Its bad enough that British Petroleum’s CEO said his massive, endless gushing spill was only a tiny blip in a huge ocean…

Its bad enough that British Petroleum has not mourned the ELEVEN DEAD WORKERS who died in the blast on the oil rig that is responsible for the gushing toxic spill…

One of the youngest workers on the rig, Shane Roshto, 22, is survived by his son and his wife, Natalie, who has filed a lawsuit against BP, Transocean and Halliburton. An inspiration to his friends, he wrote two dates — his wedding day and his son’s birthday — inside of his hard hat, referring to these dates when he was having a bad day.

Its bad enough that the oil rig company has already received $270 million in insurance money as a claim for the lost oil rig, none of which will go to cleanup or to compensate the families of the dead…

Its bad enough that British Petroleum sent its lawyers in within hours of the beginning of the spill to get the widows and residents of coastal Alabama  to sign off any future lawsuit against BP, for a measly $5,000 per life…

But now, on American soil, British Petroleum is in charge of law enforcement, puppet-mastering the local sheriffs’ offices and the Coast Guard, keeping reporters from the beaches.  Americans are being kept from the beaches by a foreign corporation.

So much for the ‘new’ logo, the earth-friendly ‘Beyond Petroleum’ public relations campaign of a few years ago, BP’s attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers, designed to show the company’s commitment to, get this, the environment and solar power…

British Petroleum is firmly an oil company.  It is dodging responsibility for its epic, monumental, continuing spill and  its degradation of the US coastline, AND its running our own sovereign law enforcement agencies.  How can Americans know the extent of damage, if reporters are turned away from American soil by a British conglomerate?

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He made a big point of the fact that it was mutual (she helped him film his abstinence video – shades of John Edwards and his videographer) and that she works PART TIME for him. You know what that means?

Probably NO HEALTH INSURANCE, no benefits… He was messing with a woman who probably didn’t have a safety net.

That’s not ‘mutual’, buddy, when you’ve got lifetime health benefits and retirement pay…

Oh, and his first response to the affair allegations was ‘it’s revenge politics’.

No, its not, Mark, it’s integrity, which you lack.  YOU’VE GOT HER INTERVIEWING YOU ABOUT TEEN ABSTINENCE EDUCATION!!!  Hmmm, Abstinence, Affair, Adultery.  Mark, get your A words straight.  Don’t let the door hit you on your way out…

He said, “In the poisonous environment of Washington, DC, any personal failing is seized upon and twisted for political gain.’

Um, Mark? No. Your affair, which, once CAUGHT, you now call a personal failing, is seized on because of your epic hypocrisy.  Your affair is used for political gain because you stand for nothing anymore, you’ve gone against every word you’ve uttered.

With your morality politics, through your 8 terms, you’ve made decisions that have impacted the lives of all Americans, yet you can’t even walk your own walk.  You’ve voted for the nuclear family, over other definitions of ‘family’ and yet you betrayed yours.  You filmed yourself talking about abstinence-only education, but committed adultery.  You say marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but you can’t even stay faithful to your own marriage, how can you judge the intent and fidelity of others?

Time for all of you who represent us in Congress to fess up, clean out your closets and act from integrity.

It’s no longer a surprise that the Representative from Indiana had an affair in his office, its so cliché…

Yet he and his brethren are the ‘deciders’ for the morality of the rest of Americans.  We’ve got infidels in charge.

Time to sweep them out and bring in representatives who act from the truth of their lives, caring enough not to throw the PART TIME worker under the bus…

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But Zuckerberg is WRONG.  There IS a place for privacy on the web, and most of his users completely believe that Facebook WILL protect their privacy.  A few days ago, supposedly, Facebook bigwigs sat down for a quickly pulled together meeting, because of the global backlash against Facebook’s ‘we own you’ draconian privacy intrusions.

You know Facebook will deny they’re up against a wall, but they are up against a proverbial wall.

The kid who allegedly texted while at Harvard saying that people who gave him personal information on the internet are dumb f**ks, is now in charge of the largest-ever cache of human information in history.  Is he acting with maturity, with foresight and with hindsight?

