SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
My experience of several weeks between the time when all but one television station abandoned analog broadcasting and I took my ludicrous plastic, magnetic, encoded, hologram-encrusted, anti-terrorist "coupon" to Radio Shack and secured an analog-digital converter did not insulate me adequately from the unrelenting wind of foolish misdirection that arises within our culture and circles around in ever-intensifying eddies and loops and cyclonic events to drive and amplify it. All I really missed for that six or eight weeks was Bill Moyers' Journal and The Office.
Because there was of course the radio. And the Internet. And the short, clear signals that would arise out of the dull hum as, waiting in line at the grocery store, I would pick up scraps of conversation from other persons seeking to secure their daily bread before it becomes unavailable, unaffordable, or made entirely of coal tar, poplar chips and fungicide.
And now that I'm back, my battered old ridge-top aluminum antenna firing its weak signal down the coax, through the box, the sweet sine waves filtered and chopped and channeled into strings of either-or, now that I can have it all again (or all but channel eight which, transmitting a bit off-axis from the compromise direction I use to haul in the rest, is often just a few frozen pixels), I find it all, again and still, more unwelcome than worthy. It's nice to have Bill back of course. And Dwight K. Schrute.
About twenty years ago my little town voted nearly unanimously (I opposed it) to abandon paper ledgers and card files and do all our collective business on computers. It was an expensive and complicated change and appeared to me to be driven by no observed or reported fault in the traditional system. But one argument, given voice again and again as residents rose to speak in favor of the change, proved terribly convincing: It's time to move into the Twenty-First Century.
And so, now, we have. Literally. And I even did a one-year tour as treasurer, poking the keyboard and mousing through the screens and fields, using a pen only to sign the checks the machinery produced. We are well started on this century. I see little evidence that we have discovered or invented a way of looking at the world and of carrying ourselves in it that will take us anywhere except deeper into the trenches we dug during our worst lapses of the century now gone.
George Bush is gone. And that, as they say on the television, is a good thing. Our new president is smarter, smirks less, curtails his ridiculous religious beliefs better in public, and does not have a receiver in his brain tuned to Karl Rove's transmitter or a servo-motor that causes his jaws to grind out the pronouncements of Richard B. Cheney. We do still have both the Republican and Democratic parties to our dismay, and the members thereof. President Obama often expresses his desire that they might be combined into the happier and more efficient form known as the Bipartisan party. For most practical purposes, of course, they have so been for some time. That he does not see this might make one wonder if he's as startlingly smart as his friends at the various anchor desks tell us he is.
We are now engaged in a great economic upheaval that pretty much everyone says is "the worst since the Great Depression." It was caused, they tell us, by "the housing bubble" or "the credit crunch." These are imprecise terms. As any old Dodgers fan will tell you the absquatulation of the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957 did not happen because of "market forces", but because a businessman named Walter Francis O'Malley willed it so. Likewise, your inability to get a loan or a job or to sell your house or to pay your debts must be laid to men and women who caused this recession of their own free will. Some did so ignorantly, some deliberately; all operated for their own gain. Many did their work on Wall Street; many more were housed in banks and insurance companies; several hundred critical players were and still are members of Congress.
The junk bond kings and day traders and deal makers and mortgage bundlers and instrument-inventors were only doing what it was their nature to do. They were slipping around and through the cracks in our economic edifice seeking leaks and weaknesses they could exploit. Any rat in any alley will work his dumpsters the same. They ought not be blamed for what they are. Most should be put out of business, many should be jailed, some should probably be killed. They are vermin, but they will exist and function and prosper so long as we run by a system that gives them openings.
But when this class of non-productive, margin-living lice infiltrated the meeting rooms of our policy-making classes they were not treated to a quick dose of termination powder; they were instead welcomed, told they were essential participants in our great collective journey, and asked how their lives might be made easier and more satisfying. Why, we only need less regulation, they cried, fewer restrictions, no oversight! And so it came to pass that Congress said, Go and be free! Let the banks speculate; let the insurance companies be banks; let the blessed Free Market, wise beyond any man or institution, work its magic.
And here we are. Now the Republicans are greatly disturbed by the prospect of an unbalanced budget. So are a few conservative Democrats. No matter that for eight years we ran enormous deficits fighting and financing unnecessary and illegal and immoral wars while nearly eliminating the taxation of the very rich-those were prudent and necessary deficits to keep us safe from the Axis Of Evil.
Democrats, of course, did virtually nothing to obstruct or oppose either of our present wars or the transfer of wealth upward or the dissolution of oversight while greed tore out our economic footings. This raises the question of whether it is worse to be a psychopath or to stand by eating sandwiches and reading tabloid newspapers while members of the psychopath club in your neighborhood eat all the children and strut about the streets taking credit for it.
But now we are blessed with the Change We Can Believe In. The operative word here, I fear, is believe. You can believe Jesus will help you into Heaven or you'll be born again in a better world or John Frum will fly to your island with a splendid load of wonderful cargo. I guess that can carry some satisfactorily all the way through life, but it doesn't help me get through even one hard-earned day
I see President Obama, having surrounded himself with advisors well-schooled in the very principles and practices that have landed us in unending war and unraveling economy, doing what members of that class have always done-rewarding wealth, incompetence and malfeasance, shifting blame to the victims and passing the bill to the future.
