Holiday Hypocrisy

By Stephen Lendman
Created Jan 15 2007 - 9:57am

Borrowing the line from Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore: "Things are
seldom as they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream." It's as true here in
the US today as it was in 19th century England, and its message explains how
to understand and view our affairs of state and why the title of this essay
was chosen - to reflect on our national federal holidays that, in fact,
represent something much different than the stated reasons we commemorate
them for. Eleven such holidays are reviewed below moving chronologically
through the year post-New Year's Day discussed briefly at the end because
it's part of the Christmas holiday season celebration.

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister, political activist, renowned
orator, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most noted leader of the American
civil rights movement until his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968,
two months before Robert Kennedy met the same fate in a Los Angeles hotel a
day after he won the Democrat primary in his campaign for the office of
president that year. In mid-January, King's January 15 birthday is
commemorated as a federal holiday as it has been since it was for the first
time on January 20, 1986 after Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed the
legislation authorizing it in November, 1983. He did it in spite of his
personal opposition, only capitulating after the bill authorizing it was
passed in both Houses of Congress with veto-proof margins.

After King's death in 1968, Representative John Conyers introduced a bill in
the House to make his birthday a national holiday. It was a long struggle
from then till it was finally achieved because of racist opposition in the
Congress against honoring a black man led by former Senator Jesse Helms who
accused Dr. King of having communist ties as well as making other outlandish
slurs against his good name and accusing him of opposing the Vietnam war
which he certainly did with passion and eloquence that may have led to his
death.

Helms was a hard-liner throughout his public life (like too many others in
the Congress then and now), and his career was characterized by
mean-spiritedness and a lifelong opposition to democracy, diversity and
affirmative action as well as his racist support for segregation and efforts
to deny black people their constitutionally mandated rights. Some may also
remember his 1990 reelection campaign waged against Harvey Gantt, the first
black mayor of Charlotte, NC, in which Helms disgracefully used a racist ad
to counter his opponent's lead in the polls. It was called "Hands" and
showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job-rejection letter with a
narration explaining he was best qualified and needed the job a racial quota
gave to a less deserving black man. It worked, overcoming Gantt's lead and
helped reelect Helms undeservedly.

Martin Luther King Day is the only national holiday commemorating an African
American, but it took over 15 long years of campaigning to get it authorized
and over two more before it was first observed. It took even longer for Dr.
King's day to be finally recognized in all 50 states for the first time on
January 17, 2000. It likely only happened at all because the Congress
finally was moved to act after receiving a petition with six million
signatures that was the largest number ever collected supporting a national
issue. Sadly, it happened because an assassin's bullet took his life much
too soon.

To this day, the question remains: who killed Martin Luther King, but it's
not hard to imagine why. James Earl Ray was accused of being the lone
assassin, at first pleaded guilty in 1969 after being arrested earlier and
held in jail for eight months. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison, never
got a trial, and retracted his guilty plea three days after making it
claiming his lawyer deceived him - to no avail. The case was closed and his
fate was sealed even though later evidence uncovered casts great doubt on
his guilt. He nonetheless spent the rest of his life in prison dying on
April 23, 1998 at age 70. Today his name is hardly ever mentioned in the
dominant media nor is any attempt made to clear it, which is no surprise.

But if Ray didn't do it, who then had a motive and might have. Every year
commemorating his birth, we note and honor Dr. King's memorable "I have a
Dream" speech while ignoring the most important of his dreams including the
speeches he made supporting them. King was the foremost of our nation's
civil rights advocates, but he also wanted to end the country's long history
of exploitative materialism and culture of militarism supporting it. He
wanted everyone's civil rights respected and honored but also was dedicated
to pursuing social justice, promoting non-violence, and was unreservedly
against war, becoming increasingly vocal in his opposition to the one raging
in Vietnam using powerful language like calling the US government "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world."

King had already won great victories in his civil rights battles with the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 that
for the first time gave African Americans the rights guaranteed them under
the Constitution that Jim Crow laws in the South denied them for decades. It
was his public stand on the other great issues driving him that caused those
in power concern. No King commemorative today ever mentions his memorable
"Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered to clergy and the public on April 4, 1967,
one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. It was an heroic
and spellbinding moment with Dr. King at his eloquent best calling for an
end to the war and violence. It also may have been a defining moment in his
life that had a single year left in it.