No.

Because he’s too young to understand the implications of his actions.  He’s literally selling the individual proprietary stories of millions of human lives, in the interest of money making.  He’s enacting a social experiment that he doesn’t understand, and he’s destroying any trust that Facebook users have in him.

What he doesn’t see is that he’s already created the most successful (yet) global brain.  People from all over the planet connect on his platform.  He’s gone from ‘fringe’ to ‘mainstream’, in less than a decade.  He has a caretaking, leadership responsibility to all his users, and he fails them when he makes them take 20 steps to protect their privacy.  I went on to my account and my daughter’s account and shut the spy hole on us, but I was able to do it because I’m tech savvy.  Regular social users of Facebook are being sold upriver.

So let’s hope there’s a bit of ‘Dude, you don’t know enough to have made this decision’ conversation today.  Let’s hope that Facebook has some wise, more life-experienced people at the meeting, who can tell the Emperor that he’s accidentally stripped all the people instead of himself.

At this point in the growth of the social web, it DOES matter that each individual assumes that they are protected by apps and websites and platforms that they use.

Zuckerberg, and sadly Facebook, have not shown maturity and consideration and due diligence in caring for their community.  This just-turned 26 year old clearly doesn’t understand what he’s done and hopefully SOMEone at Facebook can get him to do what’s right, not sell his users.

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University of Maryland’s International Center for Media & the Public Agenda did a study,

The study’s results statement says: “American college students today are addicted to media, describing their feelings when they have to abstain from using media in literally the same terms associated with drug and alcohol addictions: In withdrawal, Frantically craving, Very anxious, Extremely antsy, Miserable, Jittery, Crazy.”

Susan D. Moeller, the journalism professor who conducted the study, noted “What they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn’t connect with friends who live close by, much less those far away.”

What’s going on here?  I suggest we look at this from a different perspective.  Kids are prolific connectors these days, sending 100s of texts a day.  They communicate everything that they see and feel and think, in the very moment that things happen to them.  This can be very healthy, in that they don’t feel their wounds alone and they do not stay stuck in their response to events.  They share almost immediately, and sharing sorrows or fears or wounds and receiving feedback helps to diminish them, making them manageable.  Then the kid moves on to the next life experience.

They share their joys and judgments and distrust and distractions and together they are creating an invisible, below-the-radar tribe.

The stereotypical ‘teen angst’ experience of feeling alone and not understood in the world is quelled by constant interaction, even though it is via computers and cell phones.  One student in the study said, “Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort. When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

Given that their usual avenues to the news were voluntarily blocked for 24 hours, did they turn to old media sources? No.  Interestingly, only a scant few said they turned to newspapers or radio, because they are used to getting their news from social media and each other.  Only the Olympics and such big events got them to turn on the TV for news.

Again, from a different perspective, these kids are used to immediate reception of news and immediate sharing of not only the news but their thoughts on it.  They are relevant within their circle of friends.  They bond together in ‘Like’ groups on Facebook, they are extremely aware of current events, as they happen, and they are interested in what is happening around the globe.

I think they are not so much addicted, as experiencing brain evolution.   Their brains can and are handling massively increased brain activity.  The sending and receiving neurons, the connectors, all are being called upon minute–by-minute as they text and update and check in with each other, whether they are close friends or online friends.  A sense of loyalty exists, not just to those few kids that they know and run into in classes or after school programs, but also to hundreds of other kids near and far that they connect with only online.   In other words, their brains are firing for people in their local ‘family’, and their regional and international ‘family.’

This so-called ‘addiction’ to social media is, to me, the best sign that humanity will continue.  Because while the old white haired guys are throwing bombs at each other and sending up spy satellites, these kids’ brains are connecting, not looking for differences.  Of course, there is still teen hate, teen judgment, teen cruelty, but their ‘tribe’ isn’t just three kids they eat with at the school lunch table.

Their tribe is the hundreds of friends they have in social media, and they clearly show compassion when they hear about and communicate about events that do not personally affect them, like the earthquake in Chile that happened while some of the students were ‘unplugged.’  The only problem I see is that the ownership of smart phones, ipods and laptops is probably related to economic strata and therefore kids within lower income households aren’t getting the benefit of these enlarged social networks.

