The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are making us poor. Right now, America spends $159 billion on contingency operations for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate taxes for everyone who makes under $35,000 a year, while cutting the deficit.

Progressive hero, Congressman Alan Grayson, is once again leading the charge to put an end to this disastrous spending. I signed the petition to support 'The War is Making You Poor' Act, an act that would cut waste, fraud and abuse in the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Join me and sign the petition at www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

Do it now.

Memorial Day is a time for recollection about what is vital to our interests as sentient beings. Please take time and respond.

Ignite

Denied from the start

Indolence came calling and obsession with small things

Hardship and excuses criticizing lies, demeaning mean spirited

Veil of tears denying the inevitable pain that flesh is heir to

We crept in the darkness of slag heaps of bitter consciousness

Barely audible whimpering – shallow, nerve racking expectancy

Bleating hearts pierced with arrows slung by mine

Desolately waiting for an inevitable end to the interminable night

Fight or flight mirroring trembling deifies of the rapture

Leaves us gasping, fainting, and then failing to catch our breath

We gratefully lie down swooning violently waiting for the end of miracles

Whether we’re talking about Afghanistan, Korea, our borders, the Middle East, Palestine, just about any where that has been burdened by our presence over the last 60 years plus, we are the aggressors. We have screwed up everything and everyone with this blatant militarism that is tied to multi-national corporations having fun at the world’s expense. Unfortunately, the cost is paid for in wasted and tragically expended lives. Some losses are related to this land and most of the devastation is in places where we have little knowledge, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan we’re woefully deficient in common cultural and historic awareness.

Our drones have continued to sew the seeds of violence. Because of our partnership with Israel, almost all Muslims have elements that hate us. Our forays with Iran are stirring and sweetening the pot of violence and in nations with supposed allies, like Saudi Arabia our espionage further weakens our efforts for peace and human rights. Even South Koreans are not delighted with our presence.

Meanwhile the hungry and torn up nations become more and more desperate. I would go much further than this group espousing placing flowers on the pages of the White House and urge Americans to resist supporting our experience abroad. I refuse to pay taxes and support the military that President Eisenhower vehemently warned against their infiltration into domestic affairs; and that the last five generations subsequently staunchly imposed an iron will on these sovereign nations.

Many of those who read these words do not remember the experiences of Vietnam, but I was impressed with the conspiracy doctrine abroad and on these shores by politicians lying, creating a climate of fear and acquiescence about the dramatic imposition on people who already had been subjugated and enslaved by the French for two hundred years.

We have a responsibility as stewards of the earth to resist the temptation to accept the status quo no matter who may be serving in the White House. Urgently rise up, march, incite and add your support and passion in saying enough! “We will not have our sons and daughters shedding the blood of their children….”

Julia Ward Howe, one of our own leaders passionately placed the burden on all women who are mothers. My own mother wrote hauntingly as a child regarding the same principles. It is cowardice for us not to stand up as warriors of the spirit and resist by any means possible the inequities of a powerful nation oppressing marginal people.

In 1980 a woman who wrote as a free lance writer for the Village Voice in New York City wrote the "Cry of the People," her name is Penny Lerneaux. All of us can study and be acquainted with the subterfuge and rancor of foreign affairs as practiced by this nation.

This is why I choose to be a pacifist.

Rethink Afghanistan May 18 at 2:34pm Report
We have some sad news to share: 1,000 American troops have been killed in Afghanistan.

Please take a moment to voice your opposition to this costly, bloody war that's not making us safer.

1. Copy the following text:

2. Paste this text onto the wall at the White House Facebook page:http://facebook.com/WhiteHouse (You have to become a fan of The White House to post on their wall.)

This is a heartbreaking toll on American families. These were people's sons and daughters, husbands and wives, moms and dads. Our hearts go out to all of their families. Our hearts also go out to the families of the many thousands of Afghan civilians who have died.

We want the President and the American people to know that we abhor the awful cost of this war and want our troops to come home. Please post the message above on the White House Facebook page.

Sincerely,
Robert Greenwald & Derrick Crowe
and the Brave New Foundation Team

1,000 Dead Americans in Afghanistan [HD]
As of today, 1,000 American troops have been killed in Afghanistan. Please take a moment to voice your opposition to this costly, inhumane war that's not making us safer. 1. Copy the following text: With this flower, I commemorate the 1,000 American lives lost in th...

House Boat Grounded on in Oil Soaked Marsh: What are the Barriers to Being Safe?

Housing is not an option for more than half of the world's population. In the eyes of the children is a vacant stare. From a sense deep within there is a feeling of abandonment and longing that has disappeared. More than half of those without a home start their lives without a safe, stable sanctuary to rest.

