Tuesday, July 31, 2007

PUSHING MY REPRESENTATIVE TOWARD THE IMPEACHMENT REMEDY

July 31, 2007

The Hon. Rep. Albert R. Wynn
2470 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-2004

Re: YES to Bush/Cheney Impeachment

As your constituent, I implore you to pressure Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to steer the Congress toward impeachment proceedings. For these Democratic leaders not to pursue the remedy of impeachment is a tacit admission by them that they accept as legitimate all of the president’s impeachable offenses and/or failures to act, e.g., falsifying reasons for this horrific misadventure in Iraq, feloniously spying on citizens, and impudently ignoring the will of the other branches of government.

Yesterday I sent the attached letter to the White House. In it, I state that I intend to help convince the House of Representatives to begin the impeachment process against both Bush and Cheney in order to protect the Constitution, now and in the future. For this purpose I submit this letter to you and direct your attention to the internet reading list below:


"Statement of Bruce Fein Before the Senate Judiciary Committee On Presidential Signing Statements," http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=1969&wit_id=5482 (June 27, 2006)

"Impeach Cheney," Bruce Fein, Slate.com, http://slate.com/id/2169292/ (June 27, 2007)

"Restrain this White House," Bruce Fein, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.fein.html (October, 2006)

"In Praise of Impeachment: Pelosi may have put it ‘off the table,’ but it’s not her decision anyway," John Nichols, IN THESE TIMES http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2937/in_praise_of_impeachment/ (Dec. 13, 2006)


Yours truly,

Jonathan D. Suss, J.D., Ph.D.

cc: Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House
Sen. Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader

Monday, July 30, 2007

PUTTING THEM ON NOTICE

July 30, 2007

George W. Bush
c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC

Re: Certificate Dishonoring the Memory of Fredric Thomas Suss, Sr.

Dear Current Occupier of the White House:

Enclosed herewith is one of seven certificates that was sent to the representative of my late father’s estate. This certificate is being returned to you because the Department of Veterans Affairs has reproduced your signature on this certificate, and I thought you might be interested to know about yet one more error that has been committed in your name – they have misspelled his name.

My father (see enclosed copy of his obituary) prosecuted the very Japanese soldiers stationed on Chichi Jima who would have been responsible for your own father’s death, had your father not been so singularly fortunate as to have been rescued after bailing from his aircraft during the (declared) War in the Pacific. Dishonoring my father in this way, whether it is intentional or not, is the final indignity I intend to suffer as an American citizen under your regime. In fact, I object to your name even being on the same document with that of my father’s, even if his name had been correctly spelled.

Your disservice to this country has been replete with much graver errors over the past seven years – whether it is falsifying reasons for this horrific misadventure in Iraq, feloniously spying on citizens, or impudently ignoring the will of the other branches of government. You, sir, are a mind-dwarfed menace to this country’s Constitution and an enemy of the Republic. Be it known that there is a growing consensus among the People that you should indeed be unceremoniously removed from office, along with your co-conspirator vice president.

Please be advised that there is a serious movement afoot to impeach you and your vice president. I and many others are working diligently to convince the House of Representatives to begin the impeachment process in order to protect the Constitution, now and in the future, from demagogues such as yourself and those around you, who are setting shameful precedents for the office of chief executive and giving free rein to a corpocracy that thrives via your malfeasance, or what can only be described as sheer ignorance.

Sincerely,

Jonathan D. Suss, J.D., Ph.D.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

CORPOCRACY’S DESIGNS STILL OFF THE RADAR SCREENS OF PUBLIC POLICY MAKERS

[NOTE: InformationClearinghouse.info REFUSED TO PUBLISH THIS ARTICLE]

Last December 16, I published an article on Information ClearingHouse.info (The Real Culprit: Corpocracy)(1). That article exhorted newly elected representatives in the U.S. Congress to use their mandate to begin seriously scrutinizing the activities of those Big Money Plutocrats known collectively as the corpocracy (rhymes with “hypocrisy”). This would include mega-corporations, corrupted government and military, international banking, and big media.

Seven months have passed since then, and the corpocracy appears to have remained invisible – effectively off the radar screen. Perhaps not surprisingly, politics remains “business-as-usual” because politics has been reduced to a horse race, i.e., the public is bombarded with info on how much (and sometimes whose) money is on which candidate. Mega-corporations have the money to give and the influence to buy via lobbyists, PACs, foundations, institutes, think-tanks, NGOs,…the list goes on and on. Tragically, the Teflon corpocracy endures – despite the widely available facts that have already come to light on corporate corruption.(2) Don’t underrate its resourcefulness, citizens, and how the corpocracy strategically uses big media as its propaganda machine!

