I was sad to hear this morning of the passing of one of the great historians of our time, Howard Zinn. If you haven’t already, you should try and pick up his book, “A People’s History of the United States,” it is a fascinating look at the “real”history of our country….mostly from the point of view of the least powerful groups in our history….minorities, women, the lower class……this book really shows us what our country was built on without all the nationalistic bullshit! I remember first opening this book while camping over Columbus Day weekend……it made me shudder to think that the person we grow up idolizing was pretty much a cold blooded killer that did some real nasty damage to the indigenous population when he arrived in “The New World”. If you have some time, below is Chapter 1 from the book mentioned above…..it is a fascinating read, but be forewarned that this book will open your mind and question why we were taught what we were in school. I do understand that creating nationalism is important to the future survival of a country….but what are the costs in doing so?

UPDATE: Here’s a great speech by Howard Zinn….just in case you don’t have time to read the below excerpt from his book, you can put this on and listen to the man’s thoughts.

The following is from Howard Zinn’s,
A People’s History of the United States, 1980.
Chapter 1
Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote:

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.

The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic — the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern trip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.

In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.

Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia — the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean Sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields. (more…)

side note: Here we go again….just another lie put into motion by the criminals who ran our government the last time around! Isn’t it unbelievable that they put a lie in motion, and then justify their actions around that lie. Saddam has WMD’s…..we must go into Iraq. They leak that story to the press, and then go on national tv and say “look, even the press knows about it! Didn’t you read the NYTimes today?!?!” Al-Qaeda has ties with Iraq….we must go to Iraq. The story about the aluminum tubes that that discredited journalist wrote about for the NYTimes…..yep, another reason we had to go into Iraq. Or hey…we know that our country has had the torture debate in the past…we even helped prosecute other people based on that policy. But we want to do it now…so lets have a bunch of lawyers come up with some legal mumbo-jumbo and we’ll be able to do it to! Or the Downing Street Memos that were discovered…….or they pay off journalists to promote their agenda, remember that? And now this…..the guy that “proved” that waterboarding worked….well, he wasn’t even there! This piece of shit should be charged with a crime…..for allowing other criminals to cover up their crimes. He’s a traitor in my eyes……nothing like being angry at 9am!

BY JEFF STEIN
Foreign Policy
A study in “enhanced reporting techniques.”

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA’s application of the medieval confession technique.

The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou’s claim.

“It works, is the bottom line,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou’s ABC interview. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling — to this day — the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times. (more…)

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.sfgate.com

In a victory for medical marijuana users, the state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state law that protects them from arrest if they show police official identification cards. The court also overturned a law that limits how much pot patients can carry and how many plants they can grow.

The court unanimously ruled that the limits – 8 ounces of dried marijuana, six mature plants or 12 immature plants – conflicted with Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use. (more…)

side note: WTF? Does anyone else feel like there’s no hope at times? How can I compete with a multi-billion dollar company? I give 50 dollars….they give 50 thousand! Who would you listen to if you were an elected official? We need to get those pieces of shit, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas off the Supreme court…..they are contributing to downfall of our country. I go back to the 2004 election….and how people said it wasn’t a big deal……

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on business efforts to influence federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said companies can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority agreed.

”The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.

Strongly disagreeing, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, ”The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens’ dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns. (more…)

side note: could not have said it better myself.

Drew Westen
Psychologist and neuroscientist; Emory University Professor
Huffingtonpost.com

You can blame a bad candidate, bad organization, bad timing of a vacation — choose your rationalization. But the reality is that voters in Massachusetts were reacting to the same foul mist coming off Boston Harbor that New Jersey Voters smelled coming off the Hudson and Virginia voters off the Chesapeake.

What they all understood was that the source lay on the shores of the Potomac.

It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year’s time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.

All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama’s presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year.

The President’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in the name of “bipartisanship,” and his refusal ever to utter the words “I am a Democrat” and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy — and hence competing parties — for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility. (more…)

Marijuana Policy Project
www.mpp.org

Last night, Gov. Jon Corzine (D) signed New Jersey’s medical marijuana legislation into law. As a result, New Jersey is now the 14th state to protect seriously ill patients from arrest and jail for using medical marijuana with their doctors’ approval.

The bill had been passed by the New Jersey Legislature on January 11, passing by 48-14 in the Assembly and 25-13 in the Senate.

The new law will not only protect medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail but also allows for the regulated dispensing of medical marijuana. When the law is implemented, it’s likely that there will be at least six dispensaries for patients to obtain their medicine, two in each part of the state. Doctors will be able to recommend up to two ounces of marijuana to patients within a 30-day period.

The Drug Policy Alliance New Jersey and the Coalition for Medical Marijuana-New Jersey led the lobbying efforts to pass this important legislation, which will go into effect this summer.

We’re hoping that the decisive victory in New Jersey will convince neighboring state New York to do the right thing and protect patients who continue to live in fear. MPP has been pushing a medical marijuana bill forward there for seven years, and this year looks like the year that it may finally become law.

With the help of MPP’s 29,000 dues-paying members, we’ll continue to roll back the government’s war on the sick and dying. We’re working hard in Arizona, New York, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts to make these states the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th to pass medical marijuana legislation. Would you please consider making a donation today to support our efforts?