Last fall we were shocked at the prospect of throwing away seven hundred billion dollars on bad bankers and broken businesses. We are now so many bailouts down the line that we accept the inevitability of multiple trillions of dollars going nowhere to do no one who needs help any good. Congress and President Obama will give AIG whatever it wishes. America must help its troubled insurance companies. We shall lubricate the shotgun wedding of Chrysler and Fiat. It's just the right thing to do.
Oh, when the rabble gets agitated about having its tax money given out as million-dollar bonuses to corporate bosses, Obama can put together a nice speech about just how darned angry it all makes him, but a few days later, a few score billion more are spooned into the conduits.
And we are not leaving Iraq. We've established a timetable for removing combat troops, but the privateers and mercenaries and advisors and trainers and millions and billions and trillions of dollars are not coming home. And we're going back into Afghanistan, the destroyer of empires, to root out remnants of the same bogeyman George Bush used so effectively to scare us out of our money and rights for six years. And in Pakistan (which the President curiously and annoyingly calls Pockyston) we open a new front, antagonize a bigger, better-armed, and nuclear nation.
New century, new president, new Congress. Same old, tired, failed ideas. Give public money to private interests. Reduce oversight and remove accountability. Feed the military-Industrial complex as much wealth as it demands; console the widows and orphans with condolence letters, casket flags and lies. Flog the myths of "Clean Coal" and "Energy Independence."
And while we're building roads with "Stimulus" money for cars we won't be able to buy, and while the promise of universal health care will be diverted and subverted and turned into another boon to the same insurance companies that have made health care unaffordable and impossible, and while the very organizations that beat up on poor old G.W. for his warmongering are silent while Barack Obama escalates (MoveOn approving, apparently, Democratic wars), and while Public Radio gives air time to a conventional-wisdom-afflicted public affairs moderator named Diane Rehm who whines to a guest advocating an inquiry into the Constitutional abuses of the administration just retired, "We must move on!", while we are encouraged to buy more crap we don't need to refire the engines of consumer demand, while we prove incapable of learning from our errors and excesses, we lurch forward into a world we cannot see coming.
This is the Twenty-First Century. It will be hot. The storms will get worse. The water will run out and the food will fail. Money will not save us; not your stock portfolio, not your precious 401K, not the boxes of bills delivered to General Motors. Our wars will be a bloody and expensive sideshow of no consequence except to our victims. In this new century, in our lifetimes, in the years so close that our middle-managers already have meeting dates marked in their daily planners, we will come up against population and pollution and natural systems overloaded and uncontrollable by any military or economic or industrial firepower or religious faith we will own. No less than after 1492 we enter an unknown New World.
We will know the Change We Cannot Avoid.
Expect no bailout.
Every other week Mr. Cooper sends his thoughts to Editor Gibbs at The Wiscasset Newspaper. She prints them because he is reliable and cheap. He frequently reviews his own work and, pronouncing it as worthy as he suspected as he wrote it, sends it along to CommonDreams. Now he occasionally reads the comments on his essays that accumulate in their wakes. He wishes this week, should this piece see light in that second venue, to agree in advance of criticism that there is nothing much new in these paragraphs, and many CD readers will wonder why they merit further dissemination. Here's the thing: most Americans, most of our neighbors and friends and relatives, do not read CD or any other such source of news and opinion. It is remarkable that this small weekly newspaper continues to provide a largely unrestricted, unedited forum for the sort of complaints against the common wisdom that Cooper produces. He believes that chance may open a mind here and there as some unsuspecting decent and proper citizens stumbles over his work. And as long as CD offers the further broadcasting of the kinds of complaints and questions that plague most of us, he will continue to offer his objections to life as we know it on this site as well.
Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, justice, and a free press are escalating — putting everything we stand for at risk. We believe a better world is possible, but we can’t get there without your support. Common Dreams stands apart. We answer only to you — our readers, activists, and changemakers — not to billionaires or corporations. Our independence allows us to cover the vital stories that others won’t, spotlighting movements for peace, equality, and human rights. Right now, our work faces unprecedented challenges. Misinformation is spreading, journalists are under attack, and financial pressures are mounting. As a reader-supported, nonprofit newsroom, your support is crucial to keep this journalism alive. Whatever you can give — $10, $25, or $100 — helps us stay strong and responsive when the world needs us most. Together, we’ll continue to build the independent, courageous journalism our movement relies on. Thank you for being part of this community. |
My experience of several weeks between the time when all but one television station abandoned analog broadcasting and I took my ludicrous plastic, magnetic, encoded, hologram-encrusted, anti-terrorist "coupon" to Radio Shack and secured an analog-digital converter did not insulate me adequately from the unrelenting wind of foolish misdirection that arises within our culture and circles around in ever-intensifying eddies and loops and cyclonic events to drive and amplify it. All I really missed for that six or eight weeks was Bill Moyers' Journal and The Office.
