[Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fw: Money Can't Vote
E.Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Thu Oct 21 21:50:26 CDT 2010
What does it mean? don't mean...........
The conclusion that mr. crumb came to in his usual irascible skepticism and analysis of the
human situation and the personal war on existential terror was that the most important thing
and the most useful thing was to do nothing.
By the way, a correction and apology.. Although the "Ruff-Tuff Cream-puff" made his debut in "Despair" (1969),
the "Kick Their Ass Take Their Gas" mantra appeared in "The Ruff-Tuff Cream-Puffs Take Charge",
"Hup No. 1" (1987), also reprinted in "R. Crumb's America".
>From Mystic Funnies #2 (1999):
----- Original Message -----
From: Gregg Gordon
To: E. Wayne Johnson ; C. G. Estabrook
Cc: Peace-discuss
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 11:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fw: Money Can't Vote
Huh! That's a strange take. The quote I've been using lately is: "The surest way for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." To each his own, I guess.
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From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
To: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
Cc: Gregg Gordon <ggregg79 at yahoo.com>; Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Thu, October 21, 2010 10:33:50 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fw: Money Can't Vote
That bumpersticker mantra is older than you imagine.
"Kick their ass! Take their Gas!" was on the t-shirt of the horn-tooting protagonist in R. Crumb's "It's the Ruff Tuff Creampuff",
(who appeared in [Fall into the Depths of] Despair Comix, 1969)
"The best solution anyone has found is to sit and do nothing".
On 10/21/2010 11:08 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
That quite remarkable contempt for the political perspicacity of your fellow citizens is all too typical of the political class in this country, but it's not very democratic.
The federal government doesn't quite agree with you. That's why it spends so much time and money on "the manufacture of consent" (and why snake-oil salesmen like Obama get ahead). The public has to be managed, not indulged, they think - it's their only real enemy, as Vietnam showed.
That after all was Jefferson's view: he thought that people "are naturally divided into two parties: (1.) Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. (2.) Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."
I'm a democrat, so not a Democrat. --CGE
On 10/21/10 9:51 AM, Gregg Gordon wrote:
I don't disagree with any of that. So what? And as for wars for oil, maybe you better hope they keep lying about it, because if Americans were confronted with that stark reality, most of them might be down with it. When Alan Greenspan said so publicly, there was no big outcry. Barely lasted a full news cycle. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the Iraq war started: "Kick their ass. Take their gas." I think that's basically where most Americans are on the issue, and the main reason the Iraq war has become so unpopular (people were 2-1 in favor at the time, if the polls can be believed) is that the cheap gas never materialized. We're still paying through the nose. Most people support resumed drilling in the Gulf right now. They don't care if it turns into the Rancho La Brea tar pits. They want gasoline for their cars. I saw a poll just within the last week -- can't remember exactly, but something like, would you be willing to pay an additional 4 cents a gallon for, I don't know -- lower CO2 emissions or something. The majority said, "No." So that's where you need to start -- not with the Democrats. I think the Democrats are about the left party that the American left deserves right now. We've been ineffectual and inept. That's our reward.
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From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: Gregg Gordon <ggregg79 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>; Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Thu, October 21, 2010 9:03:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fw: Money Can't Vote
On the Carter administration, see the famous interview his National Security Adviser gave to Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998: <http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html> (in English)...
"Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
"B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems [sic] or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?..."
It's true that the US has been committing crimes in order to control Mideast oil since the Truman administration, when we saw that we could displace an exhausted Britain in the region. First, British oil companies were replaced with American ones, and concomitantly the US began the policy - which Obama continues - of controlling the countries of the region by alliance, subversion, or aggressive war (= what we were busily condemning German leaders for, at Nuremberg).
Benchmarks are our destruction of democratic government in Iran (1953), which Americans have forgotten but the Iranians haven't; adoption of Israel as our "cop on the beat" (as the Nixon administration said) after they launched their 1967 war to destroy secular Arab nationalism; our sponsorship of Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war, 1980-88; our covert sponsorship of the religious-based Hamas to undercut the secular PLO; and Clinton's murderous sanctions on Iraq (by which he killed as many people as Bush did, many of them children whose deaths were "worth it," according to Clinton's Secretary of State).
The US has consistently demanded control of Mideast energy resources since WWII, not because we need them - the US was a net exporter of oil until recently, and now imports less than 10% of the oil we use at home from the Mideast, mostly from our ally Saudi Arabia - but because control of world hydrocarbon supplies gives us an advantage over our real economic rivals, the EU and East Asia (China and Japan). That's what Obama (and other presidents) is sending Americans to kill and die for, so it's obvious that he like the others has to invent excuses, especially when two-thirds of the US public, even though they're being lied to, thinks the war a bad idea.
When Al Qaeda launched their criminal raids on US cities in 2001, they were clearly and consciously staging a counter-attack to more than a generation of US crimes in the Mideast. They said at the time that there were three reasons for their counterattack: (1) the sanctions on Iraq, called "genocidal" by successive UN overseers; (2) the suppression of h the Palestinians by America's chief client, Israel; and (3) the occupation of Saudi Arabia (and the Muslim holy places) by American troops after Bush I's Gulf war, in 1991.
It's not just those who point out that the Obama administration is, by and large, Bush's third term who note the continuity of US policy in the Mideast, which Obama if anything has intensified - as he said he would, as far back as his campaign for the Senate, when he discussed "surgical strikes" on Iran, still I think a real possibility, along with open war with Pakistan. BHO is down with the program, and only a few are criticizing it - of course many more in the country that in Congress.