Still, doggedly they cling to life because they have no other choice. They laugh and play as though they were princes not paupers.

Naively, we have built housing for those who are homeless, like launching a new paper ship casually down a river. We now understand that many people without homes are being excluded from these homes. There are barriers – semi-permiable membranes – keeping us from them – separating the deserving from non-deserving – creating arbitrary classes of people who are burdened with social and economic barriers to being able to live with dignity.

What are the barriers that must be over come: These are illustrated in the scenes of musical chairs where one by one each of the chairs disappears. Some are resilient despite the game’s bias – clinging to universal human motivators – faith – hope – the overwhelming need to love and protect their children. For others, this scenario has rudely been played out for generations, until one stops resisting the temptation to feel, or hope, or to dream. For these people there is one door and that is surrender.

Many of these people will die of excruciating chronic illnesses, anesthetize their spirits, or slip away unnoticed. These are the prisoners of squalid living who we stand with and who we acknowledge.

The first barrier is neglect. Invisible and pervasive - how many times do we pass those who are anguished only to turn away or say, "not in my backyard?" We build housing that is affordable but stop short of making it assessable to the people who need it. While it is a good effort – the door remains shut to many and we have chosen to look past the people waiting to get in.

Two: There are those who are incarcerated, whose families served time long before the bars clanked shut and the person lived in solitary confinement. Often, they cannot find housing – no matter how much money they have. We sit in judgement of these people as though they have a choice to fully participate in society when they are released Is there anywhere for many of them to live within the limits of the Housing and Urban Development restrictions? Who will open the door and give them safe passage home – or even unlock the shackles? They have no doors to housing anywhere.

Three: There are the mentally unfit, who we patronize and expect nothing of their lives. There is no place for their antic dispositions and we shun them. Housing without support is short-sighted. Housing with services but without allowing people to be engaged and valued is warehousing. Housing without community is a shell and a door to housing.

In a place called Gheel, in the Netherlands, this is completely the opposite, They've a place to live throughout their lives.

People who are in corrections are housed with mental illnesses. child abuse and sex offenders, the like. We feel safer with them safely kept apart and we subjugate and relegate them to being illegal alien.

The same is true for those who cross the borders against their will. Brazil and America are the two most prolific slave trading or human trafficking countries in the world. We send them back when they are arrested as being undocumented. In point of fact we created a market for this subjugated caste with our desire for goods and services that cost less, when throughout the world people are worthy of a universal living wage.

Immigration restrictions prevents citizens from being able to care for their families, which delineates a distinction between wealth and poverty that pervades our way of life. Children are often separated from their fathers for this reason and therefore are inadequately housed or nurtured.

Four: Legal status arbitrarily confers the ability to live sheltered from the elements, safe from harassment, and abuse. While we each know that we would cross any boarder to feed our children, we condemn or turn a blind eye to those that have heroically chosen to risk their lives to provide hope and opportunities for their families. Worse, as the economy declines, we fight each other over the scraps left by capitalism instead of working together to change our exploitive system.

MONEY

Five: Frankly, affordable housing that is not based on a percentage of income excludes families existing on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) and who are receiving or in the process of receiving social security disability. In Colorado, 1,000s of people are currently receiving TANF. The average monthly income for a family of four on TANF is insufficient to care for a family.

Six: Many people have their only support from their disability checks. Their average monthly income meets a fraction of their needs and they scratch out a living. Those without familial resources and without subsidized housing, have no hope in renting the typical affordable housing unit which runs $$$ per month.

Seven: Aging in place – fixed income –

Eight: Larger issue is structural poverty. As a society we have chosen to allow corporations to profit from labor to the extent that an adult working for minimum wage must work unbearable numbers of hours to be able to pay for an apartment in Denver. People are trading their life energy for so little that they can’t live )



Victims of child neglect and domestic violence are a devastating chasm of need that leaves all of these people who are standing far from the source of a caring community. When it is said and done all of us sit on one chair together and for that loss of constant regard, respect and dignity we all suffer immeasurably. Those who are outside the circle suffer, offering their life blood over every good and simple effort to sustain this world

Enough Militarism, Enough

How we survived this long is anyone’s guess. We were barely clinging on when we hobbled out of Africa a million years ago. The aboriginal appeal of men in particular to scrapping is based on a predisposition to “fight or flight,” engrained in the cerebral pre cortex. This creates a situation where we choose to settle everything by bullying.

I was once managing a thrift store on Park Avenue West in Denver and a person came along and dumped trash on the sidewalk. When I went over to where he was, he pulled out a sawed off shot gun and threatened me. My response was to back off immediately, “the flight instinct,” and to live another day.

