p.99). They also pointed out that LSD could not have been involved in the poisoned bread since LSD dissolves rapidly in air and upon exposure to sunlight, or upon being dissolved in water, or being baked in bread.

Hagenbach and Werthmüller further discuss the sensationalist account of the episode found in a 2009 book by H.P. Albarelli – which had raised the possibility that the Pont-Saint-Esprit episode was part of  secret CIA cold war experiments with mass poisonings by anthrax and other biological warfare agents carried out under the direction of Frank Olson in the US Army laboratories at Fort Detrick in the 1950s. The actual nature of his work was, and remained, top-secret.  What is known is that Olson became horrified by the work that he was participating in. He either committed suicide or was pushed out of a window in New York, after being surreptitiously dosed with LSD by other CIA agents in 1953. A wrongful death case brought by his widow and family resulted in 1975 in a payment $750,000, together with an invitation to the White House where President Gerald Ford and CIA-Director William Colby personally apologized to the family. The exact details of the work he was involved in or how he was poisoned have remained secret. A website exists that is still accumulating data and reports relating to his case.

Hagenbach and Werthmüller concluded that “a connection between Frank Olson and Albert Hofmann or Sandoz cannot be found, and Hofmann’s diaries do not support even the slightest suspicion that he and Stoll had participated in an investigation of a secret CIA action.”

Despite Hofmann and Stoll’s conclusive rejection of any possible connection between the Pont-Saint-Esprit episode and LSD, a 1968 book by John G. Fuller – The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire – repeated the same fabrication, with embellishments. New York psychiatrist John Beresford, MD (1924-2007; who was known to and friends with Leary, myself and the Harvard researchers, and who later dedicated himself to working with people that had been unjustly incarcerated as victims of America’s punitive drug-war laws) was troubled by the implications suggested in Fuller’s book and wrote to Hofmann concerning the concerns it raised for him. Hofmann replied in a letter to Beresford, using unmistakeably indignant language.

“The citations in John Fuller’s book The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire are invented fictions as is the great majority of what he wrote in this book. .. The whole work is a scandal. It has been proven conclusively that ergot was not involved in the Pont-Saint-Esprit episode. Mr Fuller must have known this fact. … To mention just one fact that shows the falsehood of Fuller’s writing – LSD is a semi-synthetic product, that occurs as such neither in ergot nor anywhere else in nature. …Mr Fuller has misused ergot, St. Anthony’s Fire and LSD in order to try to write a best-selling work.” (Hagenbach & Werthmüller, p. 101).

Filed under: Consciousness, Current Events, Modern History, Politics, Psychedelics, Science, The Sixties | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Howard Zinn Remembered – by Noam Chomsky

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

The following remarks below are excerpted from a tribute to the late Howard Zinn by his friend the eminent linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky, published in Al Jazeera, 27 January 2012, the second anniversary of the death of Howard Zinn. Zinn was dismissed in 1963 from his position as a tenured professor at Spelman College in Atlanta after siding with black women students in the struggle against segregation. In 1967, he wrote, one of the first, and most influential, books Vietnam-The Logic of Withdrawal, calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. A veteran of the US Army Air Force, he and Noam Chomsky edited The Pentagon Papers, leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and was later designated a “high security risk” by the FBI. Toward the end of his life, Zinn said he wanted to be known as “somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.”  In an interview he said he wanted to rehabilitate the term “socialism” which had became tainted by its identification with Soviet communism. He said he considered himself politically an “anarchist, socialist … maybe a democratic socialist.”

His best-selling  A People’s History of the United States spawned a new field of historical study: People’s Histories. This approach countered the traditional triumphalist examination of “history as written by the victors”, instead concentrating on the poor and seemingly powerless; those who resisted imperial, cultural and corporate hegemony. Since its publication in 1980, the book has sold 1.7 million copies, became required reading in thousands of classes, been turned into a play, and excerpted on audio CDs read by Zinn and actor Matt  Damon. The People Speak, released in 2010, is a documentary movie inspired by the lives of ordinary people who fought back against oppressive conditions over the course of the history of the United States. Watch a preview:
The film includes performances by Zinn, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Viggo Mortensen, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Don Cheadle, and Sandra Oh.  The book was posted in its entirety at zero cost on the internet by an anonymous group calling themselves History is a Weapon with Zinn’s approval, despite the book publisher’s opposition (A People’s History of the United States). In 2008, a graphic adaptation by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki and Pul Buhle was published as A People’s History of American Empire, concentrating on America’s imperial role in the world. Significantly, this version also followed the Zinn model of history-writing – to place the historian’s point of view clearly into the narrative.

His uniquely personal, engaged and engaging views on history and modern society also were expressed in  short plays: a one-person play called Marx in Soho: A Play on History (1999) and another short play Emma: A Play in Two Acts about Emma Goldman, American Anarchist (2002).

His memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn’s life and work.

Here is what Noam Chomsky wrote in his memorial tribute:  

It is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian. He was a very close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too. His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvellous person and close friend. Also somber is the realisation that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars, but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed – which was constant. A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Howard’s remarkable life and work are summarised best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of “those great moments” that enter the historical record – a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments.

That was true when he was an industrial worker and labour activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite. While teaching at Spelman, Howard supported the students who were at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement in its early and most dangerous days, many of whom became quite well-known in later years – Alice Walker, Julian Bond and others – and who loved and revered him, as did everyone who knew him well. And as always, he did not just support them, which was rare enough, but also participated directly with them in their most hazardous efforts – no easy undertaking at that time, before there was any organised popular movement and in the face of government hostility that lasted for some years. Finally, popular support was ignited, in large part by the courageous actions of the young people who were sitting in at lunch counters, riding freedom buses, organising demonstrations, facing bitter racism and brutality, sometimes death.