King knew he lived on the edge because of his beliefs and his ability to
reach and profoundly influence a vast audience in the country and throughout
the world. He rightfully believed his life was in danger and it might just
be a matter of time before it was taken. We don't know for sure who, in
fact, killed him if it wasn't James Earl Ray which seems very unlikely based
on the best evidence now known. We do know who had motive, cause and easy
opportunity to do it most any time or place. We also know if the US
government was behind it, what part of it likely got the assignment.

It may have been the FBI with its long record of abuse against targeted
enemies of the state that includes extensive documentation of its Cointelpro
operations from the 1950s till the early 1970s but likely never stopped and
has to be more active than ever now in the age of George Bush and its
culture of illegal surveillance, witch-hunting, and imperial justice. In
earlier years, the FBI targeted organizations and individuals on the left as
well as those considered radical including non-violent ones like The Black
Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and Dr. King's Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Dr. King himself because of Director J.
Edgar Hoover's obsession with the civil rights leader and his near-fanatical
efforts to defame and defile him.

The CIA has an even more disturbing record of lawlessness as part of its
overall mandate to collect and analyze intelligence about foreign
governments, corporations, organizations and individuals as well as conduct
whatever covert, "black bag," or extrajudicial state-sponsored
assassinations assigned it that in half a century ran into the hundreds.

Since it was created in 1947, the CIA's record has been documented in detail
including in the works of author, researcher and former State Department
employee William Blum in his books Rogue State and Killing Hope detailing
the shameful record of US foreign policy and the CIA's role in it since WW
II. It includes carrying out state-sponsored assassinations including those
against foreign leaders unwilling to surrender their nation's sovereignty to
ours based on imperial management with no outliers allowed - reason enough
to remove them with CIA operatives often assigned the task but taking care
to do it with enough discretion to make it look like the long arm of
Washington was uninvolved.

Through the years the methods used have included a "rogue element's bullet,
a hard to detect poison or an "unfortunate" plane crash that was the method
of choice to murder Panamian president Omar Torrijos in 1981 and Ecuadorian
president Jaimi Roldos in a helicopter crash the same year. Sometimes other
"plane accidents" are like the one CIA-trained Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)
personnel, led by Ugandan-born and US-trained Paul Kagame (at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas' Command and General Staff College), arranged with
surface-to-air missiles to shoot down the aircraft carrying Rwandan
President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira on
April 6, 1994 that led to the ethnic slaughter that year. It elevated "our
guy" Major-General Kagame to power and later to be president of Rwanda where
he let US forces operate freely in the country using it as a base to pursue
the greater prize Washington sought in the resource-rich Congo (DRC)even
though it took hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to do it and millions
in Congo where war for its spoils still continues but gets little attention.

Probably the best known and most infamous state-sponsored assassination was
the CIA-orchestrated coup and murder of Chilean president Salvador Allende
on another September 11 in 1973. It ended the most vibrant democracy in the
Americas replacing it with the brutal 17 year dictatorship of General
Augusto Pinochet, who unfortunately died on December 10 without ever having
to answer for his crimes against humanity. So far neither have those in
authority at CIA or higher-ups in the Nixon administration like Henry
Kissinger. He played a key role in the coup plot, ironically the same year
he won a Nobel Peace Prize, as National Security Advisor and Secretary of
State and now must check with the State Department for legal advice before
traveling abroad for assurance he won't be served with a warrant for his
arrest and detention.

That kind of record through the years shows CIA and its operatives may have
been behind the murder of Martin Luther King to remove a powerful voice
whose influential opposition to war and support for non-violence and social
justice conflicted with this government's agenda of imperial conquest for
power and profit.

If one or more FBI, CIA or other US government assassins murdered Martin
Luther King, the federal holiday commemorating his birth mocks him and
stands as a shameless deceptive act dishonoring all he stood and worked for
in his short 39 year life. It also makes his day of observance an act of
collective guilt by the nation responsible for ending a noble life that
might have accomplished far more if he'd had a chance to continue pursuing
the goals he hoped to achieve but never got the chance. Maybe that was the
whole idea and the reason he wasn't allowed to go on with his work.

