The Wash­ing­ton D.C.–based Satel­lite Sen­tinel Project (SSP) has for two years been method­i­cally expos­ing mil­i­tary build-ups and aggres­sion, as well as war crimes and shock­ing crimes against human­ity in a remote part of Africa — and demon­strat­ing the worth of one of the most promis­ing advances in human rights work in the his­tory of the world.

SSP is the brain­child of actor George Clooney and human rights activist John Pren­der­gast, who sought to use high res­o­lu­tion satel­lite imagery to doc­u­ment mil­i­tary aggres­sion and atten­dant atroc­i­ties and to bring them to world atten­tion. Access to such tools has his­tor­i­cally been lim­ited to governments, militaries and large cor­po­ra­tions. SSP is the first sus­tained pri­vate appli­ca­tion of satel­lites for peace advo­cacy and human rights. The orga­ni­za­tion has focused on volatile areas in Sudan and the new nation of South Sudan in its first two years, from 300 miles over the earth, peer­ing into places where the inter­na­tional media and even human­i­tar­ian aid groups can­not go — places that the geno­ci­dal Khar­toum regime would rather the world not see.

Clooney said jok­ingly that the SSP would be “the anti-genocide paparazzi” — but their reports have repeat­edly com­manded the atten­tion of the world media from NBC News to the BBC and Al Jazeera.

SSP has exposed, among other things, the work of death squads in the town of Kadugli. Com­bin­ing satel­lite images with eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony, SSP pub­lished satel­lite images of piles of white body bags; the trucks and clean-up crews; the dis­posal of the bod­ies in mass graves; and bull­doz­ing over the corpse-filled pits. SSP has also shown mil­i­tary build-up, such as the mass­ing of troops and and the deploy­ment of attack heli­copters and Antonov bombers. In Decem­ber of 2012, SSP pub­lished graphic images of vast tracts of land that were once home to thou­sands of peo­ple span­ning 26 vil­lages as well as crops and cat­tle — now burned black. The UN reports that more than 200,000 Nuba peo­ple have been dis­placed — dri­ven out of their homes and home­land by the Khar­toum regime — and are now liv­ing in refugee camps.

SSP is cur­rently a joint effort of the anti-genocide group Enough (a project of The Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress); the Dig­i­tal­Globe satel­lite com­pany; and Not On Our Watch, an orga­ni­za­tion of such lead­ing Hol­ly­wood fig­ures as Clooney, Don Chea­dle, and Matt Damon. The pilot phase of SSP also included the UN satel­lite agency, UNOSAT; Har­vard Human­i­tar­ian Ini­tia­tive; and the inter­net com­pa­nies Google and Trellon. Dynamic game-changing inno­va­tion inevitably dis­com­fits some estab­lished inter­ests, and the Satel­lite Sen­tinel Project has been no excep­tion. Some ele­ments in the U.S. gov­ern­ment have tried to dis­credit their work, notably the doc­u­men­ta­tion of mass graves. The leader of that effort was then-U.S. Spe­cial Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, Prince­ton Lyman. He could pro­vide no facts to dis­prove the mass mur­ders, body bag­ging, and mass graves and had no alter­na­tive expla­na­tion for what the satel­lite imagery showed — and the issue was not revis­ited. Some of the satel­lite recon­nais­sance com­mu­nity have, how­ever, wel­comed and been fas­ci­nated by this pri­vate effort.

But the project faces a greater con­cern than turf-conscious agen­cies inside and out­side gov­ern­ment. Regard­less of the qual­ity and time­li­ness of the work and its medi­a­genic nature, no one with the capac­ity to make a deci­sive dif­fer­ence has been will­ing to do much to pre­vent or respond to the mil­i­tary aggres­sion of the Khar­toum regime and the now well-documented pat­tern of atroc­i­ties that lead from Dar­fur to South Kord­o­fan. The U.S. State Depart­ment has sent an occa­sional sternly worded let­ter to Khar­toum, but has oth­er­wise taken no con­certed pub­lic action to stop the atroc­i­ties. Sim­i­larly, the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil has been briefed by its own staff about the atroc­i­ties, and is well aware of the SSP imagery, but will not take action for a vari­ety of rea­sons. One rea­son is that Secu­rity Coun­cil mem­ber China gets six per­vent of its oil from the Sudans. Mean­while, Pres­i­dent Bashir and other top Sudanese lead­ers are accom­plished war crim­i­nals, unable to leave the coun­try with­out risk­ing arrest and trial before the Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Court for their activ­i­ties in Dar­fur. They have lit­tle to lose.

