Overseas Voices

Overseas Voices: Peak Oil Crisis

2007-09-20T17:56:00.000+01:00

Overseas Voices:Peak Oil Crisis is now available and can be heard in the US on the Pacifica Radio Network.

Check with your local Pacifica affiliate for the scheduling of the program.

The audio can be downloaded/streamed from the public website at the following link:

Peak Oil Crisis audio

Swiss radio will also be broadcasting the program.

Your comments are welcome.

Views from abroad on four more years

2005-01-23T13:06:00.000Z

Americans should ask themselves whether the increase in hostility towards Americans and the U.S. fostered by Bush's policies has actually made us less safe. This American certainly believes so, besides the fact that it was largely unnecessary. Lessening this hostility would take decades in the best of circumstances, unfortunately we have another four years to get through. The best Americans can do in the mean time is to try to understand more about how we are perceived in the world and why - then hold our government to account by making our voices heard.

Global poll slams Bush leadership

More than half of people surveyed in a BBC World Service poll say the re-election of US President George W Bush has made the world more dangerous.

Newsweek summed it up well in their recent article “Dream On America”
: The U.S. Model: For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards. Other articles along similar lines of thinking follow:

Bush Bad for Global Peace, US Image, World Believes

German Papers: The Idol Worship of George W. Bush

World media: Bush inaugural a jolt

Fireworks in Washington, despair around the world (Robin Cook)

The American nation-state is out of bounds

2005-01-18T10:15:00.000Z

As a US citizen who has been permanently living abroad since 1988, it is most disturbing to observe the illegal and irrational global behaviour of the United States under the Bush/Cheney junta.

Just as disturbing has been the impotence of the US domestic media, having undergone unprecedented consolidation in recent years under the FCC leadership of Michael Powell.

There needs to be an expansion of the political discourse within the US community to fully understand just how the actions of the US are affecting the wider global community.

Overseas Voices will try to address the US community with relevant news and information that are not being told by the privatized, corporate US media.

We look forward to hearing from you about our project.

Mark

2004: More shame and disgrace than the year before

2005-01-17T13:11:00.000Z

Living in a cosmopolitan region of western Europe, I and most other Americans here experience very directly how most of America's best and oldest friends feel about America today. It is ugly. It has never been so ugly. All Americans need to know this.

We Americans in Europe would like our European friends to continue to admire America, just as they have done for so long--as a model of freedom, hope, and democracy. Instead, today's America of George W. Bush has come to be seen as a land of arrogance, ignorance, self-absorption, and blind aggression. Our young soldiers are now being forced to sacrifice their lives and limbs in a unilateral war unleashed for no good reason. This war of imperialism has destroyed much of Iraqi society while killing over 100,000 Iraqi people thus far--most of them civilians, and most of them women and children. These deaths continue to mount rapidly. Tellingly, no American official has even tried to suggest a Vietnam-like "light at the end of the tunnel," because they all see that the Bush regime's path in Iraq leads only to a deeper and darker abyss.

Serious newspapers and electronic media everywhere in Europe produce articles, interviews, histories, and commentaries each day that demonstrate a broad and deep rejection of George W. Bush, his administration, and its policies. Considering that Europeans have been our closest allies, try to guess what people outside of Europe think. The Bush regime has come to be seen not only as a bully, but as a global pariah.

[ Why is the Bush regime now seen as a global pariah? Click on the page link below to find out. There's much more: the election, a disastrous war, incompetence, rising fascism.... For the full story, click immediately below the "Page link for this post." ]

The election

Most of the world had fervently hoped for the demise of the Bush regime in the recent election, but these hopes were dashed in early November when slightly more than half the American electorate presumably voted to maintain the Bush regime in power.