Presidents' Day

Presidents' Day is observed on the third Monday of February, was formerly
celebrated as Washington's Birthday, and now states have the option to use
either designation or some other one if they choose as Alabama does
commemorating Washington and Jefferson Day. They can also pick another day
as Georgia does observing Washington's birthday the day after Christmas.

The period around this time is often used as an occasion for schools to
teach students the history of US presidents, especially Washington,
Jefferson, Lincoln and some of our other noted ones. If only that occasion
were used to teach real history (like found in Howard Zinn's A People's
History of the United States) instead of the fiction leading young minds to
believe these historic leaders were larger than life heros, noble in purpose
and service to the nation in its highest office, and now deserving to be
revered and remembered with a few further immortalized in granite sculpture
carving at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial on stolen Lakota Sioux land
in South Dakota's Black Hills.

No past president gets more reverential treatment than our first, the
general who led the Continental Army against the British in the nation's war
of liberation from the Crown. He became our first president by coronation
because he ran unopposed twice, and he's now known as the "Father of the
Country" because he was its leader in war and then "selected" as its first
head of state. Students are never taught that Washington expressed great
aspirations referring to the new nation as a "rising empire" even at its
birth and backed his sentiments with deeds to help make it one. He did it
during the Revolutionary War by his savage acts against native Indians, all
of whom he considered subhumans (or American Untermenschen). He compared
them to wolves and "beasts of prey" and called for their total destruction
much like the way George Bush today calls for defeating "terrorists" less
well-defined than the ones Washington's had in mind and went about
destroying ruthlessly.

He dispatched General John Sulivan and 5,000 troops to attack the
noncombatant Onondaga people in 1779 with orders to destroy all their
villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds and orchards in a
scorched earth campaign to annihilate them. He wanted to kill as many as
possible and did. He also wanted their land (like Bush today wants Iraq's
oil) and took it by force, including from the Onieda people who aided
Washington when he most needed help at Valley Forge. The truth about the
nation's "Father," kept out of young minds in school, was our first
president and all others after him pursued a policy of genocide against the
nation's original inhabitants who lived mainly in peace for thousands of
years on the lands we came uninvited to and took from them.

It began in 1492 when Columbus and those with him first arrived in what's
now Haiti exterminating virtually the entire estimated eight million native
Arawak, or Taino, people. The genocidal slaughter of all North, South and
Central American Indian peoples followed reducing their population by about
100 million or as much as 98%% of their original numbers. This is our
shameful legacy of a new nation conceived as a great democratic experiment
never tried before in the West outside of ancient Athens for a few decades
but only for a privileged minority in it then and now.

It was never intended to be one for the nation's indigenous peoples. Their
presence impeded what came to be known by the 1840s as the our "Manifest
Destiny," or virtual divine right, to expand west and south seizing all the
land from coast to coast south of Canada from the people living on it who
were exterminated as well as Texas and the northern half of Mexico we wanted
including the prized possession of California.

Also excluded from our grand vision were the many millions of black African
captives sold into slavery and sent to their harsh fate in the new world
"democracy" where those surviving the oppressive Middle Passage voyage, at
the cost of 50 million lives lost some believe, were held in brutal bondage
as human property to serve against their will or be sold like commodities to
another master.

This is the true legacy of Presidents' Day. It commemorates the nation's
leaders who led the nation making it grow by a state policy of genocide and
imperial expansion for wealth and power at the expense of those in the way
of the privileged class whose only concern for ordinary people was and still
is the use they could get from them. Try finding that history in a secondary
or college text (unless Howard Zinn or a few others wrote it) or mentioned
in the corporate-controlled media the next time this day of dishonor is
observed.

Easter

Easter is a day of great religious significance, but only for Christians who
worship Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ. It's not observed by many around
the country or world of other religious faiths or none at all. Still, in the
US, Christian observances take on special meaning in a nation first settled
and founded by those of Christian faith even though most came for secular
reasons, not to escape religious persecution. The Founders believed church
and state should be separated, and Jefferson first spoke of "a wall of
separation" between the two in 1802 after freedom of religion was mandated
in the First Amendment to the Constitution that came into force in 1791.