Unde­terred, SSP has con­tin­ued its focus on Sudan. But SSP would also like to see their now-proven meth­ods more widely used — in other coun­tries and focus­ing on other con­cerns. “We envi­sion that our model can also be applied to other emerg­ing crises,” Jonathan Hut­son of the Enough project told Unbound, “such as expos­ing ter­ror­ist net­works in Africa who are poach­ing endan­gered species such as ele­phants and rhi­nos to fund their activities.”

Mean­while, a war has erupted in Sudan, as Khar­toum has launched what some long time observers describe as a “final solu­tion” against the Nuba peo­ple. The Nuba are black Africans who have been tar­geted by the Arab Islamists who dom­i­nate the Khar­toum regime. Angli­can Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail told me in a 2011 inter­view that his name was on the death squad’s hit list, and if he had not been out of the coun­try, he would prob­a­bly be in a mass grave in Kadugli.

“We all belong to one human fam­ily, what­ever our national, eth­nic or polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences,” Andudu (who is liv­ing in exile in the U.S.) told a House For­eign Affairs Com­mit­tee hear­ing in 2012. “The state-sponsored eth­nic cleans­ing cam­paign is tar­get­ing Nuba peo­ple, includ­ing not only Christians such as the Angli­can Church, the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Sudanese Church of Christ in Kadugli, but also Mus­lims, includ­ing those who wor­ship at the mosque in Kauda, which a SAF [Sudan Armed Forces] fighter plane recently tar­geted with ten rockets.

“We are our broth­ers’ and sis­ters’ keep­ers, wher­ever they may be,” Andudu said. “Lov­ing our neigh­bor requires pro­mot­ing peace and jus­tice in a world marred by geno­ci­dal violence.”

His­tory is full of such sto­ries: the aggres­sors and the hor­rors that they bring, and those who stood in sol­i­dar­ity with the vic­tims and sur­vivors. And our time is no dif­fer­ent. But in our time, for the first time, unprece­dent­edly pow­er­ful tools have fallen into the hands of peo­ple wag­ing peace.

The USDA has decided in its infinite wisdom, despite pink slime and a few other debacles of the food industry, to test a program allowing chicken companies to check their own livestock and decide whether or not the chickens are safe to eat.

The USDA claims this will save them tens of millions of dollars.

Well, USDA, I can save you even more. If you’re going to let the chicken companies inspect their own chickens, just trash the whole program, because I guarantee you they will decide “ALL of our chickens are safe!”

At some point, you would hope someone at the USDA (and I looked it up, there are over 100,000 employees there) would have raised their hand and pointed out the glaringly obvious: “Uh, since these guys are selling us chicken/beef/fish/whatever, don’t you think they are going to say that everything they’re selling is safe?”

Ideally, another person (we’re up to 2 out of 100,000 – a push perhaps, but I woke up optimistic this morning) would have seconded the first person’s statement and then, just maybe, we could have our food actually inspected before we eat it.

Which, I will point out to the USDA and its 100,000 employees, is generally considered to be their core job.

And it gets worse.

Right now, the USDA inspectors (who are independent, don’t work for the chicken companies, and aren’t driven by chicken company profits for holiday bonuses) inspect 35 chickens a minute for lovely things like bile, feces and random spare parts that got through processing.

That’s a chicken every two seconds.

Should you so desire, take two seconds to inspect the next chicken you see at the store. It’s really not a lot of time, but with some practice you could get pretty good at it – which is a nice thought because you are essentially performing the task that stands between me eating a relatively clean chicken or a feces- and bile-covered chicken. (There is a difference, Mr. USDA, trust me on this one.)

