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So You Want to Live in a Police State? (Excerpts)
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post11/07/2016 03:24 am ET Updated Nov 07, 2017
If you think a police state will make America great again a.) you’re wrong, and b.) you’ve got your candidate — Donald Trump and the Deplorables are your self-evident choice.
In a national forum, Trump promises to lock up his opponent if he wins. And there are the Chants: “lock her up,” “execute her.” And the blind rage at his rallies against foreigners and immigrants and women and Jews and Muslims and reporters and anyone else who does not toe the Trump line … wherever it is that day. And the contempt for due process, laws they don’t like, the government, anyone who disagrees with them. And the claim that anything that doesn’t turn out as they want is “rigged.” And the refusal to accept results they don’t like, e.g., the expressed preference of American voters. And the willingness to try to intimidate those voters who might not vote as they want, voters who might be women or Hispanics or Blacks or the poor or foreign-born Americans or … democrats. And, always, the threat, implicit and explicit, of violence.
If you think a police state will make America great again c.) do you really want the alt-right running your life? and d.) do not think it cannot happen here.
For my part — and with my vote — I’m choosing the path toward “Liberty and Justice for ALL.”
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A True Radical, a Great Man
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post
08/13/2011 04:24 pm ET Updated Dec 06, 2017
Green is good for business. Not greenwash, GREEN. By working with nature rather than despoiling nature, Ray Anderson has led his company to high levels of success and profitability.
Ray Anderson died this week, of cancer. And the cancer is not incidental to this story. Ray was a friend and an inspiration. A lot of people talk about the environment. Ray did something. A lot of people say that we have to choose between a livable environment and a prosperous economy. Ray showed them that they were wrong, and he did it in an industry which is one of the most toxic around. Though it is impossible to know with absolute certainty precisely what causes a cancer, Ray spent much of his early career in the old-fashioned carpet industry … one which used (and still uses) bioactive, petroleum-based chemicals to manufacture the carpets. There’s a very good chance that long-term exposure to those chemicals caused the cancer that killed Ray.
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January 20, 2021 we will know if you believed Black Lives Matter. Did it or didn’t it?
It’s not too late between now and November 2, 2020. Will you ask your friends and relatives if they voted? If they haven’t encourage them to vote a straight blue ticket during this election.
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No One Will Do It For Us But US
Dr. Claud Anderson Talks Buying Black, Voting Issues, Power Nomics Plans
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They didn’t believe the scientists.
Ebola — It Didn’t Have to Be This Way
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post 10/19/2014 02:37 am ET Updated Dec 18, 2014
Ebola’s the open secret no one wanted to know about. This is anything but a new story. The Hot Zone caused a stir early in the ‘90s’; Virus Hunter toward the end. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is a chronic problem with the media. Headlines moved on to the next crisis de jour. Our program chose to look beyond those headlines. What we found is eerily prescient — virologists (people who study viruses) imploring us, begging us, to pay attention*.
What America, and therefore the world, got instead was the result of virulent Republican loathing of our government (except when subsidizing or protecting big business). Public funds plummeted while private funding was living down to its promise. In this cut-government-at-any-cost world, we’re now paying a deadly price for the stunning cuts. One example suffices: The 2013 Republican orchestrated “sequestration” required an National Institutes of Health across-the-board $1.55 billion cut in every area of medical research.
*We could easily have titled this piece “We Were Warned, and Warned, and Warned…” In 1997 we broadcast a program with Dr. C.J. Peters, then Chief of Special Pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control (and author of Virus Hunter).
Paula Gordon and Bill Russell: Conversations from People on the Leading Edge
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Don’t sit back and wait for the Supreme Court to fix things, Mr. Dean warns. It is by far the most secretive of the branches of government, and the most dangerous.
John Dean, John Dean: A Very Different Country, The Paula Gordon Show, recorded September 17, 2007. in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
Paula Gordon and Bill Russell: Conversations with People from the Leading Edge
John Dean: A Very Different Country
Republicans have broken America’s government by gaming the system, says John Dean of “Watergate” fame, and author of Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. He says his hopes for a reversal rest with the American people — we hate being suckered.
“People know when they’re getting screwed. When there’s a breakdown in fairness, people get it.”
He’s deeply concerned that authoritarian Republican leaders and followers are intent on a radical transformation of the United States.
“What’s interesting is Conservatives once were such sticklers for the rules,” says this former Goldwater Republican. “They prided themselves on their adherence to playing by the game’s proper procedures. That’s not true anymore, from the way they run government to being intellectually dishonest and making arguments that are fallacious — arguments for the nation going to war, for torture, for illegal wiretapping — very radical rulings.”
Before he wrote Broken Government, he revealed the strong authoritarian streak among leaders and followers of America’s extreme political and religious right wing in Conservatives Without Conscience. The second book in his unintended trilogy, he called Worse than Watergate.
“It was actually a misnomer. It should have been Much Worse Than Watergate. Nobody was tortured during Watergate. Nobody was killed under the so-called Watergate abuses. Millions of people weren’t subject to electronic surveillance under Watergate. It was just minor if you compare the two.”
And the good news?
“Give the public solid information — the things they don’t know about — and they’ll make the right decisions.”
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Kurtis Robinson, representing the Spokane NAACP, spoke at SCAR’s last general meeting via video. Listen to his well reasoned arguments on why Spokane does not need a new jail. (SCAR Spokane Community Against Racism)
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Without significant reforms first, and it MUST be intended for lower capacity.
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Paula Gordon and Bill Russell From the Leading Edge
Our Deadly Cocktail (excerpts)
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post, 04/18/2012 03:48 pm ET Updated Jun 18, 2012
America’s role in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy goes down as smoothly as any toxic cocktail: one part guns, one part race, one part stress, stir and duck. We’ve let ourselves become inured to guns, blind to how radically America’s changing racial composition is threatening a very old caste system, and ignorant of what is now knowable about stress. And for garnish? A deaf ear to “lead us not into temptation.”
The gun industry and their consorts among the host of extremists from our political and religious right-wing fringes have shouted down a long overdue, totally legitimate exploration of what place guns have in a society aspiring to be civil, never mind civilized. We’ve demurred when they’ve (mis)quoted the Constitution and mostly resign ourselves to sighs as a highly politicized Supreme Court majority shamelessly redefines the essence of the American Constitution.
So how do we “make sense” of Trayvon’s demise and all the factors indictable in that cruel endgame? What is the sense of America’s appetite for fear and for its purveyors, for atavistic fundamentalisms, for right-wing gun-lust, and for the irrefutably racist elements found across the nation?
We, at least, find a starting point in the actions and words of two very different men who, ironically, share a name.
First, think of George Zimmerman as an Everyman among the countless people, women as well as men, seduced by America’s gun-toting, right-wing agenda. No gun, different story. No “Stand Your Ground,” different story.
Then listen again to what Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, so presciently told us decades ago: “He’s only a pawn in their game.” Full article
Only a Pawn In Their Game : Bob Dylan
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ’neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game
Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music