At a recent conference in Washington, DC – Taking on the Giant Corporation – Ralph Nader came out swinging from his gadfly bully pulpit.(3) But I have yet to hear anything from Capitol Hill on the corpocracy’s corrupting influence. Most tellingly, few, if any, words emerge from the mouths of presidential candidates that implicate corpocracy’s designs as fueling our misadventure in Iraq; a corpocracy whose insatiable lust for positioning and profits in oil and other mineral riches in areas such as Iraq, Central Asia, the Amazon - in Sudan and other areas of Africa - is overwhelmingly driving our foreign policy. But don’t simply take my word for it, read, e.g., Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy (4) , or former economic hit man John Perkins’ latest book on the American Empire.(5)

At home, corpocracy’s agribusinesses and factory farms have been destroying the health of American citizens. Still, in every “health care program” offered by candidates, no one considers the root of the problem; no one seems to think it important enough to premise his or her program upon a complete re-evaluation and overhaul of how corporations have ruined the nutrient value of food and have contributed to an epidemic of diseases, e.g., obesity, cardiovascular problems, diabetes. Agribusinesses and factory farms, with a cow-towing US Department of Agriculture and FDA, ever-push synthetic engineering to destroy the nutrient value of crops and the sustainability of the farmland on which they are grown, keeping farmers co-opted, overly processing food crops, and subordinating real farmers and real food to food processors, suppliers, and shippers – ultimately destroying people’s health while funneling profits back to corporate coffers. But don’t simply take my word for it, read, e.g., The Omnivore’s Dilemma(6) and get some facts for yourself.

And so, before debating military commitments vs. pullouts in Iraq, and before devising ways to provide health insurance by a frontal assault on insurance and pharmaceutical companies – may I again suggest looking first at the often subtle, sometimes brazen designs of corpocracy – look behind and beyond the simulacra fed by corporate-owned, big media – get out of your comfortable, solipsistic bubble, stand up, and speak out – organize, act up – resist becoming a complacent, ill-informed consumeroid, programmed to participate as an unwitting puppet on the strings of corpocracy’s dance dualismo – Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal, capitalist/socialist, right wing/left wing, industrialist/environmentalist – i.e., the nonsensical notion of, “if you’re not one, you must be the other”; it is debate-by-labeling, rather than by substantively, dialectically exchanging ideas so as to search for just where the truth is rooted.

As long as we just keep sniping at one another, the citizen movement falters and stalls. In its place, what Nader calls the “corporate sovereign political economy” will continue to reign supreme over our public policy makers – over their ideas for education, social justice, the environment, jobs, unions, wages, and even clean water – before they are even out-of-the-gate all of the so-called issues become subject to erosion by the powers of corpocracy. And now, as China, India and other states industrialize ever more – following the USA’s corporatist model in order to “compete” (while lusting after the very things that oppress them) – the problem of corpocracy now has many, many fronts globally.

Beware the laser-like focus of the commercial interests and their capacity to transfix the consensual reality of our representatives into a culture trance run amok!



(1) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15924.htm

(2) See, e.g., http://www.ratical.com/corporations/; http://www.bapd.org/kcolon-1.html; http://www.thenation.com/special/2006_entertainment.pdf; http://www.corporatepredators.org/top100.html#Annotated

(3) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9185122577177790396&hl=en (Amy Goodman interviews Ralph Nader)

(4) Blowback (2000); Sorrows of Empire (2002); Nemesis (2004)

(5) The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption (2007)

(6) Michael Pollan (2006)



The author is a marginalized cultural mutant whose work can be accessed from various netpoints:

http://www.academici.net/userprofile.php?u=sussjd

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=1232404961&Fmt=7&clientI%20d=79356&RQT=309&VName=PQD&cfc=1

Interactivist Info Exchange: http://info.interactivist.net/

Information ClearingHouse.info: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16055.htm

MUTANT VS. STATUS QUO EXCHANGE



















[An email exchange between Paul, a status quo representative, and a marginalized cultural mutant, Jack (me); based on the AntiSickoArticle that he had sent me (“Sicko” being Michael Moore’s latest effort - his assault on the US health care industry)].

Dear Cultural Mutant,

You will soon receive a newspaper article that contradicts at least one aspect of your corporation - America - Occidental - Homo sapiens culture trance crusade. Please read before mocking the source. Please reflect before ridicule and rejection. No "echhhing". You just can't be dismissive of this.