This occurred against the Ohio and Florida swing-state backdrops of:

- active vote and voter suppression campaigns by the Republicans;

- voting machines (which left no paper trail) that were built, programmed, installed, and serviced by four companies of leading Republican donors; the head of the largest company, Diebold, stated that it was his "mission to deliver Ohio for George W. Bush;" the voting machine tabulation software cannot be examined by independent evaluators as it is protected by trade secrecy laws written by the companies' lobbyists, yet mid-level programming experts have shown they could "hack" into many of the machines in a matter of minutes;

- Ohio's 2004 chief election officer Kenneth Blackwell served as co-chair of the campaign to re-elect Bush while failing to install sufficient voting facilities in hundreds of Democratic precincts; Republican precincts suffered no such problem. Tens of thousands of potential Democratic voters gave up in Ohio after seeing the impossibly long lines; other tens of thousands braved waits of 6, 8, and even 10 hours, often in a driving cold rain; and

- Florida's 2004 chief election officer Glenda Hood was appointed to office by Bush's governor brother after having served as a Bush elector in the Florida electoral college delegation in 2000.

Exit polls showed clear wins for Kerry in both Florida and Ohio. Victory in either state would have given the presidency to Kerry. Pre-vote polls normally have a margin of error of 3-4%, but exit polls--especially when conducted by the biggest names in the business who have been doing them for some half a century--virtually never miss the target. They have a margin of error of 0.1 or 0.2%. That's many times less than the Kerry advantage shown by all the exit polls in Ohio and Florida. Exit polls don't lie. A University of Pennsylvania statistical study comparing exit poll results to reported official results concluded that the odds against an honest Bush victory are some 250 million to one. The many glaring official "errors" that have been corrected thus far had all initially over-credited Bush votes and/or under-credited Kerry votes. (On the internet, see: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111404A.shtml.)

So the United States has now shown itself to be a third-rate "democracy" that can look up to Ukraine as a model for election reform. America, which has traditionally referred to itself as the world's leading democracy, uses political appointees rather than independent commissions to run elections. It has replaced the verifiable paper ballot with voting machines that often malfunction and/or leave no verifiable record for recounts. It has no set of national voting standards. And it is the only developed country that holds elections on a normal workday as opposed to a weekend or special election holiday.

As it stands, Bush received his greatest support in the most backward states in the union--the most regressive and gun-obsessed, the least educated and least developed ones. The old confederacy--responsible for slavery, secession, and segregation, not to mention lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, the Scopes monkey trial, and dreams of a fundamentalist American theocracy--these states gave Bush his greatest electoral margins in both 2000 and 2004.

In contrast, polls taken in dozens of countries around the world showed Bush with a tiny fraction of Kerry’s support. Bush generally came in third in most foreign preference polls, behind both Kerry and "no opinion." Typical results in European countries were 80% for Kerry, 15% giving "no opinion," and 5% for Bush.

A disastrous war

Looking back at September 11, 2001, virtually the entire world was then on America's side (despite several Bush administration affronts to global cooperation, such as unilaterally withdrawing from the Kyoto environmental agreements and the world criminal court agreement.) The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban were seen by most of the world as completely justified, clear acts of defensive retaliation for the horrific, carefully planned acts of mass murder in New York and Washington. Just as the nation rallied behind its leadership following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, it again rallied behind its leadership 60 years later.

But the needless invasion of Iraq turned everything upside down. As the U.S. withdrew troops from the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan in order to stage the invasion of Iraq, there was a period of some months when Germany had more allied troops in Afghanistan than did the U.S. During this period, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld visited Berlin, where he directly insulted the German leadership for being part of an "old Europe" that refused to support the pre-planned U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell all said they had clear proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell had no such proof. And Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nor did Saddam have the equipment, labs, or factories to build them. Indeed, the United Nations sanctions had worked exactly as intended, as even Bush's own post-invasion weapons inspectors affirmed. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell had simply lied to the American people and lied to the world. As we know from Bush's former anti-terrorist czar Richard Clarke and Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush regime entered office in January 2001 planning to invade Iraq, and falsely conflated Saddam's Iraq with the September 11th attacks in order to push forward its plans.

