About Chief Crazy Horse

Chris Hedges has written a new article on Chief Crazy Horse, titled "Time to Get Crazy." This is an excerpt from the beginning of the article:

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards. Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth.
This sets the scene. What is the relevance of Chief Crazy Horse?
Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice.
We are now faced with a prospect of electing Mitt Romney, who has no credibility at all, or Barack Obama, whose campaign promises were largely a ruse to get elected:
How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
Hedges could have gone on. Obama has built up a Surveillance State that is surreal in scope. As part of that, he partnered with the telecoms, giving them free license to break the law as accomplices to the federal government. Net neutrality turned out not to be something worth fighting for, unlike the dozens of explicit promises he made in his campaign. Then we have Obama's drone wars and aggressive prosecution of whistle-blowers. We have seen a willingness to prosecute Julian Assange, whose crime is to do what the New York Times investigative reporters do to win awards as journalists, except he helped bring about government transparency faster and in even greater quantity than any newspaper. And what about the war on fossil fuel Obama promised, to be coupled with millions of new jobs centered on sustainable energy? What did Chief Crazy Horse do when neither accommodation nor resistance worked? According to Hedges, he stepped out of the system and fought, even when it appeared to be futile. Hedges is not advocating violence, but suggests that the Citizens are starting to see the system itself as illegitimate, which is a dangerous situation.

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Why you should be concerned about America’s surveillance state, even if you aren’t committing crimes

Glenn Greenwald has talked with many people who tell him that they haven't done anything wrong, so why should they be concerned about America's surveillance state? Here are the reasons: Those who wish to organize should have the right to do so away from the targets of the organization. If the government is listening in, this makes any type of activism "extremely difficult." It is exclusively in the private realm that creativity, dissent and challenges to orthodoxy. Only when you know that you can explore "without external judgment where you can experiment" and "create new paths." Psychological experiments verify this need for privacy; without it, people speak more stiffly. When you assume that you are being watched, your speech will be chilled and you will be encouraged to act in a conformist way. Third, surveillance creates a "pervasive climate of fear." It makes people afraid to speak candidly and meaningfully to other people in their same community. Greenwald (who admits that he has 11 dogs) draw on a dog example. Even when a fence is taken down, dogs are hesitant to go into a previously fenced-off area. The most insidious part of the surveillance state is that those who are being monitored are easily convinced that their limits, their conformity, is liberty and freedom. What can be done about this situation in the United States. There are things you can do to remove yourself from the "surveillance matrix." Some people have limited their economic interactions to cash transactions. There are way to communicate on the Internet that maintain anonymity (e.g., The Tor Project). It is important to educate yourself and others "beyond the prying eye of the United States government. For instance, you can educate yourself as to your rights when you have direct interactions with government officials; sources include Center for Constitutional Rights, National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms and the ACLU. To this list, I would add the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Forcible radical transparency is a way to take the offensive. That is why Greenwald (and I) support Wikileaks and Anonymous. Greenwald states, "I want walls to be blown in the wall of secrecy."

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American voters are now less apprehensive about atheists

For the first time since PEW tracked these voter attitudes, a majority of Americans say they would vote for an atheist. Hotair offers this explanation:

What you’re seeing here, I think, is the fruit of normalization: It’s not so much that people are becoming more sympathetic to atheism (although that might be true) than that, as atheists become more visible culturally, people see for themselves that we’re not that weird or threatening.

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A few thoughts on Obamacare – more questions than answers.

I often wonder why the Republicans chose the name "Obamacare" in their attempts to ridicule Barack Obama's "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." After all, the first half, "Obama," merely gives credit to the person who orchestrated the passage of the legislation and "care" is a benign word, even a pleasant word. Maybe they liked it better than the "Make the Rich Pay for Poor Children's Medical Treatment Act." Or maybe they thought that people hate "Obama" so much that just by saying his name it will make them angry. The bottom line is that it seems to be a lot like the phrase "Yankee Doodle," originally meant as an insult, but adopted and even embraced by the target of the taunt. Now that the new law has mostly survived, what does it mean for real-life Americans? There are many articles, like this one, that point out some things and make a few predictions, but no one seems to know the answers to two basic questions that are on my mind. What kind of insurance will ordinary Americans be able to purchase with regard to A) Quality of Care and B) Cost of Care? I'm not convinced that the new act has meaningful price controls on premiums or that the quality of care will be well-regulated. In fact, I will predict that the insurance companies will essentially take the following position: "Sure, you can have all of those new bells and whistles demanded by the Act, but you're going to need to pay for it." Here are some of those bells and whistles. And then the American public will likely not be witness to the intense behind-the-scenes lobbying that will result in 20% premium increases every year. I hope not, but I'm not optimistic. [More . . . ]

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A criminal act by Congress: cutting the budget for Legal Services

Last week I attended the annual seminar my law firm (the Simon Law Firm) puts on for the benefit of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. We've done this for almost ten years, and I'm proud to be part of a firm that has raised a total of more than $100,000 for the St. Louis office of Legal Services. What does Legal Services do for the folks it serves? The lawyers of Legal Services provide "high-quality legal assistance and equal access to justice to low-income people." Consider this:

Our lawyers provide counsel, advice and representation to clients in a variety of domestic cases including orders of protection, dissolution of marriage, modifications, paternity establishments and child custody cases. Other legal needs are addressed as well, sometimes by bringing the expertise of lawyers in other specialty practice areas like public benefits, housing or consumer.

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