Well, under this new program, the chicken companies will rubber stamp – er, I mean inspect 175 chickens a minute. 175! That’s just under three chickens a second.

Are you thinking, “Wait a minute, 175 chickens a minute? That’s impossible!” Well congratulations – you are now ahead of 100,000 USDA employees in the class on food safety.

I have a little test for you and the USDA: if you can even count to 175 in sixty seconds, I might reconsider my opposition.

If you can’t, you need to sign this petition, share it with the world, put it up on Facebook.

Even better, if you know anyone at the USDA, send it to them and ask them to see what they can do for you, for me, and for everyone who prefers their chickens to be properly inspected, let alone inspected at all.

This post originally appeared at HandPicked Nation.

It started with Occupy Wall Street, people rising up over the greed and inequality, the1% vs 99%. Labor joined, adding their voice and grievances. Veterans, teachers and others are showing up in greater and greater numbers now. Others are joining. Now it’s everywhere: Hundreds of towns like Occupy Orlando and Chicago and Portland and Nashville and Asheville and Oakland and even little towns like Redwood City.

People are getting arrested as the powers-that-be react to the spreading and growing crowds. According to Chris Bowers at Daily Kos,

Arrests in Chicago, New York City, Fresno, Eureka, Denver, Portland, Boston, Seattle, Oakland, Ashville, Riverside and more cities over the weekend has brought the total number of arrests of Occupy protesters over 3,350.

Globalization Of Protest

The world feels the effect of their common wealth draining to shock-doctrine attacks from the 1%. Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes at Al Jazeera that in reaction to this we are seeing The globalisation of protest,

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now become global -- with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalisation and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can.

And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: A sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right -- at least not without strong pressure from the street.

Stiglitz writes that arond the world these protesters are sounding an alarm:

They are right that something is wrong about our “system”. Around the world, we have underutilised resources -- people who want to work, machines that lie idle, buildings that are empty -- and huge unmet needs: Fighting poverty, promoting development, and retrofitting the economy for global warming, to name just a few. In America, after more than seven million home foreclosures in recent years, we have empty homes and homeless people.

The protesters have been criticised for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.

… On one level, today’s protesters are asking for little: A chance to use their skills, the right to decent work at decent pay, a fairer economy and society. Their hope is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, on another level, they are asking for a great deal: A democracy where people, not dollars, matter, and a market economy that delivers on what it is supposed to do.

Seniors Occupying Over Social Security & Medicare Cuts

More groups are expressing their own dissatisfaction with the captured government cutting back in order to preserve the tax cuts and other benefits of the top 1%. At The Huffington Post, Lizzie Schiffman reports in, Seniors Join Occupy Chicago, Protest Cuts To Medicare, Social Security

More than 1,000 senior citizens and their supporters marched from Chicago’s Federal Plaza to the intersection of Jackson and Clark Street Monday morning to protest proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

… Amid chants demanding that the cuts be forestalled — with suggestions for alternatives, including tax hikes — 43 demonstrators were escorted from the intersection (see video, above) by police and issued citations for pedestrian failure to “exercise due care,” or for blocking traffic. Those cited included four protesters using assisted mobility devices and at least one centenarian.

Moving Money From Banks

In conjunction with the Occupy Movement, people have started to move money from the too-big banks to non-profit credit unions that exist to actually serve the customers instead of the few at the top. 650,000 pedople moved from banks to credit unions just in October — more than all of the prior year — and early estimates of the recent November 5 action calculate that perhaps $60 billion was moved.

Occupy The Super Committee

Congress’ supercommittee of the 1% is discussing how much money to take out of the economy of the 99% by cutting back on the things our government does for We, the People. They want to cut the deficits that resulted from tax cuts for the rich and huge increases in military spending — without undoing those. So now a group is setting up to occupy the supercommittee. The Occupied Super Committee Hearing of the 99%

OccupyWashingtonDC to hold Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99%
Wednesday, November 9th at 11:00 AM

OccupyWashingtonDC.org will hold a hearing on the economy for the 99% that will examine how to create a fair economy for all Americans.

The Occupied Hearing will contrast with hearings on Capitol Hill which are destined to enrich the 1% and protect major donors.

The Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99% will examine critical issues facing the economy and the federal budget. The hearing will include testimony from people with great understanding of the issues facing the country as well as comments from the 99% who are directly affected by the economy.

Hundreds Of Thousands Of Views Of A Congressman’s Occupy Video

How often does a member of Congress put a video on YouTube and quickly get hundreds of thousands of views? Keith Ellison (D-MN), Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made a video for the “CongressionalYoutube Town Hall” series, talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. The video has received 340,000 views as of Tuesday morning.

Occupy Everywhere And Everything

Possible new Occupy actions include places that the government is ignoring its responsibilities, and people are sick of just taking it. Some ideas:

Occupying companies that refuse to hire people over 40.

Encouraged by the Occupy Movement, more and more people are finding their voice and speaking out.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

]]> http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/09/occupy-movement-is-spreading-and-growing/feed/ 0 http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/03/washington-ignored-the-people-and-now-you%e2%80%99ve-got-occupy/ http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/03/washington-ignored-the-people-and-now-you%e2%80%99ve-got-occupy/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:13:38 +0000 Dave Johnson http://dirtyhippies.org/?p=1719 What did the politicians in Washington think would happen? They forgot about the “We, the People” part of our Constitution. After bailing out the banks and bankers and interests of the top 1% they fiddled while our jobs burned and mortgages defaulted. With people losing their incomes, pensions and healthcare they worried about deficits instead [...]]]> What did the politicians in Washington think would happen? They forgot about the “We, the People” part of our Constitution. After bailing out the banks and bankers and interests of the top 1% they fiddled while our jobs burned and mortgages defaulted. With people losing their incomes, pensions and healthcare they worried about deficits instead of jobs and cut back on essential services. They smugly spouted slogans at us and thought we’d be fooled and pacified. People voted for change and they didn’t get change. And now people are in the streets.

Part of the fiddling was by plan, Republicans obstructing efforts to create jobs and help the economy hoping this will give them an edge in the next election. Part of it was an attempt at “bipartisanship,” trying to accommodate the ultrapartisans who only wanted to to advance their obstructionist agenda, thusly deprioritizing the needs of the people. Whatever — change did not happen.

One Spark Could Bring Trouble

The problem with big groups of angry people is that it is very difficult to maintain control. This sudden enthusiastic energy of people taking to the streets to voice their anger at Wall Street and Washington is growing fast and there is really very little to control and channel it. Large groups of people concentrated into crowds can become mobs all too quickly. One cop-with-baton too many and it could turn into something no one wants. Or one too-clever Wall Street type, hiring agent-provocateurs to start violence, thinking it will “discredit” the movement… (Yes, nonsense like this happens and never works out the way the strategerizers hope.)

Look what happened in England, with terrible riots. Did it happen as a result of the austerity – putting the top 1% ahead of regular people? Maybe, maybe not. But the tensions in England, where they still have a good safety net and everyone has health care, were certainly not greater than they are here.

Do not take the people for granted. Do not think you can engineer a population with slogans and ignore solutions. And when they take to the streets to express their unhappiness do not ignore them or think you can finesse things. It shouldn’t have gotten to this point. People have had it, they are fed up, and they are telling the leadership that they have to remember just who is supposed to be in charge here.

The New Left Pole

So the “incoherent” street occupiers and marchers represent the new left poll of the spectrum. Suddenly groups like Campaign for America’s Future, labor unions, MoveOn.org, and especially the coalition making up the Rebuild The Dream Movement now represent the center. More importantly, they represent a controlled, organized path to sensible solutions that give the people what they need.

The Path Forward

There is a path forward that has been clearly defined by the responsible organizers and members of Congress who have been trying to push the political system to respond to the needs and demands of We, the People. Start by passing the President’s jobs bill. Then pass The People’s Budget. Take a look at CAF’s “Big Ideas” for a bold jobs agenda.