Because there was of course the radio. And the Internet. And the short, clear signals that would arise out of the dull hum as, waiting in line at the grocery store, I would pick up scraps of conversation from other persons seeking to secure their daily bread before it becomes unavailable, unaffordable, or made entirely of coal tar, poplar chips and fungicide.
And now that I'm back, my battered old ridge-top aluminum antenna firing its weak signal down the coax, through the box, the sweet sine waves filtered and chopped and channeled into strings of either-or, now that I can have it all again (or all but channel eight which, transmitting a bit off-axis from the compromise direction I use to haul in the rest, is often just a few frozen pixels), I find it all, again and still, more unwelcome than worthy. It's nice to have Bill back of course. And Dwight K. Schrute.
About twenty years ago my little town voted nearly unanimously (I opposed it) to abandon paper ledgers and card files and do all our collective business on computers. It was an expensive and complicated change and appeared to me to be driven by no observed or reported fault in the traditional system. But one argument, given voice again and again as residents rose to speak in favor of the change, proved terribly convincing: It's time to move into the Twenty-First Century.
And so, now, we have. Literally. And I even did a one-year tour as treasurer, poking the keyboard and mousing through the screens and fields, using a pen only to sign the checks the machinery produced. We are well started on this century. I see little evidence that we have discovered or invented a way of looking at the world and of carrying ourselves in it that will take us anywhere except deeper into the trenches we dug during our worst lapses of the century now gone.
George Bush is gone. And that, as they say on the television, is a good thing. Our new president is smarter, smirks less, curtails his ridiculous religious beliefs better in public, and does not have a receiver in his brain tuned to Karl Rove's transmitter or a servo-motor that causes his jaws to grind out the pronouncements of Richard B. Cheney. We do still have both the Republican and Democratic parties to our dismay, and the members thereof. President Obama often expresses his desire that they might be combined into the happier and more efficient form known as the Bipartisan party. For most practical purposes, of course, they have so been for some time. That he does not see this might make one wonder if he's as startlingly smart as his friends at the various anchor desks tell us he is.
We are now engaged in a great economic upheaval that pretty much everyone says is "the worst since the Great Depression." It was caused, they tell us, by "the housing bubble" or "the credit crunch." These are imprecise terms. As any old Dodgers fan will tell you the absquatulation of the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957 did not happen because of "market forces", but because a businessman named Walter Francis O'Malley willed it so. Likewise, your inability to get a loan or a job or to sell your house or to pay your debts must be laid to men and women who caused this recession of their own free will. Some did so ignorantly, some deliberately; all operated for their own gain. Many did their work on Wall Street; many more were housed in banks and insurance companies; several hundred critical players were and still are members of Congress.
The junk bond kings and day traders and deal makers and mortgage bundlers and instrument-inventors were only doing what it was their nature to do. They were slipping around and through the cracks in our economic edifice seeking leaks and weaknesses they could exploit. Any rat in any alley will work his dumpsters the same. They ought not be blamed for what they are. Most should be put out of business, many should be jailed, some should probably be killed. They are vermin, but they will exist and function and prosper so long as we run by a system that gives them openings.
But when this class of non-productive, margin-living lice infiltrated the meeting rooms of our policy-making classes they were not treated to a quick dose of termination powder; they were instead welcomed, told they were essential participants in our great collective journey, and asked how their lives might be made easier and more satisfying. Why, we only need less regulation, they cried, fewer restrictions, no oversight! And so it came to pass that Congress said, Go and be free! Let the banks speculate; let the insurance companies be banks; let the blessed Free Market, wise beyond any man or institution, work its magic.
And here we are. Now the Republicans are greatly disturbed by the prospect of an unbalanced budget. So are a few conservative Democrats. No matter that for eight years we ran enormous deficits fighting and financing unnecessary and illegal and immoral wars while nearly eliminating the taxation of the very rich-those were prudent and necessary deficits to keep us safe from the Axis Of Evil.
Democrats, of course, did virtually nothing to obstruct or oppose either of our present wars or the transfer of wealth upward or the dissolution of oversight while greed tore out our economic footings. This raises the question of whether it is worse to be a psychopath or to stand by eating sandwiches and reading tabloid newspapers while members of the psychopath club in your neighborhood eat all the children and strut about the streets taking credit for it.
But now we are blessed with the Change We Can Believe In. The operative word here, I fear, is believe. You can believe Jesus will help you into Heaven or you'll be born again in a better world or John Frum will fly to your island with a splendid load of wonderful cargo. I guess that can carry some satisfactorily all the way through life, but it doesn't help me get through even one hard-earned day
I see President Obama, having surrounded himself with advisors well-schooled in the very principles and practices that have landed us in unending war and unraveling economy, doing what members of that class have always done-rewarding wealth, incompetence and malfeasance, shifting blame to the victims and passing the bill to the future.
Last fall we were shocked at the prospect of throwing away seven hundred billion dollars on bad bankers and broken businesses. We are now so many bailouts down the line that we accept the inevitability of multiple trillions of dollars going nowhere to do no one who needs help any good. Congress and President Obama will give AIG whatever it wishes. America must help its troubled insurance companies. We shall lubricate the shotgun wedding of Chrysler and Fiat. It's just the right thing to do.