The day I was born, January 29, 1951, we were involved in full scale war in Korea, detonation and nuclear proliferation of arms, and the cold war, none of which has diminished in sixty years. In fact, in one way or another holocaust has never ceased against the world wreaked by human beings on everything surrounding us.

We’re poised in Pakistan, Korea, along the southern border, and Afghanistan to continue to escalate the devastating build up of armed intervention, which has plagued us in our foreign policy and destroyed countless communities. I was ruminating in my spiritual practice what would it be like to make war in this neighborhood? What would the effect be on the quality of life of all of those who go about their daily exercises oblivious to the gnawing fears of a thread bare worn world? Would you still be able to drive down the street for lack of a safe and sound paved road? Would you be able to use your cell phone because of a lack of communication networks? Would you have a lack of running potable water, food, hygiene, and any peaceful surroundings? How could we believe that we are immune from this contaminating influence or that our way of life is not the finite cause of the tyranny?

What Obama might consider imperative is dispensing with all threatening gestures against anyone internally to this land or abroad and instead have a peace summit once and for all between all disillusioned and dysfunctional groups to determine exactly what would be possible to do to live in peaceful existence forever more.

If You Meet a Homeless Man on the Road Kill Him

Meet a homeless man in his late forties who has been out off and on, out on the streets since 1984. He has been serving time for being unable to fend for himself and is judged as being unfit to have a decent, safe place to lie down. He comes to me in my dream state asking for refuge and I turn to him and say, "I can't." We say this again and again and again. The police officer who comes from district 6 says that he can't and the person in the shelter turns him away because they're on overflow and he didn't make the lottery. "He is used to the conditions, like the blossoms and branches of the fruit trees that are about to snap off because they're weighted down with the heavy snow. The men huddled under the canopy across the street from the Open Door Fellowship are stuck there out of turn and gave up trying to find a refuge.

Denver's Road Home is nearly half way through its process of caring for people in a community partnership and still this man haunts me. He knows who I am and he refers to me by name because two years ago he used to reside here in this temporary shelter. For whatever reason we are condemning this person to freeze to death because most hypothermia occurs when the weather changes abruptly in the spring and fall. We're in store for a heavy snow and all we can say is, "that all of the vouchers for men have been given out for the year." It is May after all and people are supposed to fend for themselves. They don't. They die or disappear and we forget them. But I cannot forget because the image is imprinted in my head that I turned away Elijah and that it’s my turn to show compassion.

Is it possible that there is no safe place and time to be uprooted and frozen? When the summer heat seers the sinews and drives you mad from the bugs and itching that this is just as untenable a time and situation to be living on the street in public places. What are we all thinking? "Is it someone else's problem to resolve?" Can we seriously turn our backs and peacefully go back to sleep knowing that this man is vulnerable, and well, “we'll never be in his shoes?”

We're all the culprits and all responsible, and what I want to know, is, "Why can't I wash out this damn spot?"

Human Trafficking Think Again We’re All at Risk and All Must Shoulder Blame

Slavery ended some will state. Modern slavery is nothing like the enslavement of Africans. There is nothing more alarming and disconcerting that America and Brazil are the places of the greatest slavery on earth. There is nothing more alarming and disconcerting that the most substantial business worldwide will be slavery. All of us are involved directly in the slave trade and we take this for granted. Law enforcement still arrests women for prostitution in small enclaves, exclusive spas and hotel rooms and the Immigration Citizen Enforcement still sends the captured women back to their place of origin regardless of whether they are unjustly imprisoned.

How little we know of this multi-trillion dollar enterprise? We make assumptions that women and children are willingly working to create every imaginable item of apparel or substance, care for children, work in dangerous occupations, with little hope of earning their freedom. In desperate conditions economically people resort to terrifying extremes for survival and all because we need to subjugate others.

How many of us dominate people in our mannerisms and behavior and trample over the rights of individuals until their lives are forfeited? On those trains in the 1900’s millions of children who were orphaned were sent out west to work as slaves on farms, in factories, in untenable situations. Photographs of them suggest the same cruel treatment that is common practice in contemporary society. We are all culpable for the inhumane treatment of people throughout the world. In most cases these people feel as though they’re worthless, expendable and in terms of rights and justice we are each to blame for the world’s orphaned and marginal people.

The question must be asked what do you do to promote slavery and how will we end this nightmare for half the inhabitants of the earth?

Mother’s Day Proclamation
Written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870

“Arise then ….. women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Whether thy baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: we will not have questions answered by irregular agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us reeking of carnage,

For caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the voice of a devastated earth a voice goes up with

Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor,

Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil

At the summons of war,

Let women not leave all that may be left at home

For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace ……..

www.juliawardhowe.org