Still, throughout our history, many believed the nation was a Christian one
and tried to tear down the separation wall the Founders erected. That view
became especially prominent since the ascendancy of neoconservative
influence, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, as these
hard-liners want the country governed by Christian principles, including
Judaic ones as well, but give short shrift to others and demonizing them the
way Islam is now condemned as something synonymous with "terrorism" and
"Islamofascism."

In the US today, all Christian holidays of importance get prominent mention
and due reverence paid them, especially Christmas and Easter, the two
holiest days in the Christian calendar. Prominent Jews, too, aren't ignored,
many have near-equal status with Christians, and most non-Jews in the
country know about special Jewish holy days like the Yom Kippur Day of
Atonement and Rosh Hashanah New Year even if they're not sure why they're
commemorated.

But try finding any mention of a Muslim holy day other than a general
recognition of Ramadan (established in the year 638) without explanation of
what the month-long observance in the 9th month of the Islamic calendar
signifies. This period is considered the most important and blessed month of
the Islamic year, and it's believed there are about as many Muslims in the
US as Jews as well as about 1.8 billion of them worldwide (compared to an
estimated 13.3 million Jews overall in 2002), a number surely large enough
to warrant its adherents respect but instead only finds them wrongly
condemned as a collective Antichrist and threat to national security.

Easter is commemorated between late March and late April (and early April to
early May in Eastern Christianity little known about in the US) and is also
known as Resurrection Day. It's the most important religious feast of the
Christian liturgical year and thus gets due prominence in prayer and public
displays of religious observance. But Americanized flair goes much further
taking full advantage of a chance to commercialize almost anything. So
around this period there are Easter Sunday parades and other non-religious
promotional activities and expressions that always manage to be emphasized -
even on the day celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which
observers believe occurred on the third day following his death by
crucifixion between 27 and 33 AD. The Roman Catholic Church gives this
period special recognition with an eight day feast called the Octave of
Easter. It's also the time of year when the Jewish seven day period of
Passover is commemorated, marking the Exodus of the Israelites from
enslavement in Egypt, that also now gets more prominent mention in the
country as part of the effort to market anything, even important religious
days and periods of observance, but only ones celebrated by Christians and
Jews.

In a nation obsessed with and addicted to a culture of consumerism, even
marketing the Almighty is fair game. Easter then, like other holidays and
special days in the calendar, is just another day to be exploited for profit
along with it being observed for the event and significance it commemorates.
It's a subject left for the end of this essay when its most frenzied
expression arrives between Thanksgiving and the New Year celebration. It's
the time of year when corporate America's only interest in the spirit of the
season is how to make a buck out of it - as many as possible because that's
the make-or-break time of year they rely on and must do well in to have the
year overall be successful for owners and/or shareholders. So with
Thanksgiving dinner still being digested, they practically scream "let the
holiday shopping begin," and let it continue right into the new year almost
unabated.

It happens on Easter as well, whether it's new outfits for the season, a day
or two on the town, vacation travel or any other way the business community
can exploit an occasion to get the public to part with its resources spent
on everything imaginable people never knew they needed or wanted until the
power of round the clock advertising convinced them their lives would be
unfulfilled without them. Discussion of this subject will be picked up later
in this essay to show it's quite acceptable to exploit a religious holy day
for profit even if it corrupts the reason it's commemorated that should be
an occasion for solemnity and not for the consumerism that defiles it. But
corporate bottom lines aren't enhanced by religious reverence or
observance - at least not until the big business finds ways to sell its
wares in places and at times of worship and can get away with it. It's hard
to imagine they're not trying to figure out how to do it.

Memorial and Veterans Days

Because both days are related, they're discussed under a single heading. The
first, Memorial Day, is commemorated on the last Monday in May and was first
observed in 1866 and called Decoration Day beginning in 1868. Usage of
Memorial Day wasn't common until after WW II and wasn't the holiday's
official name until federal law called it that in 1967. The day is an
occasion to honor the nation's men and women who died in military service to
the country. More on that in a moment.