The stubborn incompetence of the Bush regime boggles the mind. Having planned an invasion of Iraq since January 2001, the Bush regime utterly failed to conceive any exit plan, any plan for keeping the peace, or any plan for the effective deployment of occupation troops and material. Consider the following facts, recently compiled by senior American journalist Mark Shields:

"In the three years immediately after Pearl Harbor, the United States, a nation of 132 million people with a gross domestic product of less than $100 billion, produced the following to win World War II: 296,429 aircraft; 102,351 tanks; 87,620 warships, 372,4311 artillery pieces; 2,455,694 trucks."

Now a nation of some 285 million people with defense spending of over $500 billion [not gross domestic product, just defense spending] has only 5,910 of the 19,584 Humvees that U.S. troops in Iraq depend on protected with factory-installed armor. More than 8,000 of the 9,128 medium and heavyweight trucks transporting soldiers and supplies in the Iraq war zone are without armor. This is what the Bush regime calls "the best trained, best equipped" military ever. As Shields points out, "An America coming out of the Great Depression somehow found the leadership and the will to build and deploy around the globe 2.5 million trucks in the same period of time that the incumbent U.S. government has failed to get 30,000 fully armored vehicles to Iraq." Homemade bombs have caused half of all American casualties in Iraq, both dead and wounded; most of these casualties could have been prevented by adequate armor.

Another useful perspective from a few years ago demonstrates the futility of Rumsfeld's fantasy decisions on troop strength for "peace-keeping." During the height of "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, the British Army was assigned to keep the peace, much like the current American military mission now in Iraq. The British soldiers and the population of Northern Ireland spoke the same language and shared most aspects of a common culture. In such a "non-foreign" environment with very short supply lines, the ratio of British soldiers to the population was several times greater than is the ratio of American soldiers to the Iraqi population. By this measure, the American military in Iraq should number well over 550,000 soldiers. It now numbers less than 150,000. And few American soldiers can penetrate the language. Or the culture. And far too few armored vehicles have penetrated the 8,000 mile supply line. So it is a simple matter for a critical mass of Iraqi translators to function as spies and alert their comrades to probable American troop movements in unarmored vehicles.

The American military can certainly "win" every set battle it chooses to fight in Iraq....and just as certainly lose the war. The American military won every set battle it fought in Vietnam....and it lost that war. The Iraqi "insurgents" have, as it were, the home field advantage. Most of the Iraqi population at least does not oppose them. Many back them along a range of passive to active support. Like the Vietnamese, the Iraqis despise foreign invaders. For nearly every Iraqi "insurgent" killed, Iraqi civilians die as well. And in a tribal society steeped in vengeance, more fighters rise to take their place. They need win no battles. All they need do is create selective chaos by picking off a few Americans each day. As in Vietnam, American troops can hardly distinguish friend from foe. Effectively, most of the Sunni population and much of the Shiite population are incubators of insurgents who oppose the invader.

According to Britain's leading medical journal, The Lancet, over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have thus far died in this war through October. That comes to 1 out of every 250 Iraqis, and it doesn't count those who were injured or maimed. Most of the victims have been women and children, and most of them have been killed by American bombing and artillery. Applying this 1 in 250 mortality ratio to the U.S. population base would imply over 1,150,000 dead Americans. As it is, some 1,300 American young men and women have thus far lost their lives. Over 10,000 have been wounded, about half of those seriously. And Americans are being killed and wounded in steadily increasing numbers, despite Bush's "mission accomplished" theatrical aircraft carrier act, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the appointment of an "interim" Iraqi government built around exiles. Reenlistment rates for the American military are now plummeting. The U.S. National Guard and the Army reserve missed their latest recruiting targets by a third. And manpower needs are growing. Other countries simply refuse to grind up their soldiers in the black hole of Iraq. Their position regarding the Bush administration is simple and direct: "You broke it, you fix it." And yet the Bush regime insists that they will not reinstate conscription, even as their policies have made the world less safe and have increased the threat of terrorism a hundred fold.

For confirmation of this conclusion, simply ask Bush's staunch ally, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Or ask the residents of Bali or Madrid....just for starters.

