EditorBlog

MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

I am extremely pleased that BuzzFlash, with its more than 10 year record of progressive journalism and advocacy on the Internet, will be entering a positive new phase as of August 1. At that time, I will be joining the prominent voice for the common good, Truthout.org, as an editor, advancing BuzzFlash forward.

I cannot tell you how much I admire Truthout for its substance, courage and unrelenting integrity. This collaboration will enable us to amplify our progressive voices and strengthen the independent media movement.

It is deeply reassuring to see BuzzFlash move to its next stage under the committed progressive stewardship of Truthout.org and its large, committed readership. And I am personally most excited to be part of a team whose mission is based on conviction about achieving equality, accountability, social and economic justice and change.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

We've been selling the collector's edition of the classic "Wizard of Oz" in the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace and it made us think how much the Democrats in D.C. are like Bert Lahr's cowardly lion: They need a massive infusion of courage.  In fact, as a BuzzFlash columnist pointed out the other day, "fierce" is not an adjective that you are likely to see in front of 99.5% of the Democrats on Capitol Hill or the leadership in the White House.

As BuzzFlash has noted over 10 years, form often supercedes content in American politics, and many Americans will respect courageous and bold political leadership, even if they are somewhat in disagreement about the politician's politics.  Oddly enough, the fiercest Democrat near the top of power may by Rahm Emanuel, and he is a "made man" of the ruling elite and corporate governance crowd. In short, our one fierce Democrat at the highest levels is working for the status quo of Big Money government.

As for President Obama, much was made of how many small donors contributed to his campaign and that would allow him to "change" the environment in D.C., toss the lobbyists out, and rein in corporate governance.  But the Obama campaign also got a whole lot of dollars from the standard Wall Street/Corporate donors. With Rahm Emanuel's urging, Obama chose to tilt deferentially toward the lattter, rather than the former, thus basically abandoning Main Street.  A government of "change" on behalf of the 99% percent of Americans who are not grossly wealthy was, for President Obama, the road not taken.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

If you think the 5-4 partisan hack decision denying the City of Chicago the right to ban handguns is about guns, you're wrong.  (It's the same 5-4 GOP block -- with some face changes -- that put Bush in the White House and bestowed Corporate Personhood in the Citizens United Case, in short a radical right activist majority of judges.)

It's about white males in America feeling threatened by becoming a minority and the gun is their last psychological reassurance of entitlement power against an encroaching demographic change in our democracy.  After all, the City of Chicago allows citizens to own rifles, so there never was a ban on guns in Chicago; there was a ban on a certain type of gun, which didn't even exist at the time the Constitution was written.

But it is the handgun that makes so many white males feel impregnable, as if they were riding around with a turret gun in a Hummer.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

When the invasion of Afghanistan occurred not long after 9/11, there were repeated stories -- if one looked deeply enough -- of both speculative and proven involvement of a pro-Taliban, pro-Al Qaeda wing of the notorious Pakistani ISI role in enabling the attack, or at a minimum not preventing it from happening.  Even those members of ISI (who function virtually as an independent combination of the CIA and FBI for Pakistan, with little government oversight) who weren't "running" the Taliban and the terrorists saw the Taliban in Afghanistan as their proxy army, an investment in regional power building during the chronic near war-level friction between Pakistan and India.

India, a country of many religions but primarily Hindu, has shown little tolerance for Islamic terrorists who are active not only in Kashmir, but also throughtout India.  Evidence linked the ISI with the training of the Islamic terrorist group involved in the Mumbai massacre, but India chose not to escalate the ISI connection to the level of war because both Pakistan and India have atomic bombs. 

That gives some context to why some elements of the Pakistan ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) maintain a very tight and supportive relationship with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other terrorists group, while other factions of the ISI, although in lesser numbers it appears, working with the "elected" government in placating the U.S. desire to have Pakistan appear to be doing something to stop terrorism in the tribal frontier zone and Eastern Afghanistan.  But the ISI members who side with a regional alliance with the Taliban and the Islamic terrorists have had the upper hand since before 9/11, and according to a New York Times article this week have returned to the precipice of an Afghanistan that appears very much like the one that existed prior to 9/11, with the Taliban (including Mullah Omar who Rumsfeld let get away), Al Qaeda (including Osama bin Laden) and other terrorists forming a "power-sharing" agreement with the feckless and corrupt Karzai and the Afghan opium growing warlords.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

If you value this BuzzFlash Editor's Blog, please help us keep the lights on by contributing at the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

There is no doubt that the biggest political disappointment this year for BuzzFlash is how a candidate who promised "change" from the corporatist stranglehold over D.C. turned into a President who believes that corporate rule is beneficial to America, even as he presides over the destruction that such corrupt corporate control of our capital leaves in its wake.