Oh, when the rabble gets agitated about having its tax money given out as million-dollar bonuses to corporate bosses, Obama can put together a nice speech about just how darned angry it all makes him, but a few days later, a few score billion more are spooned into the conduits.
And we are not leaving Iraq. We've established a timetable for removing combat troops, but the privateers and mercenaries and advisors and trainers and millions and billions and trillions of dollars are not coming home. And we're going back into Afghanistan, the destroyer of empires, to root out remnants of the same bogeyman George Bush used so effectively to scare us out of our money and rights for six years. And in Pakistan (which the President curiously and annoyingly calls Pockyston) we open a new front, antagonize a bigger, better-armed, and nuclear nation.
New century, new president, new Congress. Same old, tired, failed ideas. Give public money to private interests. Reduce oversight and remove accountability. Feed the military-Industrial complex as much wealth as it demands; console the widows and orphans with condolence letters, casket flags and lies. Flog the myths of "Clean Coal" and "Energy Independence."
And while we're building roads with "Stimulus" money for cars we won't be able to buy, and while the promise of universal health care will be diverted and subverted and turned into another boon to the same insurance companies that have made health care unaffordable and impossible, and while the very organizations that beat up on poor old G.W. for his warmongering are silent while Barack Obama escalates (MoveOn approving, apparently, Democratic wars), and while Public Radio gives air time to a conventional-wisdom-afflicted public affairs moderator named Diane Rehm who whines to a guest advocating an inquiry into the Constitutional abuses of the administration just retired, "We must move on!", while we are encouraged to buy more crap we don't need to refire the engines of consumer demand, while we prove incapable of learning from our errors and excesses, we lurch forward into a world we cannot see coming.
This is the Twenty-First Century. It will be hot. The storms will get worse. The water will run out and the food will fail. Money will not save us; not your stock portfolio, not your precious 401K, not the boxes of bills delivered to General Motors. Our wars will be a bloody and expensive sideshow of no consequence except to our victims. In this new century, in our lifetimes, in the years so close that our middle-managers already have meeting dates marked in their daily planners, we will come up against population and pollution and natural systems overloaded and uncontrollable by any military or economic or industrial firepower or religious faith we will own. No less than after 1492 we enter an unknown New World.
We will know the Change We Cannot Avoid.
Expect no bailout.
Every other week Mr. Cooper sends his thoughts to Editor Gibbs at The Wiscasset Newspaper. She prints them because he is reliable and cheap. He frequently reviews his own work and, pronouncing it as worthy as he suspected as he wrote it, sends it along to CommonDreams. Now he occasionally reads the comments on his essays that accumulate in their wakes. He wishes this week, should this piece see light in that second venue, to agree in advance of criticism that there is nothing much new in these paragraphs, and many CD readers will wonder why they merit further dissemination. Here's the thing: most Americans, most of our neighbors and friends and relatives, do not read CD or any other such source of news and opinion. It is remarkable that this small weekly newspaper continues to provide a largely unrestricted, unedited forum for the sort of complaints against the common wisdom that Cooper produces. He believes that chance may open a mind here and there as some unsuspecting decent and proper citizens stumbles over his work. And as long as CD offers the further broadcasting of the kinds of complaints and questions that plague most of us, he will continue to offer his objections to life as we know it on this site as well.
My experience of several weeks between the time when all but one television station abandoned analog broadcasting and I took my ludicrous plastic, magnetic, encoded, hologram-encrusted, anti-terrorist "coupon" to Radio Shack and secured an analog-digital converter did not insulate me adequately from the unrelenting wind of foolish misdirection that arises within our culture and circles around in ever-intensifying eddies and loops and cyclonic events to drive and amplify it. All I really missed for that six or eight weeks was Bill Moyers' Journal and The Office.
Because there was of course the radio. And the Internet. And the short, clear signals that would arise out of the dull hum as, waiting in line at the grocery store, I would pick up scraps of conversation from other persons seeking to secure their daily bread before it becomes unavailable, unaffordable, or made entirely of coal tar, poplar chips and fungicide.
And now that I'm back, my battered old ridge-top aluminum antenna firing its weak signal down the coax, through the box, the sweet sine waves filtered and chopped and channeled into strings of either-or, now that I can have it all again (or all but channel eight which, transmitting a bit off-axis from the compromise direction I use to haul in the rest, is often just a few frozen pixels), I find it all, again and still, more unwelcome than worthy. It's nice to have Bill back of course. And Dwight K. Schrute.
About twenty years ago my little town voted nearly unanimously (I opposed it) to abandon paper ledgers and card files and do all our collective business on computers. It was an expensive and complicated change and appeared to me to be driven by no observed or reported fault in the traditional system. But one argument, given voice again and again as residents rose to speak in favor of the change, proved terribly convincing: It's time to move into the Twenty-First Century.
