Left of "Liberal": December 2006

Saturday, December 16, 2006

MUNY Explained

OK, as a final answer to those who keep harping on what happened in Cleveland 30 years ago, here, finally is Dennis's side, as explained in a letter from his wife, Elizabeth.

Dear Friend,

Today marks the 28th Anniversary of Cleveland's default and finally the truth is out about Muny Light.

Joshua Scheer at Truthdig has posted an interview, newspaper articles and TV news stories which show the great courage it took for the then 32 year old Mayor, Dennis Kucinich, to save Cleveland's public power system.

The city went into default, because the banks would only accept the public utility as payment on the city's debt. Nothing else would do.

The story exposes the very real issues of corporate greed, media manipulation and corruption all of which were overcome when the people were supported by the very courageous Mayor, Dennis Kucinich.

Visit http://www.truthdig.com/interview/page2/20061214_battle_muny_light/ for the full story, TV and newspaper articles.

Scheers interview has been described by some as being the most important populist manifesto in the last 50 years.

The people of America are very, very lucky to have Dennis working for them!

Thank you

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Best: Redux

Following this text is the letter I received yesterday from Congressman Dennis Kucinich which announces his 2008 candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Once again, Kucinich will be considered a "vanity" candidate, but how can that be when Senator Barack Obama has significantly less legislative experience? He will, once again, be considered "unelectable", but how can *that* be when polls are largely on his side in terms of Iraq, the bellwether issue?

In 2004, we picked the safe, electable candidate, and we got four more years of Bush, four more years of war, two right-wing Supreme Court Justices, fewer protected lands, a higher core temperature for the earth, and less funding for education, the poor, and the hungry. In 2004, Kucinich's slogan, "How Much Change Do You Want?" seemed ill-timed. Isn't it human nature to fear change? But now, when the lack of an incumbent makes a change of guard inevitable, it's a timely question. Go, Dennis.

Here's the letter:

Announcement of Candidacy for President of the United States

Dear Friend,

We are living in a time of great tests of our humanity, which also present great opportunities for transformation. The war in Iraq is a veil that shrouds our creativity and our potential for prosperity. It cuts us off from the world at a time when it is imperative that we acknowledge our interdependence and interconnectedness.

This is a moment with a profound feeling of destiny. America has been an extraordinary international power to manifest that which we focus our energies upon. This power is true of individuals as well as nations.

In a way, when we focus on terror, we bring to ourselves that which we fear. We focused on terror in Iraq and paradoxically helped to create the circumstances, which have propelled Iraq into civil war and chaos.

The prestigious Lancet report on excess casualties in Iraq estimates that the war in Iraq has caused 655,000 Iraqi deaths, and that 20% of those deaths are a direct result of the actions of coalition forces.

This war sacrifices the lives of innocent Iraqis, the lives of our troops, and the physical resources and good will of our nation. We are sacrificing our financial future, borrowing money from Beijing to occupy Baghdad in a war that military generals and the Iraqi Study Group have concluded is impossible to win militarily.

We are focusing our resources on the power of destruction rather than the vision of a world in which we want to live: A world of prosperity and peace, equity, beauty and justice. It is time for us to stand together to bring the troops home and stand by the people of Iraq through implementing a real policy for the security, recovery, reconciliation and restoration of their nation.

We as a nation have the opportunity to embrace the challenges of our time and take a new direction, starting with ending the war in Iraq. The leaders of my party have said that they will not stop funding the war, and are openly supporting a supplementary appropriations bill for an additional one hundred and sixty billion dollars ($160,000,000,000), on top of the $70,000,000,000 that was appropriated to Iraq for financial year 2007, back in October of this year. This would bring war expenditure for 2007 to $230 billion, double the expenditure of 2006, and by far the largest appropriation of the war so far.

Today, I announced my candidacy for President of the United States in a quest to call my party to courage and integrity on this issue. This is a journey upon which I hope you will join together with me to ensure that our country calls forth our great potential with the same courage of our forefathers and mothers who birthed the vision for our great nation.

You can see a video of my Announcement speech on www.kucinich.us (Our site has undergone its own transformation!)

Our campaign will change the direction of the Democratic Party, the war in Iraq and our nation.

Please join me to help make this great turning possible.

Thank you

Dennis Kucinich

About Me

Name: Left of Liberal

Location: Washington, United States

Remember the heady fun of learning Deconstructive theory? I learned it in college, in the 1990s, and I delighted, then, in fathoming my locus as the "site of transgression" in various binarisms. The site of transgression used to be the locus of the good guys: Experimental writers and Marxists and queers and misfits of all stripes. But "degeneracy" doesn't feel quite so benign now that the "construct" of morality has brought us into a collapse of civil rights. I guess it could be argued that Bush is the "site of transgression" between morality and immorality, the thread to pull to deconstruct the construct. But, sadly, no one is pulling.

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Oprah and James Frey

Tim O'Brien's narrator in "How to Tell a True War Story" explains, "Someone tells a story, let's say, and, afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer." For millions of James Frey's readers, the answer mattered. By O'Brien's math, however, readers should have doubted the veracity of A Million Little Pieces from the start. Now readers from Oprah Winfrey to my students at the community college where I teach are crying foul. "Duped," they say. Meanwhile, others are trying to make sense of the grandscale public furor. Arguments range from the political to the ethical to the literary. Here are a few questions percolating to the tops of blogs, book reviews and news shows: Why are people outraged about this but not about more egregious lies with higher stakes? Why has the publishing industry sacrificed honesty in the service of sales? Why should we, in a nihilistic culture that values "perception" above "truth," be surprised by the fictive memoir as a new development? What does this new controversy signify about Oprah’s cultural clout? Even when jumping into the infinite regress of these unanswerable questions, I can’t find a satisfactory explanation why, Oprah’s wrath notwithstanding, so many people are so very angry at one small, shy man who wrote a book with tall tales and bad prose. Sure. No one likes to be fooled. But if it’s really about truth and lies, why aren’t people screaming in the streets every day about Diebold and Enron and WMDs? If it’s really about the mercenary nature of big publishing houses, why aren’t independent media outposts now the sudden beneficiaries of a windfall? The causal connection between nihilism and lying seems, at best, quaint. If we call for an end to the consciousness of perception and relativism, what are we asking for? Empiricism and essentialism? Haven’t decades, if not centuries, of critical thought exposed those views as even graver lies than any that could be constructed by a single human’s perception? And Oprah. Is it really about Oprah? I know that many of my students, for example, know more about Jennifer Aniston’s divorce than they do about our government, but no single item of celebrity gossip—not even Martha Stewart’s incarceration—has ever instigated their indignation to this extent. Indeed, this is only the second time in my eight years of teaching that students have brought up a current event for discussion before I could. The first time was 9/11. My best analysis is that the outrage isn’t about truth. It isn’t about politics or publishing or the nature of perception. Anyone who’s read even a page of Frey’s book knows it sure as hell isn’t about literature, either. It isn’t even about Oprah. James Frey’s lies garner widespread and widely publicized outrage because, in Frey’s lies, we recognize ourselves. His behavior reminds us of our own insecurities. Who among us has never tried to make ourselves look better than we are, even if we haven’t done so in "memoir" form? Maybe Frey lied for the same reasons many people do: because he didn’t believe that he was good enough or interesting enough as he was. Maybe even those of us who don’t lie use other questionable tactics to try and make people like or even love us. Maybe we do favors we don’t have time to do or give money that we don’t have to give. And maybe we want to loudly punish James Frey because he reminds us of something we’d like to forget: That we all make dubious ethical choices when compensating for our own feelings of inadequacy...

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