Jack, your monograph (The Plight of the Cultural Mutant) and the accompanying poem, contain the expected provocation yet are somewhat alarming. Your conclusion in the last paragraph is certainly true, and many examples of this insight are used by Hitchens as an argument to support atheism. But it is more correct, as you say, that it is religion and not necessarily the existence of God that has caused centuries of human trauma. His latest book is on this very subject.

You ended the poem in the past tense. Not good. Is this social agitation or a depression of sorts? If it is the latter, then I am sure it will pass.

Paul



Dear Unrepentant WhiteMan,

As for the article, this is typical reactionary stuff, albeit from an educated mind. I say "typical" for a number of reasons:

1. in true mental-rational form, Offit first sets up his dualism (Michael Moore's negative depiction of pharmaceutical companies vs. "the truth" or "the facts" about pharmaceutical companies); by slamming the movie depiction, then presenting his heroic depiction, the readers are left with an "either/or choice," which is a false dichotomy

2. Offit then tries to mask his deficient mental tracks by posing "issue questions" designed to give the impression that there is a "third way"; and yet the real effect of these questions is to eliminate from readers' minds - in case there is any remaining doubt - that Moore is biased and unreasonable while Offit is the sensible, logical person truly interested in making things better for people

3. he is loaded with premises: that we are all-accepting of allopathic medicine; that medicines/vaccines are "good"; that saving children is so noble a cause that it is not necessary to ask such things as - should we consider what quality of life these saved kids will need to endure while being kept alive and who are the players who contribute to their poor quality of life? how much do these miracle vaccines cost, exactly who pays for them, and who decides who gets them? should we be concerned about side-effects from vaccines?

Next, he peppers his article with sympathy devices: saving children, a woman doctor reduced to tears, another researcher who might never have created nine vaccines if not for the free market, profit-driven pharmaceutical company that could provide what no one else could. The result: whoever is against saving children and pioneering scientists and the companies that fund them must be some sort of perverted Luddite sadist. (This is the same false dichotomy that scuttles any debate about the underlying causes of that blowback called "9-11.")

Also note: in that old chauvinist/paternalistic sleight of hand, Offit mentions the "developing world" and rattles off a list of third world countries - WE of course are the DEVELOPED (viz., "civilized") world. It is of course our holy grail mission to cure the maladies that our psychotic Western culture has helped to create after colonizing and destroying the lifeways of many indigenous societies worldwide and the environments upon which they had depended for countless generations, infecting them with our own peculiar vices and lusts, not the least of which is its science-that-is-ecologically-unsound more-often-than-not (e.g., burning fossil or nuclear fuels to produce electricity in order to energize its many gadgets). Note: In his ideological rush, Offit completely ignores the whole body of literature out there on the dangerous side effects of vaccines - autism, Gulf War Syndrome, et al.

Finally, Offit's credentials (which obviously impressed you when you Googled him) set him up on that white-coated pedestal. He is of course some brilliant do-gooder doctor - "How could someone of his accomplishments and learning be wrong or have the wrong idea about Moore?" readers are left pondering. In fact, he's a company man - a man produced by the medical establishment, financed and made comfortable by the entire consensual reality/culture trance model that he so brazenly buys into. And he's a hero to all of the pharmaceutical interests for writing this piece, not to mention the investors that line up like lemmings to buy the corporate media newspaper in which it appears.

In short, this authority figure assures the status quo that they can rest easy in what it is that they hold dear and that what they believe is "true." And yet they read only for confirmation of their "truth," selectively screening out all that does not fit that out-dated, failed consciousness; assiduously avoiding critical analysis and inquiry - grasping for other ideologues who can feed them via mammon media.

Comprende?

Jack

Cultural Mutant and Proud To Be



Jack,

No. Non capisco. Actually I meant for you to Google Hillman (see article) not Offit. I of course do not agree with your response, but I do thank you for giving it the due diligence I had hoped for. By the way, I may be a White man, but I am not "unrepentant" because I have nothing, in regard to the present topic anyway, to be penitent about. If it's White guilt that animates you, join the racial castrati club.

I am at a complete loss as to how you are able to dismember every aspect of that article. This is not your usual rodomontade. The quality and quantity of your contempt for all things American lies so far outside the curve that it damages your credibility. Was there nothing mentioned in the Offit piece that you could be proud of? American capitalism and principles have helped more people than any other society in the history of the world. That is a truism.

Paul





Paul,



Hillman, Offit, et al.

"WhiteMan" as in R. Crumb's version.

Glad to know you are sin-free!

...And so counter-gelding!