And so, now, we have. Literally. And I even did a one-year tour as treasurer, poking the keyboard and mousing through the screens and fields, using a pen only to sign the checks the machinery produced. We are well started on this century. I see little evidence that we have discovered or invented a way of looking at the world and of carrying ourselves in it that will take us anywhere except deeper into the trenches we dug during our worst lapses of the century now gone.
George Bush is gone. And that, as they say on the television, is a good thing. Our new president is smarter, smirks less, curtails his ridiculous religious beliefs better in public, and does not have a receiver in his brain tuned to Karl Rove's transmitter or a servo-motor that causes his jaws to grind out the pronouncements of Richard B. Cheney. We do still have both the Republican and Democratic parties to our dismay, and the members thereof. President Obama often expresses his desire that they might be combined into the happier and more efficient form known as the Bipartisan party. For most practical purposes, of course, they have so been for some time. That he does not see this might make one wonder if he's as startlingly smart as his friends at the various anchor desks tell us he is.
We are now engaged in a great economic upheaval that pretty much everyone says is "the worst since the Great Depression." It was caused, they tell us, by "the housing bubble" or "the credit crunch." These are imprecise terms. As any old Dodgers fan will tell you the absquatulation of the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957 did not happen because of "market forces", but because a businessman named Walter Francis O'Malley willed it so. Likewise, your inability to get a loan or a job or to sell your house or to pay your debts must be laid to men and women who caused this recession of their own free will. Some did so ignorantly, some deliberately; all operated for their own gain. Many did their work on Wall Street; many more were housed in banks and insurance companies; several hundred critical players were and still are members of Congress.
The junk bond kings and day traders and deal makers and mortgage bundlers and instrument-inventors were only doing what it was their nature to do. They were slipping around and through the cracks in our economic edifice seeking leaks and weaknesses they could exploit. Any rat in any alley will work his dumpsters the same. They ought not be blamed for what they are. Most should be put out of business, many should be jailed, some should probably be killed. They are vermin, but they will exist and function and prosper so long as we run by a system that gives them openings.
But when this class of non-productive, margin-living lice infiltrated the meeting rooms of our policy-making classes they were not treated to a quick dose of termination powder; they were instead welcomed, told they were essential participants in our great collective journey, and asked how their lives might be made easier and more satisfying. Why, we only need less regulation, they cried, fewer restrictions, no oversight! And so it came to pass that Congress said, Go and be free! Let the banks speculate; let the insurance companies be banks; let the blessed Free Market, wise beyond any man or institution, work its magic.
And here we are. Now the Republicans are greatly disturbed by the prospect of an unbalanced budget. So are a few conservative Democrats. No matter that for eight years we ran enormous deficits fighting and financing unnecessary and illegal and immoral wars while nearly eliminating the taxation of the very rich-those were prudent and necessary deficits to keep us safe from the Axis Of Evil.
Democrats, of course, did virtually nothing to obstruct or oppose either of our present wars or the transfer of wealth upward or the dissolution of oversight while greed tore out our economic footings. This raises the question of whether it is worse to be a psychopath or to stand by eating sandwiches and reading tabloid newspapers while members of the psychopath club in your neighborhood eat all the children and strut about the streets taking credit for it.
But now we are blessed with the Change We Can Believe In. The operative word here, I fear, is believe. You can believe Jesus will help you into Heaven or you'll be born again in a better world or John Frum will fly to your island with a splendid load of wonderful cargo. I guess that can carry some satisfactorily all the way through life, but it doesn't help me get through even one hard-earned day
I see President Obama, having surrounded himself with advisors well-schooled in the very principles and practices that have landed us in unending war and unraveling economy, doing what members of that class have always done-rewarding wealth, incompetence and malfeasance, shifting blame to the victims and passing the bill to the future.
Last fall we were shocked at the prospect of throwing away seven hundred billion dollars on bad bankers and broken businesses. We are now so many bailouts down the line that we accept the inevitability of multiple trillions of dollars going nowhere to do no one who needs help any good. Congress and President Obama will give AIG whatever it wishes. America must help its troubled insurance companies. We shall lubricate the shotgun wedding of Chrysler and Fiat. It's just the right thing to do.
Oh, when the rabble gets agitated about having its tax money given out as million-dollar bonuses to corporate bosses, Obama can put together a nice speech about just how darned angry it all makes him, but a few days later, a few score billion more are spooned into the conduits.
And we are not leaving Iraq. We've established a timetable for removing combat troops, but the privateers and mercenaries and advisors and trainers and millions and billions and trillions of dollars are not coming home. And we're going back into Afghanistan, the destroyer of empires, to root out remnants of the same bogeyman George Bush used so effectively to scare us out of our money and rights for six years. And in Pakistan (which the President curiously and annoyingly calls Pockyston) we open a new front, antagonize a bigger, better-armed, and nuclear nation.
New century, new president, new Congress. Same old, tired, failed ideas. Give public money to private interests. Reduce oversight and remove accountability. Feed the military-Industrial complex as much wealth as it demands; console the widows and orphans with condolence letters, casket flags and lies. Flog the myths of "Clean Coal" and "Energy Independence."
