SAY I AM YOU

Say I am You

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.

What is, and what isn't.

You who know, Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.

IRANIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

clipped from: www.counterpunch.com

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

There have been numerous news reports that the U.S. government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran.

Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the U.S. interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”

if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

STIGLITZ, VANITY FAIR

The Stiglitz article in Vanity Fair is superb; it very politely points out to the American populace that their asses are hanging out, just like their tongues, and that the whole world sees them as the mother monkey that tramples her own young to get at whatever fruit is in view.

He even evinces scorn for "the Chicago Boys" and their murderous school of economics (by putting quotation marks around their epithet), but he doesn't carry his own insights to their logical conclusions -- probably because he is an economist himself.

Economists do not recognize the natural world as a biological system. They see it as an endless chain of dead materiel, even as they refer to such input as 'natural' resources.

Stiglitz does not materially stray from the Chicago School, from the exploitative Debt Virus that is the essence of capitalism when he says, "Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction."

Horseshit.

Poverty throughout the human population could be eliminated with one or two percent of the world's GDP. No more starvation, uncontested epidemics, grinding wage slavery. Every human could be assured of food every day, clean water, decent shelter, and basic medical attention -- the preventive kind.

For another percent of GDP, literacy could be quadrupled at the least.

But caring for ourselves, our species, and the planet we live on is not the goal of capitalism. The pathology of capitalism is to extract and exploit, and then walk away from the garbage created thereby.

While you can. It's getting real hard to avoid the garbage anymore.

Our living biological world, the thin film of slime we call soil and water and air and ecology spread around this planet is not capable of being endlessly extracted, mined, harvested, cut, chopped, taken and the remains then abandoned as mountains of garbage. There is a natural limit, just as there is a finite measurement of the planet's girth. A finite amount of copper, of iron, of helium, of every damned thing, and the unrestrained concentration and redistribution of all these things is hitting up against the finite limits of the living systems we call life on Earth.

There are new elements of extreme danger involved in a return to unrestrained, perpetual growth all over the world. The kind of danger an addict faces when he can't quit no matter the consequences already experienced.

If we took the whole human species and rolled it into one human being, and took the whole ecology of this planet and rolled it into one house and backyard, and walked through it we could not help but perceive that this one human is trashing the place, shitting where he eats, killing every other species without the slightest heed, overfishing and overharvesting the soil, water, air, seas, and the rocks themselves, and is in all ways acting as if he can just move somewhere else when this house falls down.

Worst of all, he is so mismanaging his own health that he is redolent with hundreds of toxic chemical compounds he knows nothing about; they permeate his every cell and organ, and he is so poorly nourished that he is subject to every kind of affliction that a person who cared for himself could easily avoid.

And yet this human marches around with a sword in one hand and a flag in the other, stomping on whatever he can in order to prove that he can. Doing this is what floats his boat. This is what does it for him.

If this species is to survive in any health and sanity on this overused planet, the pathological pursuit of profit as a means of dealing with ourselves and our planet will have to be outgrown. Capitalism as the embodiment and sanctification of heedless greed will have to be treated as a personality disorder, not a political philosophy.

One thousand years from now, the humans on this planet will be looking first to their environment and ecology, to the thin layer of biological slime that sustains them. Just as a colony of humans traveling through interstellar space would keep their algae and soil and fungi and trees going in order to keep themselves going, the colonists currently trashing this round, blue globe -- as it travels through space -- are going to have to learn to live with our planet.

Not merely on it.

It's about a lot more than America's standing, or economics as a science, or politics, or even globalization.

It's about making it at all.

Posted by: Antifa | Jun 16, 2009 6:39:45 AM | 8

MEMRI'S MISTRANSLATION

Things Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not do: 1) deny the Holocaust; 2) say that Israel should be wiped off the map; 3) develop a nuclear weapons program

Written By StiflyStiferson on June 15th, 2009

Intro

With the Iranian election results disputed (a dispute that the incumbent will likely win), I think it’s important to revisit the American conventional wisdom about the Iran and its president. Suspicious sources and a lazy media echo-chamber have instilled many misconceptions into the American public’s mind about Iran. This is worrisome because such misconceptions leave the American public vulnerable for the type of hawkish manipulations that led us into the Iraq war, and so for that reason US attitudes towards Iran need reexamining.