Reagan, the two Bushes and Cheney may have planted the booby traps that blew up our nation's economy, destroyed its environment and mired us in war, but Obama continually looks to those global corporations and financial firms who have caused our catastrophic problems to resolve them.  The late David Halberstram wrote about how the "best and the brightest" (Ivy League grads, primarily, but toss in the University of Chicago and Stanford types too) were the ones who steered us into the Vietnam War without an exit plan.  Obama appears to believe in the elitist notion that if you are at the head of an immense enterprise, it is because of merit.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

If you value this BuzzFlash Editor's Blog, please help us keep the lights on by contributing at the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

For many years, as part of the right wing thuggish putsch in America -- and their great skills at "framing" public policy issues -- environmentalists trying to aggressively save our natural heritage and keep our lives free of industrial toxins have been increasingly classified -- with legal punishments -- as "environmental terrorists." This has included every one from people who sit in trees to try and prevent excessive and ruinous logging to Greenpeace activists merely painting messages against deep sea oil drilling or trying to prevent the killing of whales. 

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, AN EDITOR'S BLOG

As President Obama pleads for a measly $50 billion to prevent teachers, fire men and women and police from being laid off, any frank analysis of trends in U.S. economic policy -- despite the stimulus packages -- would recognize that regardless of a Democratic Congress and President the snake venom of the "Reagan Revolution" is metastasizing like advanced lung cancer throughout society. Obama, in his abundant caution and admiration for and mollycoddling of entrenched wealth and the ruling elites, is no match for the long-term, ongoing impact of the Republicans "strangling and then drowning government" in a bathtub.

The latest "conventional wisdom" among elected officials in Washington, Wall Street, the corporate mainstream media, and corporate lobbyists and the wealthy that the deficit must be lowered is just an attempt to preserve wealth for the Reagan/Bush tax-cut rich, further shrink public services, and bankrupt state and local governments, not to mention help ruin public education by denying it much-needed funds and laying off public teachers and other public employees essential to the future of our nation.

The success of the right wing strategy known as the "Reagan Revolution" is like a toxic underground river that keeps gaining in strength and can only be seen from time to time as it emerges to the surface and grows in strength and power as it undermines the common good.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

We hope that the Blanche Lincoln and Jane Harmon primary victories against two progressive challengers don't open another round of finger pointing and bitter recriminations among progressives.  There is too much at stake.

When I started BuzzFlash in May of 2000, before Bush was put in the White House by the Supreme Court, progressives and Democrats in general were looking for a voice to call out the Republicans for what they are: Bullies, Liars, Hypocrites and full of Gluttonous Greed.  BuzzFlash to hundreds of thousands became that voice for several years until blogs emerged and became thousands of individual voices.  The Internet became the vehicle for exposing and challenging the dishonest and thuggish theocratic oligarchy of the GOP, as the corporate mainstream media gobbled down Republican talking points and regurgitated them in stories as the "truth."  The Internet was -- for many years -- the sole counterpoint to a "frame," as George Lakoff labels it, that the GOP successfully uses to control the debate on public policy issues and skewer that discussion to the hard right.

But with the emergence of an Obama Administration that is filled with Centrists and that has leaned heavily toward corporatist governance, progressives and Democrats have split into two camps: those who are critical of Obama's frequent siding with the status quo and those who argue that he can't do anymore because of the booby traps he inherited from Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations.  But remember this: there is nothing that the entrenched elite and the Republicans want more than progressives to be engaged in a shooting war at each other.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

To say that many global corporations get away with murder is not an understatement; it's a likely fact. BP --despite the DOJ's investigation which given the Obama Administration's corporatist record will end up putting some low level figure or two in jail to avoid offending the President's corporate CEO buddies -- as miners get killed because of the intentional negligence of Massey Energy in West Virginia, as men on oil rigs in waters that shouldn't be drilled in get blown to smithereens, and union organizers killed by paramailitary groups with alleged relations to Coca Cola in Colombia and elsewhere, and the list goes on and on.

And then there are the slave wages, toxic pollution, deaths caused by cancer, predatory monopoly of the earth's harvest as Monsanto is doing around the world with its GMO rice.   Then there is the IMF and World Bank forcing third world countries to by from these firms.  Then there is Wal-Mart as our de facto State and Commerce Department power behind the U.S. presence in China, paying slave wages to sell cheap products to Americans who have lost their jobs.  The list goes on and on.

Exxon/Mobil reported the largest profit in the history of the corporate world last year; they make hundreds of billions of dollars.  Few nations have the financial resources of these multinational corporations; the dollars to buy men, women and the power over lives without acccountablity for the death and ruin that they leave in their wake.

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MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH, EDITOR'S BLOG

Let's start taking the Supreme Court's January 5-4 endorsement of the concept of "corporate personhood" as the legally binding concept the court ruling confers (although the concept has been around since a spurious Supreme Court "ruling" in the late 1800s), which means the executives of BP should be treated as persons subject to criminal investigation, indictment, prosecution and jail.

The disaster that BP has unleashed in its frenzy of greed to cut costs, sacrifice lives for profit, and drill in depths beyond their ability to rectify blowouts of catastrophic proportions cries out for prosecution under "corporate personhood."  People wouldn't be protected from prosecution in such a case, so why should BP only get the advantages of the legal rights of "corporate personhood," but not be subject to the legal sanctions that we as Americans would be subject to? 

The fact is that there is no reasonable excuse for letting them off to continue their ruinous rampage in the Gulf except that "they are too big to be prosecuted."  Reminds of you some other corporations, such as Wall Street?

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