And while we're building roads with "Stimulus" money for cars we won't be able to buy, and while the promise of universal health care will be diverted and subverted and turned into another boon to the same insurance companies that have made health care unaffordable and impossible, and while the very organizations that beat up on poor old G.W. for his warmongering are silent while Barack Obama escalates (MoveOn approving, apparently, Democratic wars), and while Public Radio gives air time to a conventional-wisdom-afflicted public affairs moderator named Diane Rehm who whines to a guest advocating an inquiry into the Constitutional abuses of the administration just retired, "We must move on!", while we are encouraged to buy more crap we don't need to refire the engines of consumer demand, while we prove incapable of learning from our errors and excesses, we lurch forward into a world we cannot see coming.
This is the Twenty-First Century. It will be hot. The storms will get worse. The water will run out and the food will fail. Money will not save us; not your stock portfolio, not your precious 401K, not the boxes of bills delivered to General Motors. Our wars will be a bloody and expensive sideshow of no consequence except to our victims. In this new century, in our lifetimes, in the years so close that our middle-managers already have meeting dates marked in their daily planners, we will come up against population and pollution and natural systems overloaded and uncontrollable by any military or economic or industrial firepower or religious faith we will own. No less than after 1492 we enter an unknown New World.
We will know the Change We Cannot Avoid.
Expect no bailout.
Every other week Mr. Cooper sends his thoughts to Editor Gibbs at The Wiscasset Newspaper. She prints them because he is reliable and cheap. He frequently reviews his own work and, pronouncing it as worthy as he suspected as he wrote it, sends it along to CommonDreams. Now he occasionally reads the comments on his essays that accumulate in their wakes. He wishes this week, should this piece see light in that second venue, to agree in advance of criticism that there is nothing much new in these paragraphs, and many CD readers will wonder why they merit further dissemination. Here's the thing: most Americans, most of our neighbors and friends and relatives, do not read CD or any other such source of news and opinion. It is remarkable that this small weekly newspaper continues to provide a largely unrestricted, unedited forum for the sort of complaints against the common wisdom that Cooper produces. He believes that chance may open a mind here and there as some unsuspecting decent and proper citizens stumbles over his work. And as long as CD offers the further broadcasting of the kinds of complaints and questions that plague most of us, he will continue to offer his objections to life as we know it on this site as well.
"The interception occurred in international waters outside Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, in violation of international maritime law," the Freedom Flotilla Coalition said.
The Israeli military intercepted and seized the Gaza Freedom Flotilla vessel The Handala late Saturday night local time as it attempted to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition reported that Israeli forces cut the cameras on board the ship at 11:43 pm local time, when it was around 40 nautical miles from Gaza.
"The unarmed boat was carrying lifesaving supplies when it was boarded by Israeli forces, its passengers abducted, and its cargo seized," the coalition wrote. "The interception occurred in international waters outside Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, in violation of international maritime law."
Israel's Foreign Ministry confirmed that its navy had intercepted the ship, as Al Jazeera reported.
"The vessel is safely making its way to the shores of Israel," the ministry said in a statement. "All passengers are safe."
"Our vessel does not constitute any threat to you. We carry only humanitarian aid, and therefore, you have no authority to intercept or otherwise attack our vessel."
The Handala set sail for Gaza on July 20 from Gallipoli, Italy. It is the second attempt by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition to break the siege on Gaza in under two months. An earlier attempt in June was also intercepted by the Israeli military and its crew members arrested and deported.
There are 21 crew members onboard The Handala from 12 countries: 19 human rights defenders and two journalists. The crew includes seven U.S. citizens, among them labor leader Christian Smalls.
The crew had promised to begin a hunger strike as soon as they were intercepted by the Israeli military.
"In captivity they can give their sandwiches and water to the starving people of Gaza," Smalls wrote on social media.
Another U.S. crew member, the Palestinian-American lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf, rebuked the Israeli Navy as they boarded the ship, according to a video obtained by Al Jazeera:
"Let me give you a lesson in international law," Arraf said, adding:
Any blockade that deliberately starves a civilian population is a violation of international law. It is not only that—it is a war crime. You have no legal authority to enforce an unlawful blockade. And as such, you have no authority to use force to enforce an unlawful blockade.
Therefore, we demand that you stand down. You are responsible for the well-being of every civilian on board this vessel. As an occupying power in Gaza, you are responsible for the health and well-being of the civilian population there.
Not only have you disregarded that obligation, but you are actively exterminating the people. You have engineered a famine. You are deliberately starving civilians and children before the eyes of the world.
Our vessel does not constitute any threat to you. We carry only humanitarian aid, and therefore, you have no authority to intercept or otherwise attack our vessel. We demand again that you stand down.
The Handala's interception came at the close of a day that saw 71 people killed in Gaza due to Israeli attacks and five perish from hunger. This brings the total number of deaths from starvation in Gaza to over 127, among them more than 85 children. After 658 days of a U.S.-backed Israeli siege, more than 85% of Palestinians in Gaza are now in the most dangerous Stage 5 of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification to measure famine. One five-month-old child who died on Friday due to lack of baby formula weighed less at death than she did at birth, as The Associated Press reported. A growing number of human rights experts and advocates have characterized Israel's war and siege on Gaza as a genocide.