Nuclear Weapons Program

Top among the controversies surrounding Iran is the issue of their nuclear development. One goal of Iran’s energy policy is to use nuclear energy for domestic energy needs so that more of Iran’s oil supplies can be diverted for foreign sale.

In developing their domestic nuclear energy program Iran has often skirted certain IAEA regulations, with the ostensible reason being that strict adherence to the rules has allowed the US to sabotage nuclear development contracts forged between Iran and other countries. This evasion of IAEA directives has been the primary basis on which Iran has been accused of having a nuclear weapons program.

However, in 2007, part of a United States National Intelligence Estimate was leaked that concluded that Iran had not worked on a nuclear weapons program since 1993. Ironically, Iran’s first nuclear weapons programs was facilitated by America in the 1950s.

“Vanish from the page of time” vs. “wiped from the map”

Since he was elected in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has received much criticism on his comments regarding Israel. The most famous of these was given in a speech called “A World Without Zionism” in which he quoted a line from Ayatollah Khomeini.

An improper English translation painted him as calling for Israel to be “wiped from the map.” When word got out there was an international uproar. As it happens, in Persian there is no such idiom. More accurate translations read “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] the page of time.”

The focus of the speech was a hopeful vision of a world free from Western oppression of Muslims, and, in context, it is clear that this is not policy—much less a military threat. In fact, Iran has never made a military threat against Israel. Israel has against Iran, though—many, many times.

Holocaust Denial

Ahmadinejad has also met sharp international criticism over his comments on the Holocaust. The widespread and misleading allegation is that he denies that the Holocaust ever occurred.

It is undoubtedly true that Ahmadinejad has raised some uncomfortable questions about the Holocaust. Indeed, in December 2006, he even convened a conference to explore historical evidence for the Holocaust, and he also occasionally referred to people making “a myth” of the Holocaust.

However, as Iran Specialist Professor Shiraz Dossa states, while Ahmadinejad’s “rhetoric has been excessive and provocative,” he“has not denied the Holocaust or proposed Israel’s liquidation. What Ahmadinejad has questioned is the mythologizing, the sacralization, of the Holocaust.”

Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory statements are all in the context of the Palestinian struggle. The questions are put in terms of skepticism towards the Holocaust’s use in justifying Zionist colonialism in Palestine. The intellectual exploration, undoubtedly born of a deep, sometimes justified, mistrust for the West, has never crossed the line into outright denial of the Holocaust.

When such statements have been conflated with anti-Semitism, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly clarified his position with statements like “creating an objection against the Zionists doesn’t mean that there are objections against the Jewish.”

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, the recent election dispute in Iran leaves one questioning the democratic scruples of the country’s leadership. Ahmadinejad’s Iran is far from the idyllic liberal democracy. But, however great the fervor for Ahmadinejad’s opponent, one need be careful not to lose sight of how unfairly Western caricatures of Iran have influenced attitudes toward the incumbent worldwide—a habit long in the making and likely slow to change.

THE GLOBE'S SINGLE GREAT GARRISON STATE...WHICH LIVES OFF WAR

clipped from: original.antiwar.com

He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States, which means that he is head honcho for the globe’s single great garrison state, which now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war.

In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as 1,000 “diplomats.”

Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house “a large military and intelligence contingent,” will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan.

He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community of at least 16 squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other’s throats. They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more.

The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up almost half the world’s total military expenditures.

in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He’s just appointed a general, Stanley A. McChrystal, as his Afghan commander. From 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated:

Although he’s now being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and “protect” the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is “counter-terrorism.”

The team he’s now assembling in Washington...It’s filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work...bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it’s been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Gen. McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article, has “been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans. … [He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by Gen. McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

So, this is now truly Obama’s war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president’s men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called counter-terror

The new crew aren’t counterinsurgency warriors, but – a term that has only recently entered our press – “manhunters.” And don’t forget, President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which “manhunters” engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks to the CIA’s escalating program of targeted assassination by robot aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and an orgy of manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era version of “counterinsurgency” dissolved as well.