Veterans Day was formerly known as Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day in
Europe, that originally commemorated the end of WW I on the 11th hour of the
11th day of the 11th month of the year in 1918 when the guns went silent, or
were supposed to. It was first observed in the US in 1919 and made a legal
holiday here in 1938. In June, 1954, Congress enacted legislation changing
the holiday's name to Veterans Day.

Both holidays would never be needed in a nation dedicated to peace, but one
committed to perpetual war for an unattainable peace dishonors its youth in
life and disingenuously honors those who died in imperial wars for conquest
and plunder. Nations waging wars only guarantee more of them in an endless
cycle of violence, militarism, brutality and shameless inhumanity to those
made to suffer and die in combat theaters - so the privileged who get to
stay home can profit from them.

People don't want wars but can always be made to support and fight in them
using the proven method of choice that always works - fear based on
shameless lies and deception by governments with hidden motives unrevealed
because who would go along with them if they did. Only by deceitfully
scaring people enough to believe the nation's security is threatened will
they support foreign wars and fight in them thinking they have no other
choice. When traumatized enough, those wanting peace can be convinced to go
along with the most outlandish schemes planned that if ever explained would
be condemned and never supported.

If people only knew the wisdom of iconic investigative journalist IF Stone,
they'd know in times of war, or events leading to it, truth is the first
casualty. He told young journalists that "All governments are run by liars
and nothing they say (about anything) should be believed, and on another
occasion shortened it saying, "All governments lie."

Serial lying is the defining characteristic of the Bush administration, but
all others earlier were duplicitous as well including the one led by the
Republican former president just passed whose short two and a half year
tenure only gave him less time to commit fewer crimes of war and against
humanity. He managed to do his best with the time he had, yet we honor him
instead of exposing his shameless acts deserving condemnation.

It's almost like it's preordained and in the country's DNA that this nation
is warrior state sending its expendable youth to fight and die in foreign
wars but not for national security, honor or the rights of free people
anywhere. It's always for wealth and power that conquest and plunder afford
the privileged who get to stay home safe and in comfort letting others do
their dying and then shamelessly hold a day of remembrance honoring them for
their sacrifice. This is the long tradition of this nation that since
inception in 1776 has been at war with one or more adversaries every year
without exception from that time to the present.

These two federal holidays warrant special condemnation. They represent a
galling legacy of endless wars and false patriotic glorification of them
including the so-called "good" one about which there was nothing good at
all. Choosing days to honor the dead who sacrificed everything is a
sacrilege and failure to note they died in vain on the alter of power and
privilege for the few. Their deaths assure an unending cycle of violence and
killing with legions of nameless, faceless grave sites ahead known only to
those experiencing unconscionable loss.

These commemorative days stand above the others as symbols of this nation's
depravity and ultimate crime against humanity and wasted lives it's taken.
They ignore what Lincoln hoped for at Gettysburg in November, 1863 when he
said "we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this
nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of
the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
He knew the horror of war and understood for that to be they must end. He
also feared they would not and had to reflect that future wars would take
their leaders to new battlefields in an endless cycle of death and
destruction wars always guarantee.

Future commemorations of past wars should chart a new course - a vow
pledging they'll end, and this nation resolves never again. Remembrance
should then be an act of contrition and path to redemption, honoring the
living, and taking a sacred oath of non-violence promising to stand by it
for all time. It should be a solemn dedication to equity and social justice
for all in a state of peace renouncing wars and the shameless holidays in
their honor. One day they'll be no more wars because no one will go fight in
them. When it comes, days of memorial and honoring veterans will end
replaced by a Peace Day honoring the living and sacredness of life so those
past dead finally won't have died in vain. Pray it comes soon.

Independence Day

Along with Christmas, no federal holiday is more celebrated than the day of
the nation's independence from the British Crown declared on July 4, 1776.
Coming in the summer with good weather across the country, it's a day of
parades, outings, and baseball at all levels that many years ago nearly
always meant so-called major league double-headers that was a big occasion
for young boys growing up in "big league" cities whose dads took them out
for an endless day at the ballpark. It's also a day of commemorative and
exulting fireworks and other expressions celebrating the nation's history,
liberation and traditions - not the truths about them but the acceptable
illusions taught in school and extolled by the dominant media and their
disingenuous allies in academia and the clergy who go along propagating the
nation's myths.