The ship was carrying diapers, baby formula, food, and medicine.
According to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition, Saturday's interception was the "third violent act by Israeli forces against Freedom Flotilla missions this year alone."
"It follows the drone bombing of the civilian aid ship Conscience in European waters in May, which injured four people and disabled the vessel, and the illegal seizure of The Madleen in June, where Israeli forces abducted 12 civilians, including a member of the European Parliament," the group wrote.
Ann Wright, a member of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition steering committee, called on the governments of the 21 crew members to advocate for their citizens.
"Protect innocent international people who are merely accompanying a small amount of aid—medical and food—as a symbol of the international outrage at what Israel is doing," she told Al Jazeera.
"There is still a chance to stop this industry before it begins, but only if governments stand up for science, equity, and precaution now," one campaigner said.
Despite growing momentum, world governments failed to agree to a moratorium on deep-sea mining as the 30th session of the International Seabed Authority wrapped up on Friday.
The authority's July meeting was the first since U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite permits for deep-sea mining under U.S. authority and The Metals Company (TMC) promptly applied for U.S. permits. Governments rebuked the U.S. and TMC for their unilateral approach and did not agree on a mining code that would allow the controversial practice to move forward under international law. However, campaigners said more decisive action is needed to protect the ocean and its biodiversity.
"Governments have yet to rise to the moment," Greenpeace International campaigner Louisa Casson said in a statement. "They remain disconnected from global concerns and the pressing need for courageous leadership to protect the deep ocean."
Casson continued: "We call on the international community to rise up and defend multilateralism against rogue actors like The Metals Company. Governments must respond by establishing a moratorium and reaffirming that authority over the international seabed lies collectively with all states—for the benefit of humanity as a whole."
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) gains its authority to regulate deep-sea mining under the United Nations Law of the Sea, to which the U.S. is not party. TMC, however, could suffer consequences for bypassing the international process, as other countries and companies may decide not to do business with it.
At the most recent session, the ISA's council decided not to revoke exploratory permits it had previously granted to TMC and its subsidiaries. However, it approved an investigation on Monday into whether mining contractors such as TMC subsidiaries Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. and Tonga Offshore Mining Limited were abiding by their obligations under international law.
"TMC has been testing the limits of what it can get away with, a bit like a child seeing how far it can go with bad behavior," Matthew Gianni, cofounder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), told The New York Times.
"The member countries of the ISA have basically sent a shot across the bow, a warning to TMC that going rogue may well result in the loss of its ISA exploration claims," Gianna explained, adding that the investigation also served as a warning to other companies who might consider following TMC's example.
"The Trump administration's pursuit of deep-sea mining isn't about global stewardship—it's about sidestepping it."
Casson agreed: "The international community's message to The Metals Company is clear: Violating international law, ignoring scientific consensus, and disregarding human rights will have consequences. This is also a warning to any companies or governments choosing to align themselves with [TMC CEO] Gerard Barron's business model—they must be prepared to bear the reputational fallout of trying to destroy the ocean."
At the same time, a U.S. representative spoke on Thursday, doubling down on Trump's dismissal of the international process and earning instant push back from Brazil, France, and China
"As a non-party to the Law of the Sea Convention, the United States is not bound by the convention rules dealing with seabed mining through the International Seabed Authority," the U.S. statement said in part.
The statement came days after Greenpeace released a report titled Deep Deception: How the Deep-Sea Mining Industry is Manipulating Geopolitics to Profit from Ocean Destruction, which details how TMC and other deep-sea mining companies are exploiting national security concerns to lobby U.S. lawmakers to fast track deep-sea mining.
"The U.S. statement confirms what Deep Deception has already exposed: The Trump administration's pursuit of deep-sea mining isn't about global stewardship—it's about sidestepping it," Arlo Hemphill, Greenpeace USA's project lead for the Stop Deep-Sea Mining campaign, said in a statement. "By rejecting the ISA's authority while claiming environmental responsibility, the U.S. is trying to have it both ways—and in doing so is advancing a 'smash and grab' agenda that puts ocean health and international cooperation at serious risk."
Ultimately, ocean advocates agree that the only way to protect the deep sea is for governments to agree to a precautionary pause on a practice they argue would do irreparable harm to ecosystems science barely understands.
The consensus for such a pause is building, with Croatia becoming the 38th nation to support one during the latest ISA meeting.
"The ISA is paralyzed by a small group clinging to outdated extraction agendas while blocking even the most basic reforms," Simon Holmström, the deep-sea mining policy officer for Seas at Risk, said in a statement. "The firm rejection of the U.S. and The Metals Company's power grab, alongside 38 countries now calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause, shows growing resistance to sacrificing the planet's least understood ecosystem for corporate short-term profit."
"To even consider a new form of ecocide on our already ailing planet is both reckless and irrational."
Several nations spoke strongly in favor a moratorium, including Palau, Panama, and France.
"Exploiting the seabed is not a necessity—it is a choice," said His Excellency Surangel S. Whipps Jr., president of the Republic of Palau, on Tuesday. "And it is reckless. It is gambling with the future of Pacific Island children, who will inherit the dire consequences of decisions made far from their shores."