Furthermore, the Bush regime has used prisoner abuse and torture in Guantanamo (an historic imperial possession), Iraq (a more recent imperial possession) and Afghanistan (some 90% of which is now controlled by warlords and the heroin trade, thanks to a massive shift of American military forces to Iraq). The Bush regime's point man in reinstating prisoner abuse and torture is Alberto Gonzales, Bush's nominee for Senate confirmation as the new Attorney General of the United States--the cabinet member historically charged with defending American civil liberties.

Gonzales has been Bush's lead lawyer for the past ten years, having served Bush in his positions as U.S. president and governor of Texas. Few people are aware that in his six years as Texas governor, Bush holds the record for approving the most prisoner executions (152) of any governor in modern American history. Throughout Bush's tenure as governor, it was Alberto Gonzales who cleared the way for these executions, even in the case of severely retarded prisoners. Gonzales then moved on to national prominence as White House counsel, leading the Bush regime's efforts to trash the Geneva conventions and international agreements against prisoner abuse and torture, despite the fact that these are approved treaties enshrined as the law of the land by the U.S. Constitution. Gonzales wrote that Bush's war policy "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." In doing so, Gonzales led the charge to attack and eviscerate the constitution rather than to protect and defend it. Gonzales cleared the way for policy changes from the Pentagon and the Office of the President that resulted in the American Statue of Liberty being replaced in the collective consciousness of the world by the iconic image of a hooded Iraqi prisoner teetering on a pedestal with electric wires attached to his fingers, toes, and genitals.

From incompetence to food fights

The Bush regime has developed one skill into an art--their concerted efforts to hide their abject stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence through secrecy and duplicity have resulted in half the American population being suckered in the last election. But there are concrete blunders that comically leak out from time to time to reveal their spectacular ineptitude in even the smallest things.

A short time ago, the White House held an economic conference for which a rather challenged conference sign boldly displayed to the cameras, "Financial Challanges for Today and Tomorrow."

Then there was the detestable Bush campaign practice of ensuring that only committed Bush supporters would be admitted to campaign speeches. This practice conveniently ignored basic democratic traditions in which a voter could come to the speech so he or she could decide whether or not to vote for the candidate. Those who came to hear a speech in New Mexico--all of them invited, registered Republicans--were required to sign a formal document which stated: "I, (full name) ... do herby endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States." Now read that again. Not only did the Bush campaign misspell "hereby," but it failed to specify "as president of the United States."

Then there were the training sessions held in Washington DC for mid-level government civil servants who were expected to help "re-build" the Iraqi economy. It seems that the models they were being fed were those used for the "re-building" of Eastern European economies in the early 1990's. When a British reporter inquired as to what relevance such models could possibly have to the Iraqi situation, the matter-of-fact response was, "Well, we just don't have any other models. So those are the ones we work with." Yes. Indeed. Give a small boy a hammer, and everything needs pounding....

Most Americans do not know or understand much of the world's reaction against Bush. Virtually all the electronic media and most of the print media in the U.S. have failed horrendously in their responsibility to inform Americans about the world outside their borders. As corporate media companies have redefined "the news" from a serious public service to just another profit center, media giants have fought to out-pander and out-sprint one another in a frantic race to the bottom--led by Rupert Murdoch's infamous Fox News. Anchored by Bill O'Reilly--notorious for screaming at his guests, telling them to "shut up," and still bitter from his expensive settlement of a recent sexual harassment action--Fox news journalists are people who can't write, interviewing people who can't converse, listened to by people who won't read, and broadcast over a chain that won't stop slamming anyone who does not parrot the views of the extreme right. Thus are public policy questions on television, radio, and many newspapers being reduced to something between high school football pep rallies and food fights.

Uninsuring domestic tranquility

Of course, none of the above has yet touched on the plethora of domestic problems that plague the United States far more than they do any country in western Europe. For example:

-- There are now approximately 3.5 million homeless people in America, and the figure is growing. That's 1.2% of the population, or one out of every 83 people. All other standard measures of poverty have shot up in the past four years.

-- The average American family is worse off than it was four years ago. Median income has fallen by over $1,500 in real terms. Family budgets are shrinking as wages drag behind inflation. Most of the benefits of growth have gone to those at the top of the income scale; these are the same people who profited most from the Bush tax cuts.