It’s time to get moving, and finally get to work on the side of We, the People. That is how it is supposed to work here.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

]]> http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/03/washington-ignored-the-people-and-now-you%e2%80%99ve-got-occupy/feed/ 0 http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/01/fighting-things-that-arent-there/ http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/01/fighting-things-that-arent-there/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:18:32 +0000 Tom Sullivan http://dirtyhippies.org/?p=1777 Have you heard about Zombie ACORN? The conservative media is a-twitter with ACORN sightings over a year and a half after the right wing succeeded in killing off the voter-registering, community organizing group. Behind the 99% in the Occupy movement is ACORN, did you hear? They just won’t die.

It’s ironic. The conservative [...]]]> Have you heard about Zombie ACORN? The conservative media is a-twitter with ACORN sightings over a year and a half after the right wing succeeded in killing off the voter-registering, community organizing group. Behind the 99% in the Occupy movement is ACORN, did you hear? They just won’t die.

It’s ironic. The conservative “pimp” with the video camera wore the outrageous outfit, but it’s Zombie ACORN conservatives report seeing everywhere like Elvis. (Elvis isn’t really dead, you know.)

Conservatives must have been the inspiration for the “Halloween” movies. For one, because of what Siskel and Ebert called the Calvinism berserko world view. That is: think about having sex and die. And two, because you can’t kill the Boogie Man.

Half a century after the Red Scare, American conservatives are still looking for Reds under their beds before they crawl beneath their sheets.

Two decades after the Berlin Wall came down and they declared that Saint Ronald of Reagan won the Cold War, conservatives are still fighting it. They’re still looking for commies in the woodpile.

Not even the Chinese are commies anymore. Have you seen Shanghai? They must have cornered the free market in concrete, glass and steel skyscrapers and the cranes to build them. They sure as hell cornered the market in capitalist jobs. And still, conservatives can’t get their heads out of their anti-communism.

They’re always resurrecting dead enemies, and rallying around the flag to fight things like the Boogie Man. Things that aren’t there.

Forty years after the Summer of Love, conservatives are still looking to punch hippies who aren’t there for wearing love beads that aren’t there, and for sticking daisies in gun barrels. Some memories are timeless, I guess.

The Bushies spent upwards of $1 trillion dollars that wasn’t there to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that weren’t there because Saddam Hussein had an al Qaida connection that wasn’t there, in a war that wasn’t there until they invaded.

Now conservative legislators are rewriting election laws all across the country to prevent so-called voter fraud that isn’t there, obstructing Congress and slashing state budgets to ensure jobs aren’t there for millions of Americans, all so they can put a Marxist president who isn’t there out of a job.

The party of ideas that aren’t there would have you believe they are the only people prepared to lead America forward in the 21st century. Fourteen million Americans are out of work, desperate, and looking to their leaders for help. And where is the party of the 1% when the 99% needs them?

They aren’t there.

]]> http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/11/01/fighting-things-that-arent-there/feed/ 0 http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/10/23/occupying-my-thoughts/ http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/10/23/occupying-my-thoughts/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 11:52:56 +0000 James Boyce http://dirtyhippies.org/?p=1736 I have been traveling overseas during the majority of the Occupy movement and up early on Sunday morning, back in the States, I was thinking about what the moment means and how we should judge success.

Being American, we often want to categorize things as success or failure, it’s A or B. We want our wars to end in Times Square moments when the confetti flies and the sailor kisses the surprised girl smack on the lips. We like are business and our movements clean.

As the weather turns cooler, the lack of a clear goal post in sight, the fraying of the movement, the infiltration of those with less than pure political goals, which I have seen first hand in Boston, all these things will, I suspect, lead the Occupy movement to falter and fade a little bit.

The very smart people that think they are very smart will rush to declare it a failure. They will ask what came of it, where are the benchmarks, what was the Times Square moment? And lacking one, they will declare it a failure, when it most assuredly is not.

In a country like South Africa where I just was, the decades long struggle versus apartheid was one struggle or moment on top of another. Each movement stands on the shoulders of the one before it. I am not surprised that the Occupy Movement started in New York City because this Spring, I was lucky enough to help out on the ON MAY 12th movement. Occupy stood on their shoulders and soon, someone will stand on Occupy’s shoulders.

It won’t be pretty or organized or perfect but, for example, the November 6th circling of The White House by environmental groups, that will be better attended and better covered now. The next moment after that will be more successful still.