So their brains are hyper-active, in a way that does not need to be medicated.  Their brains have brought them into larger, safer, more solid groups within which they can hopefully learn to be their best selves.  That’s not addiction.  That’s a healthy learning environment.  If their parents and educators could see from a new perspective, social media could be the glue to a new, larger, more global coherent community.

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I’ve clipped two of his screen shots, because they are pretty shocking.  The first comes at 3:50 into the video, where he shows how the economy did WITHOUT taking into consideration Mortgage Equity withdrawals.  Blue bars show GDP WITH Mortgage Equity withdrawals showing up as “Spending”.  The red bars show the GDP calculations WITHOUT Mortgage Equity withdrawals showing up.  Two negative years would have scared us somewhat straight…  But, no, we were told to spend…

The second is a graph of the debt super cycles that comes 1 minute into the video.  The gray bars are recessions.

Its a LONG video, but its worth it.  Lots of remedial information about economics and the US economy in particular.

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This guy helped found the Ella Baker Center, a modern day civil rights organization in Oakland, California, providing the launching pad for  needed activist groups such as Books Not Bars and Color of Change AND he provided shelter and advocacy for families who lost their homes to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.  He wrote the definitive book on rescuing both our jobless and our environment, “The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems“.

His sin?  Once signing something that wondered whether or not 9/11 was an inside job.  And believing in a society of equality.

Westboro Baptist Church?  What have they done for a city, the oppressed, the overlooked, the homeless?  Nothing.  They show up at funerals and picket the dead, with whom they have NO connection.  They carry signs that say ‘God Hates Fags’.  They showed up at a memorial for a bus accident…  They showed up at a memorial for the Sago Mine Disaster.

They show up at the funerals of U.S. soldiers who die in the line of duty.  They showed up and one brave father sued them for disrupting his own right to privacy, to grieve his son who died in battle.

What is Westboro’s sin?  For which no one has yet caught or stopped them?  For which Conservative Pundits DO NOT attack???  They honestly believe that their hate-filled God is killing AMERICAN innocents around the world as a SIGN that we are doomed because the United States is becoming more tolerant of homosexuality.  (Forget that their Jesus said ‘do not judge’…)  The Dixie Chicks suffered more for saying ONE THING in 2003 (in the run-up to invading Iraq): “we don’t want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas”, than Westboro has EVER suffered for their far, far worse inflammatory calls to civil war.

They believe 9/11 was an inside job.  They believe that the pregnant woman who jumped from the burning, collapsing Tower ‘deserved’ to die, along with her 3700 fellow Americans murdered that day.  They don’t care if you are gay or straight, their God wants to kill you.

Where are the Conservative pundits now?  Why did they attack (like ravenous wolves) a man who stood up for the poor and the incarcerated?

Why are the Conservative pundits now silent, when a soldier’s father is forced to pay the legal bills of a pseudo-religious group that wants to incite riots?  WHY ARE THEY SILENT?

Could it be that the activist is black?  And the preacher is white?  Their base is white and Christian…

We are sitting on a powder keg.  These protests are not lawful.  They are meant to incite real violence.  Letting them scream their vitriol is like allowing the shouting of ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater.  Until now, there have been no riots, because individuals or groups like the Patriot Guards show up and buffer the crazy protesters from the grief stricken families.

We give tax exemption to anyone who claims they are a religion.  Let’s outlaw that.  Why should one portion of society not pay the costs of the society they operate within, especially when they cost us LOTS OF MONEY for increased police protection when they host these HATE events?  The Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Christ is worth $20 billion. Scientology is a rich religion.  Why allow tax benefits to nut jobs like Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church?  Let them be taxed at the same rate as regular Americans.

And where are the same Conservative pundits who ripped Van Jones to shreds, when Westboro says exactly the same thing, only crazier?

Sitting on their hands, silent.  As usual.