On 10/21/10 8:05 AM, Gregg Gordon wrote:
Well, that strikes me as quite a stretch to lay responsibility for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the back of Jimmy Carter. I could take your logic just a small step further and put it on FDR. Or William McKinley. Or James K. Polk. Plus it ignores the question of why three subsequent Republican presidents failed to end it, as your premise indicates they should have done. It is a sad fact that since the disastrous and misguided McGovern campaign (God bless him), Democrats have been so bullied and intimidated by charges of being anti-military (not that there's anything wrong with that) that they too often feel compelled to prove they have gonads. I thought Clinton kept Saddam around just to have somebody to bomb when he needed to look tough. That's murderous and deplorable and certainly won't get him into heaven, but that's the political landscape we find ourselves in. Deal with it. Anyway, wealth and power breed arrogance. Americans, like the British, Spanish, Romans, and every great empire before us, think we should have our way just because God obviously loves us so. (If He didn't, we wouldn't be an empire.) That's human nature, and liberals are just as susceptible to it as conservatives. More often than not, Democratic militarism just takes the form of seeing to it that veterans actually receive the benefits they've been promised, for which they get no credit whatsoever. And "spineless" is not the same as "evil" in my eyes. The "spineless" need to be encouraged. The "evil" need to be stopped. Who can blame the Democrats for being spineless? Who's got their backs? The left?
I'm a Bernie Sanders kind of guy. I don't really consider myself a Democrat, but I caucus with them because I think the alternative is so much worse. But if you really can't see any difference between, say, Karl Rove and Dennis Kucinich, I'm not going to waste any more time arguing with you. You're not serious.
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From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: Gregg Gordon <ggregg79 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>; Peace List <peace at lists.chambana.net>; Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Wed, October 20, 2010 11:09:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fw: Money Can't Vote
First, Iraq and Afghanistan are both part of what the Pentagon calls "The Long War" (for oil) in the Mideast. So far, the US has killed a million people in Iraq under Clinton (whose Secretary of State said that the tens of thousands of dead children were "worth it"); a million under Bush; and apparently hundreds of thousands in AfPak under Bush and his third (Obama) term.
That falls short of the perhaps 4 million we killed in SE Asia, but of course Obama's escalated murders in SW Asia are in no way justified by being fewer in number than Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon's in Vietnam.
It's difficult to determine when the Long War begins, but it takes a tick up in the Carter administration when Carter (and Obama's) adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sends Osama bin Laden and friends into Afghanistan (before the Russian invasion) "to give the Russians a Vietnam of their own," as he said at the time, in the most expensive CIA operation to date.
If a Republican administration after 2012 brings Obama's AfPak war to an end, then we'll have a third example of a Democratic war concluded by Republicans in as many generations. But that may not be likely. The news suggests that the Obama administration is looking to expand the war with an attack on Pakistan and/or Iran. It certainly isn't looking to abandon the world's greatest energy-producing region.
Control of Mideast energy resources has been a cornerstone of US foreign policy since 1945. Obama is simply lying when he says the war is to "stop terrorism" - it obviously increases terrorism - but he has to lie, because the only Constitutional authority he has to wage war in the Mideast is Congress' "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" of September 2001 - which is directed against terrorism.
Something positive to do: years ago, there was a great debate in America, "How do we get out of Vietnam?" The best answer was given by Herb Caen: "Ships and planes." Load up the troops and bring them home. The Russians did - and survived and prospered from the end of their war.
Eventually we did, but it took two presidents' being driven from office and (even more important) a revolt of the American conscript army to do it.
Regards, CGE
On 10/20/10 7:15 PM, Gregg Gordon wrote:
So I conclude from your statement that you don't consider either Iraq or Afghanistan to be "major" wars. So why are you so worked up about them? I think you're just still mad at Lyndon Johnson.
And please, don't accuse me of being some kind of racist who doesn't mind us murdering brown people. That is so lame. It's just that not all of us see the world in as simple terms as you seem to. Simple solutions are nice, but they're mainly for the simple-minded.
All I'm saying is if you're so gung-ho on stopping the war, why don't you come up with something positive to do (as opposed to sniping from the sidelines) that might help get us closer to that goal? We'll all get behind you.
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From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: Gregg Gordon <ggregg79 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>; Peace List <peace at lists.chambana.net>; Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Wed, October 20, 2010 5:10:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fw: Money Can't Vote
You are aware, are you not, that America's major wars since WWII - called by synecdoche "Korea" and "Vietnam" - were started by Democratic administrations and ended by Republican administrations. Since the current Democratic administration has greatly expanded the killing in AfPak, it's hard to argue that they're going to reverse their policies. Voting for them is an acquiescence to those policies.
To say of Obama and the Democrats, "Let them kill some Asians, because they might do some good someplace else," is at best a counsel of despair, if not an outright criminal attitude. Particularly when it seems that they're doing precisely the wrong things elsewhere, too - not surprisingly, because they're working for the owners of the banks, the insurance companies, the oil and construction companies, etc. --CGE
On 10/20/10 4:48 PM, Gregg Gordon wrote:
Maybe because there are other important issues that she does agree with him on. The only way you're going to find a candidate you're in 100% agreement with is to run for office. If support for the war is an absolute deal breaker for you, fine. Not everybody sees it that way. But if you think the war will end sooner if more Republicans get elected, I think you're out of your mind.
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From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Peace List <peace at lists.chambana.net>; Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Wed, October 20, 2010 4:33:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] Fw: Money Can't Vote
This guy supports the war. I can't see why anyone on an anti-war list would contribute to him.
On 10/20/10 4:28 PM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
Another request for help...
I love this guy!
--Jenifer
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