-- Today one in six Americans (45 million people) has no health insurance. That's a 13% increase in four years. Most working people who have health insurance have it only through their jobs, which drastically reduces worker mobility and creates greater inflexibility in the labor market. And those who do have health insurance have seen their annual premiums nearly double since 2000.

-- Bush entered office with a budget surplus exceeding 2% of the gross domestic product. But instead of using that surplus to sustain the economy, he turned it into a crushing 5% GDP deficit through his tax cuts for the rich.

-- Math and science scores in America's schools have been dropping for the past generation, to the point where the U.S. consistently ranks toward the bottom of the heap in international comparison exams. Few native-born Americans are now going into the intellectually rigorous disciplines of science and engineering. These crucial ranks have been increasingly filled in the last 25 years by bright young foreign graduates, but there has been an enormous fall-off since September 11th in the number of foreign technical graduate students coming into the country. In short, America's future science and technology base is beginning to crack badly.

-- The infrastructure, housing stock, and industrial base of many of America's cities is in an advanced state of collapse. One need only compare the fabric of urban life in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo to their nearest northern neighbor, Toronto. The dramatic differences are inescapable.

-- American dependence on foreign oil is driven in large part by its addiction to inefficient and needlessly large vehicles, and to the lack of efficient public transportation. Great Britain, to take a reasonably similar example, has a bit more than 1% of the world's population and consumes slightly less than 2% of the world's annual energy resources. The United States, in contrast, has a bit less than 5% of the world's population, but consumes over 25% of the world's annual energy supply. More than a few voices in the world suspect this might shed some light on the Bush policies in Iraq, which has the world's second greatest proven oil reserves.

American fascism?

There is now growing concern around the world that America is on the slippery slope to becoming a neo-fascist society as it avoids addressing its many pressing problems. This is a most disturbing thought that cannot be answered here. But it is useful to consider 14 classic elements of fascism as they might apply to American society in 2005:

1) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights: Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3) Identification of Enemies and Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4) Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5) Emphasis on traditional gender roles: Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to legalized abortion is high.
6) Compliant Mass Media: Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7) Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8) Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9) Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10) Organized Labor is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11) Disdain for Intellectual Pursuits: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
12) Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power.
13) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14) Tainted Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Then and now

Some readers will undoubtedly reject this presentation of disturbing facts and observations and not think much beyond this point. Most such people are willfully ignorant or conveniently forgetful of the kind of respect and admiration that America once commanded under such leaders as Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. They choose not to see the spectacular disconnect between then and now. Our hard won respect of more than a generation ago has been lost and must be rebuilt. It has drained away because of the failure of so many Americans to understand the consequences of the Bush policies in their own lives, as well as the consequences of Bush's arrogant unilateral actions on the lives of others in an ever-shrinking world.

Traveling throughout Europe, one sees in virtually every important city on the continent a variety of bridges, roads, monuments, hotels, and the like named after such luminary U.S. presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy. These tributes, and the cherished memories they represent, bear witness to an America that was not imperialistic, an America that was truthful. It was an America that had saved Europe in its worst hours. It is for these reasons that Europeans came to love and admire America.

But in the last three years, that admiration has been reversed. There was great support for the U.S. after 9/11. But within a matter of months--beginning with the blatant violations of the Geneva conventions in Guantanamo and continuing through the countless blunders of its Iraq policies--the Bush regime not only destroyed that support, but in a kind of imperial ju-jitsu, turned it all against us. Bush plunged head-first into a cesspool of fear--playing on fear, building fear, and orchestrating fear (Vietnam, anyone?)--while proposing himself as the only alternative.

Many Americans in Europe can remember when someone after whom many monuments here are named--Franklin D. Roosevelt--was so deeply loved around the world. FDR set the tone for his long presidency in his first inaugural address when he counseled, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And shortly before he died toward the end of the war, he made it clear to his dearest ally, Winston Churchill, that America could not and would not support the continuation of British imperialism in the post-war world.