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This could be seen as hypocritical, because here are four ‘old white men’ holding up funding to a program that serves a predominately minority constituency of CHILDREN, while these same four ‘old white men’ are NOT PUSHING FOR REFORM on the hundred million dollar bonuses of their ‘old white men’ Wall Street buddies.

Chuck Grassley, R-IA, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, Jon Kyl R-AZ and John Cornyn, R-TX have joined together to block further federal funding of Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

The allegations against Boys and Girls Clubs of America are:

Roxanne Spillett, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, received a total compensation of $988,591 in 2008, according to the charity’s tax filings. She got a base salary of $360,774, a bonus of $150,000 and other compensation of $83,152, for a total of $593,926. She also received $385,500 in deferred compensation, most of which went to a retirement plan, and $9,165 in nontaxable benefits.

They are concerned that:

the chief executive of a charity that has been closing local clubs for lack of funding was compensated nearly $1 million in 2008. They also questioned why in the same year officials spent $4.3 million on travel, $1.6 million on conferences, conventions and meetings, and $544,000 in lobbying fees.

Hmmm, excessive travel and conference expenses, conventions and meetings and LOBBYING FEES?  Sounds like the typical life of a POLITICIAN.  What these men do not tell you is how many officials were included in that $4.3 million travel spending, whether the $1.6 million spent on conferences were to put on one conference or fifty, and why in all fairness a childrens’ organization NEEDS to spend $544,000 to LOBBY for funding…

Here’s what Boys and Girls Clubs of America accomplish:

• More than 4 million boys and girls served
• More than 4,000 Club locations
• Locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and on U.S. military bases around the world
• More than 50,000 trained professional staff

Boys and Girls Clubs of America have helped millions of kids across America, including R&B singer, Usher.

From academic failure and gang violence to poverty, drugs and obesity, America’s youth face a daunting array of problems – with serious consequences and fewer safety nets at home and in the community. According to a 2007 BGCA alumni survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 57 percent of alumni reported, “The Club saved my life,” while another 28 percent credited Boys & Girls Clubs with keeping them in school.

“Growing up in the Club, I had the chance to experience a lot of positive things; it helped reinforce the values I learned at home including good character, leadership and giving back to my community, my country and my world,” said Usher. “It’s where I developed my love of singing and performing, received help with my homework, and it’s where I found a safe place to go after school.”

So how do we begin to have constructive change, when the complainers do exactly what they’re trying to stop?

And why do our kids need lobbyists to fight for money that is channeled to Big Banks whose CEOs’ crazy annual incomes are NEVER LIMITED?

Where is the integrity?

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I was struck by something Tom Hanks said in his recent interview in TIME Magazine:

How can Americans ask our young men and women to indiscriminately kill a shadowy enemy and then return to their ordered Coca-Cola lives Stateside?  “It’s even worse for our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hanks says. “At least the Pacific-war soldiers coming back from World War II decompressed on ships for weeks. And then once the troops arrived portside, it was often a long train ride home to Peoria. Today these guys in Afghanistan fight in bloody hell and are flown back in 18 hours. How can they cope with that? How can they suddenly go from Tora Bora to Peyton Place?” Even the legendary Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II, suffered posttraumatic stress disorder after his return from the European theater. During one meltdown, a deranged Murphy held his wife hostage at gunpoint.

Recently, an angry Ft. Stewart soldier, Spc. Marc A. Hall, wrote a rap song about his rage at having been ’stop lossed’, forced again and again to re-enlist into dangerous war zones even though his contracted time in service had expired.  In the song, he describes revenge and vengeful acts on his Commanding Officers for betraying him and forcing him back into combat.

How is the Army handling it?  They want to ship him from the United States of America, where he is currently in military jail in Georgia, to KUWAIT!!! For a military trial.  He wouldn’t be able to put together a strong defense, because most of his civilian attorneys and civilian witnesses couldn’t fly to Kuwait to testify.  Its like he’s being toyed with, after he was toyed with for years of stop loss.

There is no mercy in the military.

So we need to find it in the civilian world.

It turns out that writing about your rage, or your sorrow, or fear, or brokenness actually helps you PROCESS the unthinkable things you might have seen or done in wartime. Author Maxine Hong Kingston has a writers group for US soldiers that has been helpful in their re-entry into their home environments. An anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace was published with these writings.

