Liked the last Edition, Ed, did you?

Dear Rod:

Kevin rambles around, I almost lose my footing; then he spits out a chunk of solid ground - SAFE!.

He's right about hired gun friends and across the board acceptance of spiritual matters - they are just an imitation of what inner struggle and friendship are all about.

Can't find a good shrink? It's no wonder, I told you about MY adventures in that department.

By running our thoughts and real life stories, you have been a friend to all who have posted to or written for G21; please, allow us to return the favor and save you from the "dissection of a stranger".

"Waiter, some more bread and another round for me and my friend..............."

EC

P.S. I'm rolling the dice on "The Lottery"


From Ed C., Pontiac, MI, USA:

Subject: Bob Martin & ICANN At Large

Dear Rod:

I didn't realize that you were supposed to fix our world if things went wrong. I say ,"Stay out the kitchen if ya can't take the heat" . Hasn't this guy been spammed before? I alway thought that's why most ISP's offer people more than one screen name; one for friends, one for business, one for member-at-large organization.

ROFLMAO :O)

EC


From Al D., London, UK:

Rod

I thought G21 was very interesting this week, did you know Ken Livingstone (London Mayor elect) has openly supported the Seattle rioters? I think a major issue at the moment is the cancellation of Third World debt which is necessary for the anti-capitalist sentiment to have any direct action. As you say in your article, capitalism needs to be more responsible, I don't particularly like what is going on in Washington right now and I hope it brings the issue into light rather than stifles debate, but before any progress can be made, the West has to cancel Third World debt. Britain has said it will, and Canada said it may, and the rest of Europe will engage in debate over it, yet US remains the one stumbling block. Maybe G21 could help highlight the situation?

Here are few quotes that I thought would add to your ones in your article:

"U.S. contempt for UN authority is shown by its defiance of the recent General Assembly vote of 157 nations versus 2 nations protesting the U.S. criminal blockade of Cuba" --Ramsey Clark (former U.S. Attorney General), Letter to the UN, November 1998

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909?1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street." --U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler**, in Common Sense, November 1935

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own ... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans." --General David Sharp, former United States Marine Commandant, 1966

"The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy." --Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson


From Ed C., Pontiac, MI, USA:

Dear Rod:

Couldn't find a definate email address for Brother Raheem, so pass along my compliments. His parting comment about old men in a Star Chamber brought back an old paranoia of mine, which I memorialized in song around 1977-78. I was worried about the sky thing too......long before the Star Chamber system was a gleam in Ronnie Reagan's eye. I'll expand on this, once I "decompress" from the tax man(the check is finally in the mail).

Caio,

EC


From Ed C., Pontiac, MI, USA:

Good solid stuff! Bob obviously has a feel for whats real. Makes me want to go out and get a solid jazz "fix".

Thanks Rod, Thanks Bob.

Ed C.

Rod -

I liked Ed's piece on the lottery. If we need to have lotteries, I've always thought they would be a lot more interesting if they had better layered payoffs. Rather than having it so one person wins $20 or $40 million, while the next best person wins enough money to buy designer coffee doesn't seem right. If you had 5 $5 million dollar winners, with a whole bunch of 6 figure and 5 figure awards thrown in, it might get your odds up to the potential of winning big in Vegas. At least if you go to Vegas, you usually slowly lose your money, so you can have some fun along the way.

Playing the lottery is about as rewarding as playing Nasdaq last week.

Dan


From Claudette R., Geneva, SWITZERLAND:

Dear Editor,

It is very refreshing to find a Web site from the US that is not all "America is the Greatest." Thank you for admitting that there is a world outside of the US and maybe we don't want to be like you or bend the knee to YOUR idea of the future.

I will be back to read more!

Best Regards,
Claudette

AND your favorite e-mails from The World's Mailbox

Sheesh!

Take a Look at These Facts...

Some things are worth speaking out about... even when people are sick of hearing them...

The state of Texas, under the leadership of Governor George W. Bush, is ranked:

• 50th in spending for teachers' salaries 49th in spending on the environment
• 48th in per-capita funding for public health 47th in delivery of social services
• 42nd in child-support collections
• 41st in per-capita spending on public education and ...
• 5th in percentage of population living in poverty 1st in air and water pollution
• 1st in percentage of poor working parents without insurance 1st in percentage of children without health insurance 1st in executions (avg. 1 every 2 weeks for Bush's 5 years)

Forward this to every person of voting age.


From Rolanda P., (No City Provided,) BELGIUM:

The book I would like to bring to your attention is DISCOVERING AMERICA AS IT IS by Valdas Anelauskas, a monumental study of the devastating effect American-style ultra-capitalism is having on the American people -- something that people in other countries, and Europeans in particular, need to know, as the American Way is going global. This book raises serious questions concerning America's role as a leading model for development, and even as to its future capacity to compete due to the deterioration of its "human capital" -- the American people -- resulting from its anti-social domestic policies.