It appears that far too many Americans have forgotten or ignored recent American history, from the wise words of FDR to the costly and bloody lessons of Vietnam. Thirty years ago, the last American troops were evacuated from another false effort to "protect the security of the American people." Nearly 60,000 Americans had lost their lives in the debacle. About double that number had been maimed for life. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had been slaughtered wholesale by American carpet bombings, napalm attacks, artillery barrages, and My Lai-type massacres. Additional hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had lost eyes and limbs. Millions had lost loved ones. Since the evacuation of the last American troops in 1975, some 40,000 additional Vietnamese have lost their lives in accidental detonations of unexploded bombs, mines and artillery shells. Records on post-1975 Vietnamese limb amputations and eye losses indicate even higher numbers, but are hard to verify.

Most remarkably, no one has ever seriously claimed that "the security of the American people" was diminished one bit after the final helicopter evacuation in 1975 from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). Indeed, America lost that war. And, indeed, America lost not an iota of security.

This critique will typically result in denial and dismissal in the minds of those who would prefer not to entertain uncomfortable thoughts. Far too many Americans have chosen to escape from freedom and personal responsiblity by ignoring inescapable facts while succumbing to the Bush barrage of false fears. If even a few drops of credence are given to any of the points in this critique, a good deal of thinking then needs to be rearranged in order to avoid the fundamental discomfort of cognitive dissonance.

That's hard, because it requires a change of perspective. A much easier next step is flippant cynicism, juvenile sarcasm, or crude humor. When all that ultimately fails to stem the tide of reality and the cynic grows even more perplexed, then frustration and anger emerge, setting the stage for a kind of personal fascistic reaction. But hard new realities will eventually, after sufficient disasters--eventually--overtake the comfortable conventional wisdoms, and a grudging acceptance of avoidable horror will be followed by shame and humiliation. This process played out millions of times in the hearts of good Germans in the 1930's and '40's.

In closing, I urge you to do all you can--begin today; begin NOW--to make sure that such a disaster does not play out in America in the coming years of the 21st century. Talk with your friends, your family, your neighbors, your colleagues. Contact your government officials at ALL levels to let them know that you will NOT support any policy or decision that advances the path to American fascism or imperialism.

Our country can still proudly lead the world as it did for decades after World War II. But it cannot lead the world through fear, domination, ignorance, and unilateral arrogance.

Soros group raises stakes in battle with US neo-cons

2005-01-13T16:45:00.000Z

As Overseas Voices prepares to give a voice to Americans residing abroad, millions are being raised to help bring America back to being a "reality based community". Hopefully, we will be able to convince Soros & company we are worthly foot soldiers as he and others pursue their “joint investment to build intellectual infrastructure”.

A group of billionaire philanthropists are to donate tens of millions more dollars to develop progressive political ideas in the US in an effort to counter the conservative ascendancy.George Soros, who made his fortune in the hedge fund industry; Herb and Marion Sandler, the California couple who own a multi-billion-dollar savings and loan business; and Peter Lewis, the chairman of an Ohio insurance company, donated more than $63m (£34m) in the 2004 election cycle to organisations seeking to defeat George W. Bush. At a meeting in San Francisco last month, the left-leaning billionaires agreed to commit an even larger sum over a longer period to building institutions to foster progressive ideas and people.Far from being disillusioned by the defeat of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, the billionaires have resolved to invest further in the intellectual future of the left, one person involved said.

More...

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c0e45a86-6408-11d9-b0ed-00000e2511c8.html

Help Overseas Voices! Give us your comments and ideas

2005-01-12T23:51:00.000Z

Overseas Voices is now in the process of getting organized. We will be producing radio programming along with building on this web presence. Through both mediums we will be offering first-hand insight into the effects of U.S. and foreign government policies on the lives of citizens around the world –health, education, living standards, security, trade, and media. Already we have had Mark Stenzler contribute reports to Air America Radio (see our home page for these www.overseasvoices.com) and more reports are scheduled for 2005.

Please help us by telling us what you think about this initiative. Also, if you would like to help just let us know by sending an email to info@overseasvoices.com .