The whole movement could indeed fade into obscurity. It won’t be for lack of triggers, the path the country on is a devastating one and I would suspect Greece is showing us what our future will look like. But Americans are not South Africans, we don’t like struggles that last decades, we want instant gratification.

But for now, I would look to November 6th and then the next one and the one after that. The November 2012 elections are happening at the perfect time for the movement to influence them.

The power of the Occupy movement will not be seen now; just as the power of the ON MAY 12th wasn’t seen on May 13th.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, according to Lao Tzu. The steps are starting to add up. The journey has begun. Hold on, it could get a little crazy out there.

]]> http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/10/23/occupying-my-thoughts/feed/ 0 http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/10/19/one-pissed-off-hippie/ http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/10/19/one-pissed-off-hippie/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:31:56 +0000 Tom Sullivan http://dirtyhippies.org/?p=1724 We had to repost this gem from hippie One Pissed Off Liberal at Daily Kos:

#OWS: Let Me Tell You Wall Street

Asshats a Little Something About

Hippies

One of the attack memes for right wingers and know nothings is that the Occupy Wall Street movement is merely the wacky [...]]]> We had to repost this gem from hippie One Pissed Off Liberal at Daily Kos:

#OWS: Let Me Tell You Wall Street

Asshats a Little Something About

Hippies

One of the attack memes for right wingers and know nothings is that the Occupy Wall Street movement is merely the wacky doings of hippies, or aging hippies, or dirty fucking hippies.

Now I don’t want to make this all about hippies…because it isn’t. The #OWS movement is a phenomenon all to itself. Blaming it on hippies is just typical weasel behavior from the champaigne-sippin’, caviar-dippin’ greedheads of Wall Street crowd – you know, the ones who got us into this mess in the first place. It’s just their way of avoiding responsibility, and boy howdy are they good at it.

But hippies, young and old, are involved…and that’s a damned good thing.

Let me tell you something about hippies. Hippies didn’t export anyone’s jobs, hippies didn’t lie us into an immoral war, hippies didn’t conspire to steal anyone’s pension funds, hippies didn’t order anyone tortured, hippies didn’t steal so much that it crashed the economy of the entire world, and hippies don’t go on national tv and spew nonsense and propaganda for a very nice living.

So go ahead and blame hippies for everything…as if they had ruled us for decades. We should be so lucky. But we weren’t that lucky – not by a long shot. Instead, we got you.

So if the hippies have some advice for you Wall Street assholes, maybe you should listen. You could do worse. You did do worse. You did a lot worse.

Hippies told you to mind your planet. Hippies told you to make love not war. Hippies told you to not let greed grab you. But did you listen?

No. You and your minions in Congress and elsewhere turned your backs on responsibility. You abandoned the people and sold your souls to the highest bidders. Consequences be damned.

You should thank what gods may be that there are still hippies, that there are still people who put humanity over corporate profits, that there are still those who insist that we do the right thing rather than the profitable thing. We just may save the planet from assholes like you.

Meanwhile, our bought-and-paid-for politicians can’t do shit:

Global warming? Sorry.

Unjust wars? Nope, nothing to be done.

An oppressive and unjust Military Industrial Complex? C’est la vie.

Class warfare by the 1% against the 99%? It’s only class warfare when we say it is.

The disastrous drug war? Whatcha gonna do?

Loss of precious civil rights? Quit yer bitchin’.

Mercenaries on the streets of America? What’s to worry about?

Corporate takeover of the country? Yawn.

No, our bought-and-paid-for politicians can’t do anything that doesn’t involve shoveling cash into the coffers of the already filthy-fucking-rich. And by their inaction they would doom us all.

You greed-deranged fools who have done these things to us had better hope that the dirty fucking hippies come riding to the rescue. Otherwise we are all going to suffer a fate that only you deserve.

I don’t care what anyone says, there is something sweet and pure about old hippies like Ben Masel and others. People who still retain their principles and ideals and are still willing to stand up for humanity in the face of unrelenting tyranny. They deserve respect not scorn. Bless them all.

Hippie photo gallery at dKos.

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