Valdas Anelauskas is a Lithuanian journalist and former anti-Soviet dissident who was expelled from the USSR for his human rights activities. He was received in the U.S. as a high profile political dissident, and initially even addressed American audiences alongside powerful right-wing American politicians like Newt Gingrich. While many anti-Soviet human rights activists turned to the United States to champion their cause, and many even emigrated to the USA, few have publicly exposed their view of human rights as practiced in the United States. That fact, in itself, would make DISCOVERING AMERICA AS IT IS an important book, coming as it does from someone of this background.

Ten years of observation of American reality has led Anelauskas to conclude that the U.S. extreme capitalist system represents an even greater threat than Soviet mock-communism to the well-being of the world. He paints an extraordinary portrait of the America he discovered -- the true America, as it exists in actuality, for most Americans. His book explores with shock and indignation the lot of vast millions of ordinary people in the richest country in the world, which surely could treat its citizens at least as well as other industrialized nations do, but refuses to. Thirteen highly documented chapters -- on poverty, crime, health, education, homelessness, income inequities and the replacement of welfare by "workfare" (which appears to be reintroducing slavery to America) -- detail the public disarray which results from an unfettered system of great wealth where the rich determine the social priorities. This is hardly the America of the movies and the slick magazines which be!dazzle the world with images of American prosperity.

This blistering reality is not "one man's opinion," but rather has been scrupulously culled - in nearly 600 pages with literally thousands of citations -- from the very latest researches by international organizations, domestic and international NGOs, independent U.S. think tanks and experts, and even from American government and business sources. While most critiques focus on one social sector or another, Anelauskas' multidimensional study brings them all together, and the impact is staggering. What this book enables us to grasp -- both intellectually and emotionally -- is the predatory and wasteful operation of unbridled capitalism as practiced in America, and the needless, preventable injury it is wreaking upon millions.

Anelauskas' study makes detailed comparisons between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, and also, even more tellingly, with the capitalist countries of Western Europe. What people need to consider is: Does capitalism have to weigh upon people so mercilessly -- or is the American version more extreme, more pitiless than that of other industrialized nations? Anelauskas found the U.S. shockingly deficient in the areas of economic and social human rights, and extensively documented the extent to which citizens of all other industrialized countries generally fare far better than, actually, most Americans.

So... how long will the relative prosperity of the citizens of other industrial nations be able to continue, in face of the extension of the American model? Truly, should the countries of the world be rushing to follow the American example -- or rather, moving strenuously to protect their social structures from the future that America seeks to impose, as forewarned in Anelauskas' final chapter, "The New World Order Takes Shape." This culminating chapter provides a clearer understanding of the true source of America's "know-how" as it relates to accumulating wealth and to maintaining it. From the expropriation of Indian lands, and the exploitation of African slave labor, to a taste for empire which spread to the continental rim, then jumped across many waters in a hundred-year history of invasions all around the globe, culminating at last in the hegemonic military-economic grip on the world by what many in the world view as a Rogue Superpower -- from the loot of domestic colonialism to that of colonialism, then neocolonialism abroad -- this is America as it is.

Perhaps the popular vision of America has been wrong for a very long time, as the book's Foreword by international legal specialist, Y.N. Kly, suggests?

Famous American historian Howard Zinn (Professor Emeritus, Boston University and author of A People's History of the United States) wrote about this book as follows: "This is an extraordinary book, especially startling not because it is a diligently researched and scathing critique of contemporary America, but because it is written by a Soviet dissident who arrived here with great expectations and discovered a sobering reality. The scope of the book is breathtaking, a sweeping survey, factually precise and philosophically provocative, which deserves to be compared to de Tocqueville's 19th century classic. I hope it will be widely read."

According to David Gil, Director of the Center for Policy Change at Brandeis University, Anelauskas' book is "a veritable tour de force... a rich source for understanding the forces which shape the quality of all our lives." Well-known American Indian author and activist, Ward Churchill, writes: "If just one-in-ten lifelong Americans had ever bothered themselves to learn as much about their country as has this recent Lithuanian immigrant, the horrors he writes about would never have existed. This is must reading for the entire population."

This is why I took liberty of bothering you with this information. If you would like to find out more about DISCOVERING AMERICA AS IT IS, you can visit the website of the publisher, Clarity Press, Inc., at:

http://www.bookmasters.com/clarity
http://www.efn.org/~rolanda/discovering/america.html

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,
ROLANDA P.

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