CitizensTruth

As 2006 ends I want to recommend an opportunity to look back at the past in a way that will entertain and make you think. I was not interested in history in the least, not one bit, until this year when at age 55 I started reading and listening to work by Michael Parenti.

A couple of my favorites are:

• “The Struggle for History - Dissident Truth and Official Deception
• “Real History” - in four half-hour segments

You can hear these for free at Maria Gilardin’s TUC Radio or buy recordings. Doing the latter helps support the TUC Radio project.

Disclaimer: I don’t think we should take anyone as an absolute authority on something, no matter how articulate, charismatic, etc. Nothing absolves us, as citizens, from the responsibility to continue asking questions, doubting authority, and relentlessly seeking out the truth.

Here is the quote from Faulkner with which Parenti ends the first of the above two sets of talks (in fact there is a complete transcript here but I recommend the audio for impact):

“The past is never dead and buried. In fact, it is never even past.” If we’re lied to with impunity, we are robbed of the first condition of a democratic citizenry: how the present can help us understand the past and the past understand the present. How we can arm ourselves against the lies and calumny that are bombarding us all the time. History need not bore us, need not imprison us, but it can liberate our understanding so that we might become not its victims but its active agents.

Open letter to Trish Choate of Scripps Howard News Service

Dear Ms. Choate-

I just came across an article attributed to you:

Plan for military could mean cuts
Bush’s call to increase Army, Marines might mean Air Force has to trim personnel
By Trish Choate/Scripps Howard News Service
December 23, 2006

- in which you cite speakers from the nonpartisan and nonprofit Lexington Institute and American Enterprise Institute, crying poor over part of a defense budget that is now well over half a trillion dollars a year.

What has happened to our values in this country?

You don’t address the immense opportunity cost in the present expenditures. Here is a comment on the $378 billion that the Bush administration has already spent, solely on Iraq, from the nonpartisan and nonprofit National Priorities Project:

As NPP Research Director, Dr. Anita Dancs, testified at a congressional forum, $378 billion could pay for all of the following: health care coverage for all uninsured children during this entire war; four-year scholarships to a public university for all of this year’s graduating seniors; construction of 500,000 affordable housing units; the Coast Guard’s estimate on funds needed for port security; tripling the energy conservation budget in the US Department of Energy; and reducing this year’s budget deficit by half.

You don’t address the moral issue of putting so much of our national treasure into murder and mayhem instead of building up the human condition. In a time when much is made of holocaust denial at a conference in Iran, it is common to dismiss without serious examination the report of 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion. The latter report was compiled by a team of internationally respected researchers with data collected at considerable personal risk.

And you don’t address the fiscal madness of the Bush administration spending, outside of Social Security, roughly one dollar for every 68 cents it takes in, or the irresponsibility of the Pentagon losing track of $2.3 trillion.

I urge you to take a stand, to help point out the madness that so much of our press is telling the American people to comply with.

Sincerely,

Hal Snyder, M.D.

[Note: the qualifier, "outside of Social Security", in the second to last paragraph was added after emailing to Ms. Choate, and the number corrected from 69 cents to 68. - hs]