As for the rest,

I guess a Reagan Republican

Could never "get it"

All this to say -

As you can barely tolerate my ideas

I too have trouble recognizing

Who you are

And once again

A strong critique

Means I trash all

That you hold so dear



Jack





Jack,

I don't walk away from strong critique. I respect, and at times, agree with your point of view. But what kind of an "idea" is this?: "...should we consider what quality of life these saved kids will need to endure while being kept alive..." These kids are not on life support, we are talking about a vaccine.



Your guy - "Ich bin ein Berliner."

My guy - "Tear down this wall." And they did.



I'm sorry you always take things so personally. This correspondence got a bit corrosive. It was not my intention. Let's get back to a more convivial exchange.

Paul



Paul,

I didn't say you "walk away" from strong critique. I said that your reaction is always to put me on the opposite end of the dualist spectrum - you interpret my strong critique of a piece of newspaper propaganda as trashing all of "capitalism and [American] principles." And here, you do it again - if your "guy" is Reagan, then my guy must be "Kennedy." My "guy" is the underdog - whomever that might be.

You have never been to a third world country. You have no experience of that or an inkling of all of the insidious workings of the USA abroad over the past 50+ years in particular. You could research and investigate it but you choose not to. Instead, you prefer the comfort of your American myths and living in this upper middle class psychic mirror world. Vaccines for so-called under-developed or developing countries are like keeping kids alive so they can live like American Indians on global reservations; let's pay them shit wages too to live miserable lives working in sweat shops so we can have cheap clothes back home. Certainly there is a place for allopathic medical intervention - but please look at the bigger picture!

You can put your faith in techno-science and the status quo. I'd rather believe in human dignity and true democracy for all. That piece of shit editorial from the Wall Street Journal represents everything I detest about this trance dance we do every day... (See, Howl Reborn http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16055.htm )

Jack



Jack,

Basta. I surrender.

Paul



Paul,

Let the author surrender - his reasoning is sacrificed to the context in which he deploys it.

Thanks for engaging my thoughts on this,

Jack



Jack,

The circle is complete. What you have lusted for is now oppressing you. You have become the elitist you hate.

Paul



Paul,

What have I lusted for? - the ability to see through the false consciousness of others? If that's an elitist, and I'm being oppressed by my own folly, then the supposed purity of your own insight is your own undoing.

Jack

Sunday, July 1, 2007

THE PLIGHT OF THE CULTURAL MUTANT

The cultural mutant somehow missed out on being or becoming a part of the new American dream: the techno-modernist vision, the Western triumphalist society, a person capable of easily identifying with the vapid, deficient-mental consciousness of the age.

While his or her society is reveling in its self-referent, solipsistic definition of success, the cultural mutant bemoans the decline of the authentic and agitates against the inequities and imbalances inherent in consensual reality and a culture trance run amok;

while this society smugly congratulates itself on its legacy of democratic ideals and its being the champion of liberty and freedom around the world, the cultural mutant recoils in horror at such hypocrisy, seeing instead a USA that, in spite of itself, has exploited peoples, their resources, and the environment – either directly or through client entities – wherever it could.
The cultural mutant sees a corpocracy (rhymes with “hypocrisy”; also see corporatocracy), that – in the name of free market capitalism – has quietly and cunningly traded democratic values and the ideals of liberty for a rank materialism based on the almighty petro-dollar (a dollar now tied to the price of oil), whose supremacy is enforced via the militarism of over 400 US bases overseas.

Being “out of the loop,” the cultural mutant is none-the-less determined to inform fellow, planetary citizens about the benefits of learning to be adept at applying an empowering skill from a holistic, relational/participatory consciousness;

the values and perspectives gained from such a consciousness provide a trenchant method for exposing this old-think-based-on-exploitation by a corpocracy whose sole aim has been to amass wealth and power, and that lulls ill-informed citizenry into complacency via rampant consumerism and out-of-control commodity fetishism.
In fact, the message of the cultural mutant is that humanity needs to dismantle the fascist powers of corporatism, militarism, and corrupt government.

Alternatively, citizens can rally for improved emancipatory and regulatory human systems, and a new form of sovereignty that moves beyond the outmoded concept of nationalism, with its cover of “national security” and its often myopic “national interests.”

Consequently, citizens of the planet need to resist these fascist forces of corpocracy as much as they need to be fighting the fascism foisted on them in the name of religion (viz., profane interpretations of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, etc.), as we recall the words of Krishnamurti:

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. --Freedom from the Known, pp. 51-52
Colesville, MD/ June 30, 2007