There is a courtroom in Pennsylvania that takes into account the extenuating circumstances of a soldier’s service, offering a Veteran’s Affairs mentor and programs to help.

Drugs and addiction account for a significant percentage of veterans’ crimes: nearly half of vets in federal prison, for example, are locked up on drug charges. Fully 61% of veteran prisoners are dependent on or abuse alcohol or drugs. Meanwhile, cases of post-traumatic stress disorder — many left untreated — only compound the problem.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization’s tagline is ‘For America’s Newest Generation of Veterans and the People Who Support Them’. They offer a hand to help veterans re-acclimate to their families and their jobs and their lives.

We need to UN-BOOT CAMP our brave men and women in the Military, especially if the Military will not do so.

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Today is a national day of protest for students:

Students, professors, teachers and unions around the country will organize today to protest America’s imperiled system of education with more than 100 events in 32 states.

The movement started in California, where the public college system has been seized by tension and dissatisfaction over proposed tuition hikes, budget cuts and a series of racist events on University of California and California State campuses.

At the same time that we’re upping their educational costs, think about this:

The founding fathers said that our national debt should be paid off every generation. They said it is immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. Today we are saddling not only the next generation but the next and the next. This is taxation without representation because we are putting our posterity in debt when they are not old enough to vote on it.

Its not exactly fair to make students pay more for the ability to discover the ways in which we’ve betrayed them.

In California, Governor Schwarzenegger wants to tie education spending to prison spending, because only 7.5% of the general fund goes to higher education but a whopping 11% goes to the prison system.

So kids, we won’t educate you, but we’ll sure house you for life!

On this day of protest, let’s give students our support.  We’d rather have them smart so they can dig us out of the mess we’re in, so they can provide GOOD FOOD to us when we’re in nursing homes in just a few decades… We’ll be in trouble if they are all uneducated or incarcerated.

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According to Lawrence Lessig, there are two places we are in denial:

The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about. The pivot points of our financial system — the infrastructure that lets free markets produce real wealth — have become profoundly corrupted. Balance sheets are “fictions,” as Professor Frank Partnoy put it. Trillions of dollars in liability hide behind these fictions. And as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. That bubble burst, but we can already see the soaring profits of the same firms that sucked billions in taxpayer funds. The cycle has started again.

You know all about the billion dollar bonuses, but have you forgotten about the billion dollar bailout?

But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors. As if regulators had just miscalculated, like a pilot who accidentally overshoots the run way, or an engineer who mis-estimates the weight of cargo on a plane. And so, because these were mere errors, people spoke as if these errors could be corrected by a bunch of good ideas….

But we aren’t in our current double dip recession because of math errors, that’s blind.  We are here because our governmental system is beholden to political interests and guess who has the most money to throw at Congress? The same unregulated corporations who put a gun to the global economy’s head, took obscene profits, got bailed out (remember that you’re not getting bailed out via credit card reform or mortgage reform or healthcare reform) paid themselves bonuses and are now experiencing a bump in their business (WHY? because they’ve again BET AGAINST AMERICA).

Lessig has a solution:

We need to admit our (democracy’s) problem. We need to get beyond this stage of denial. We need to recognize that until we release our leaders from a system that forces them to ignore good sense when there is an opportunity for large campaign cash, we won’t have policy that makes sense. Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can find the fix to fund the next cycle of campaigns.

…privately funded public elections tend inevitably towards this kind of corruption. And until we solve that (eminently solvable) problem, we won’t make any progress in making America’s finances safe again. FixCongressFirst. Only then will sensible policy be possible.

With Billionaires running for office and committing $100 million of their own money IN CASH to their campaigns, with Wall Street and lobbyists funneling billions to keep the current governmental/corporate back-scratching going on and to ensure that NO REFORM HAPPENS, American workers will be bankrupted again and again.  This Congress is incapable of the change we need, because they are so happy to jump on planes and go to vacation spots, on corporate dimes, while you and I think they are working for us.

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