More Recent Comments

Monday, January 29, 2007

Guernica

 
Remember Guernica? Thanks to the team of senior public health scientists and practitioners at Effect Measure for finding this video.

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

Thank you Larry.

I'm an outraged American disgusted by the actions of the civil servants in the US, especially the thugocractic administration of this President.

In the 2004 campaign, the morally corrupt man who was reelected President of the United States often used the phrase "culture of life" in his stump speeches. Observably, he has no respect for people, no respect for life in general, and no respect for the world that sustains life. Hypocrite is too weak a descriptor. Liar might be closer if he weren't in politics. Betrayer, while true, stops too far short. Traitor feels most appropriate. Traitor against the US, of course, but, more to the point, a traitor against mankind.

I'm convinced that the Iraq war was started for one reason only, possibly the most vulgar reason imaginable: simple greed. For the sake of some people's financial gain, innocent men, women and children have been massacred, soldiers have been intentionally put in harms way, the money to pay for it has been borrowed, and none of those making the money will pay the debt, financially or with the lives of their own children. None of the justifications used as smoke screens for why we should invade Iraq had any merit from the start. Three thousand dead on 9/11 is certainly the stuff of war marketing campaigns, but more US citizens are killed in traffic accidents every month. WMD's were a fraud. Saddam Hussein killed thousands, but, we've multiplied Saddam's efforts at least fifty-fold. Oil, the most often proposed "real reason," has lots of backers, but, it, too, was only an underlying factor. I'm convinced that war-profiteering was the only real reason.

Defense contractors have been handed billions of windfall dollars with billions more guaranteed through the we-must-support-the-troops pipeline. The current troop escalation assures even greater profits in the short-term, maybe a last-ditch effort at squeezing every drop of blood from the American tax paying public before reason comes to the fore. A sort of get-while-the-gettin's good since still this very moment literally one person out of three hundred million can squeeze all taxpayers of his own accord.

Recent election returns offer a small modicum of hope, but they also serve to underscore just how impotent democratic peoples can be once a war for profit President inhabits the White House.