A Pacific leader from Solomon Island also defended the interests of the Pacific Ocean community: "As Pacific people, we continue to carry the trauma of what extractive industries have already done to our homes. Mining companies that came with promises, stripped our lands and waters, and left behind ecological, cultural, and spiritual scars. We cannot let that cycle repeat itself, in the ocean that connects us. That sustains us. And that defines us."
Olivier Poivre d'Arvor of France called for a pause of 10-15 years: "Our message is clear: no deep-sea mining without science, without collective legitimacy, without equity [...] France is calling for a moratorium or a precautionary pause. What for? Because we refuse to mortgage the future for a few nodules extracted in a hurry, in favor of a few."
However, campaigners argued that many governments continued to fall short of the commitments they had made at the U.N. Ocean Conference (UNOC) in Nice in early June.
"Thirty-eight states have now joined the call for a moratorium or precautionary pause, with Croatia joining the coalition during this Assembly," said DSCC campaign director Sofia Tsenikli. "But too many other states, which were bold in their ocean promises at UNOC, are not putting this into action at the ISA. Governments must meet their promises by doing what it takes to implement a moratorium before it's too late."
Farah Obaidullah, founder and director of The Ocean and Us, argued that the ocean already faces too many other threats to add the additional burden of deep-sea mining.
"The health of the high seas including the seabed is critical to our own. Yet our shared heritage faces an onslaught of threats from climate and nature collapse, escalating tensions, and failed leadership," Obaidullah said. "To even consider a new form of ecocide on our already ailing planet is both reckless and irrational. We know that deep-sea mining will devastate life in the deep ocean, wipe out species before they have been discovered, and impact ocean functions, including carbon sequestration. When it comes to the ocean we have no time to lose. We cannot colonize and conquer our shared heritage which belongs to us all. There is only one responsible way forward, and that is to secure a moratorium on deep-sea mining."
DSCC's Gianni also argued strongly for a pause: "Being on the fence or remaining silent is not a politically defensible position. We are risking severe ecological damage, and future generations will ask what we did to stop it. There is still a chance to stop this industry before it begins, but only if governments stand up for science, equity, and precaution now, and take action to prevent companies within their jurisdiction from cooperating with rogue mining operations."
Greenpeace's Hemphill concluded: "Governments must secure a moratorium that leaves no room for a desperate industry to force through a mining code. The science is not ready. The legal framework is not in place. The world must not be bullied into an irreversible mistake for the benefit of a few."
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin of Massachusetts found an exception to the Supreme Court's recent limit on nationwide injunctions.
For the third time since the U.S. Supreme Court used the case to limit nationwide injunctions in June, a court has blocked U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship from going into effect.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin of Massachusetts ruled on Friday that a nationwide injunction he had granted to over 12 states still applied under an exception laid out in the Supreme Court decision.
"We are thrilled that the district court again barred President Trump's flagrantly unconstitutional birthright citizenship order from taking effect anywhere," New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, whose state took the lead on bringing the case, said in a statement.
Trump issued an executive order in January ending birthright citizenship for children born to parents with no legal status, a move widely decried as unconstitutional. Several lawsuits followed, resulting in a nationwide injunction blocking the order from taking effect.
"American-born babies are American, just as they have been at every other time in our Nation's history."
In June, the Supreme Court weighed in by limiting the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, but declining to comment on the constitutionality of the order itself. However, the nation's highest court did say that states could receive nationwide injunctions if it was the only way to offer full relief, which Sorokin determined Friday was indeed the case.
The states had argued that the birthright order, in addition to being unconstitutional, would put millions of dollars for citizenship-dependent health insurance assistance at risk, according to The Associated Press. Sorokin determined anything less than a nationwide ban would not provide full relief to the states, given that people often move across state lines.
"The record does not support a finding that any narrower option would feasibly and adequately protect the plaintiffs from the injuries they have shown they are likely to suffer if the unlawful policy announced in the Executive Order takes effect during the pendency of this lawsuit," Sorokin wrote in his decision.
His ruling followed two others blocking the order since the Supreme Court decision: A July 10 ruling from a federal New Hampshire judge establishing a nationwide class in a new class-action lawsuit, and a determination from a federal appeals court in San Francisco on Wednesday that the order was unconstitutional and the block could stay in effect to offer states relief.
In his decision Friday, Sorokin said the Trump administration was "entitled to pursue their interpretation of the 14th Amendment, and no doubt the Supreme Court will ultimately settle the question," adding, "But in the meantime, for purposes of this lawsuit at this juncture, the Executive Order is unconstitutional."
In response, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Newsweek, "These courts are misinterpreting the purpose and the text of the 14th Amendment," adding, "We look forward to being vindicated on appeal."
Patkin, however, celebrated the ruling: "The district court's decision, consistent with the Supreme Court's own instructions, recognizes that this illegal action cannot take effect anywhere without harming New Jersey and the other states who joined in these challenges. American-born babies are American, just as they have been at every other time in our Nation's history. The president cannot change that legal rule with the stroke of a pen."