By the early 1960s, a mass popular movement was taking shape, by then with Martin Luther King in a leadership role – and the government had to respond. As a reward for his courage and honesty, Howard was soon expelled from the college where he taught. A few years later, he wrote the standard work on SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), the major organisation of those “unknown people” whose “countless small actions” played such an important part in creating the groundswell that enabled King to gain significant influence – as I am sure he would have been the first to say – and to bring the country to honour the constitutional amendments of a century earlier that had theoretically granted elementary civil rights to former slaves – at least to do so partially; no need to stress that there remains a long way to go. …

After being expelled from the Atlanta college where he taught, Howard came to Boston, and spent the rest of his academic career at Boston University, where he was, I am sure, the most admired and loved faculty member on campus, and the target of bitter antagonism and petty cruelty on the part of the administration. In later years, however, after his retirement, he gained the public honour and respect that was always overwhelming among students, staff, much of the faculty, and the general community. While there, Howard wrote the books that brought him well-deserved fame.

His book Vietnam – The Logic of Withdrawal, in 1967, was the first to express clearly and powerfully what many were then beginning barely to contemplate: that the US had no right even to call for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, leaving Washington with power and substantial control in the country it had invaded and by then already largely destroyed. Rather, the US should do what any aggressor should: withdraw, allow the population to somehow reconstruct as they could from the wreckage, and if minimal honesty could be attained, pay massive reparations for the crimes that the invading armies had committed, vast crimes in this case. The book had wide influence among the public, although to this day, its message can barely even be comprehended in elite educated circles, an indication of how much necessary work lies ahead. Among the general public by the war’s end, 70 per cent regarded the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral” a remarkable figure, considering the fact that scarcely a hint of such a thought was expressible in mainstream opinion.

Even more influential in the long run than Howard’s anti-war writings and actions was his enduring masterpiece, A People’s History of the United States, a book that literally changed the consciousness of a generation. Here he developed with care, lucidity and comprehensive sweep his fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it. Later, his “Voices” from the People’s History, now an acclaimed theatrical and television production, has brought to many the actual words of those forgotten or ignored people who have played such a valuable role in creating a better world.

Howard’s unique success in drawing the actions and voices of unknown people from the depths to which they had largely been consigned has spawned extensive historical research following a similar path, focusing on critical periods of US history, and turning to the record in other countries as well, a very welcome development. It is not entirely novel – there had been scholarly inquiries of particular topics before – but nothing to compare with Howard’s broad and incisive evocation of “history from below”, compensating for critical omissions in how US history had been interpreted and conveyed.

Howard’s dedicated activism continued, literally without a break, until the very end, even in his last years, when he was suffering from severe infirmity and personal loss – though one would hardly know it when meeting him or watching him speaking tirelessly to captivated audiences all over the country. Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight; a light touch of humour in the face of adversity, and dedication to non-violence and sheer decency. It is hard even to imagine how many young people’s lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.

Filed under: Current Events, Films, Modern History, Politics, Roots of War & Domination, The Sixties | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

An end to GM crop development for Europe


Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

Awareness of and resistance to food from genetically modified organisms is much greater in Europe than the US. The battles between the industrial food and chemistry corporations on the one hand and public health experts, food nutritionists and small-scale organic farmers on the other hand, have been raging for years in Europe, yet have barely begun to emerge into US public media awareness. The news reported below, from the Financial Times, reports a watershed development.

BASF, the German chemical giant, is to pull out of genetically modified [GM] plant development in Europe and relocate it to the US, where political and consumer resistance to GM crops is not so entrenched. The headquarters of BASF Plant Science will move from south-west Germany to Raleigh, North Carolina, and two smaller sites in Germany and Sweden will close. The company will transfer some GM crop development to the US but stop work on crops targeted at the European market – four varieties of potato and one of wheat. The decision … signals the end of GM crop development for European farmers. Bayer, BASF’s German competitor, is working on GM cotton and rice in Ghent, Belgium – but not for European markets. “This is another nail in the coffin for genetically modified foods in Europe,” said Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth. BASF battled for some 13 years before the European Union approved in 2010 cultivation of its Amflora potato, which was intended to provide high-quality starch for industrial customers. However, German test sites had to be put under constant guard and activists still succeeded in destroying potato fields.

From an article in Financial Times
, Jan 16, 2012.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6e074ee4-403e-11e1-82f6-00144feab49a.html#axzz1jkDcQbe9

The European public is well aware of the serious threats of GM food, yet the U.S. public, Seeds of Deception is a book by Jeffrey M. Smith, which exposes industry and government deception about the safety of genetically engineered foods. John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, says of this book “clear, profound and unerringly accurate, .. tells you what you need to know about genetically engineered food – and what Monsanto won’t tell you.” For a ten-page summary click here.

For key articles from major media sources on the risks of genetically modified foods, click here.  This and the other two sources listed here come from the excellent wanttoknow.info series of websites.

This excellent website has a 12-page list and description of seasoned and respected journalists who have exposed mass media cover-ups on a variety of topics. The general public generally knows very little about this. For details on the work of these courageous and independent-minded journalists, click on this link controlled media. Here are excerpts from the revealing accounts of 20 award-winning journalists in the highly acclaimed book Into the Buzzsaw. These courageous writers were prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major news stories. Some were even fired or laid off. They have won numerous awards, including several Emmys and a Pulitzer. A partial list of the journalists whose work was censored by the major media is Jane Akre, Dan Rather, Monika Jensen-Stevenson, Kristian Borjesson, Greg Palast, Michael Levine, Gary Webb, Joh Kelly, Robert McChesney.

Filed under: Current Events, Ecology, Economics & Finance, Modern History, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,453 other followers