Young minds are never taught the nation's real history, just what's falsely
glorified with all ugly parts about important events and leaders responsible
for them suppressed to assure a new generation of "good citizens" is
properly trained, just like the ones preceding it, assuring those in it will
be loyal to the state because they believe the mythology about the country
schools at all levels teach is the greatest on earth.

We should commemorate the glorious achievement of our Founders and their
Revolution that liberated the nation from a repressive British monarchy and
aristocracy replacing it with an experimental system of government never
tried before in the West outside its imperfect form in Athens in ancient
Greece for a few decades. After the war of liberation, the Founders met in
1787, in the same Philadelphia State House where the Declaration of
Independence was signed 11 years earlier, to frame our historic Constitution
and later our Bill of Rights ratified in 1791.

It was historic and glorious, but much was left undone and to be desired.
Only white male property owners got the most fundamental of all rights in a
democracy until 1850 - the right to vote that should have been federally
mandated for all male and female adults in the country but wasn't. In
addition, slavery was a national shame until the 13th Amendment freed black
people, who were just property until 1865. But they still never got real
liberties until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s completed what the
Constitution and its Amendments left undone. Even so, from then to the
present, African Americans and others of color have always had far fewer
rights and privileges than the nation's whites, and shamefully our society
is as segregated today as it was in the 1960s before the landmark civil
rights laws were passed guaranteeing this would never happen again. It did,
and it's hardly a reason for people affected and all others of conscience to
celebrate on July 4 or any day.

The nation's native Indians have even less to celebrate, the small number of
them remaining of the 100 million or so throughout the Americas slaughtered
without mercy from the very earliest days before the nation was liberated
from the British Crown. Native Americans lived on these lands for thousands
of years in relative peace. It wasn't until white settlers and "Western
civilization" arrived that everything changed for the worst.

When the first European settlers came in the late 15th century, they were
accepted and at times aided by the nation's first peoples who preferred
peace to conflict. But native graciousness wasn't returned in kind, and it
led to the great push West and South and near total extermination of the
many great Indian nations given no rights or quarter in our grand new
democratic experiment for the privileged few. It was only in 1924 that
indigenous peoples got any rights with the passage of the Indian Citizenship
Act when there were hardly any left to enjoy what little they got
grudgingly. Getting no rights at all were the many millions never born
because their ancestors were slaughtered in cold blood leaving no new
generations to follow.

Even today, in the 21st century, over 80 years since Indian people got
citizenship including the right to vote, no peoples overall in the "land of
the free" have fewer rights as citizens or live in more desperate poverty
and despair unaddressed and virtually ignored than the original inhabitants
of this vast continent for whom justice long delayed is justice never
gotten. No day is ever held honoring these courageous people acknowledging
their sacrifice for what the privileged few now enjoy.

Why would any of them, even as citizens, have reason to commemorate the date
of the nation's "liberation" that for them only meant the continuance of
their destruction and denial of their proud cultures. Today the traditions
of our original inhabitants are unknown by the greater public, they're
untaught in schools, and they're ignored by the dominant media that only
disgracefully mock and demonize Indian people in films and society as
drunks, beasts, primitives and savages, noble or otherwise. What native
American could respect a government speaking only with forked tongue and
acting like real savages making and breaking treaties, taking their lands,
destroying their welfare and finally their lives. The kind of "liberation"
this nation brought to the people of Iraq for the past 16 years, we gave our
original inhabitants for 500 years "liberating" them, like Iraqis today,
from their liberty and lives.

Others in the nation also have little to celebrate on this or any other day.
Today it's truer than ever in an age of extreme greed, unprecedented wealth
disparity, galling corruption and virtual abandonment of the rule of law by
an administration and Congress uncaring about the rights of ordinary people
anywhere. Through lies, deceit and contempt for humanity, they created a
state of permanent war and disregard for the needs and human and civil
rights of the majority. They also ignored and exacerbated conditions for the
growing millions of poor, persecuted and deprived, who have no reason for
joy on our day of "liberation" that gave them no rights or "free" society
fruits few of them ever enjoy. Today, tens of millions of poor people,
especially those of color, are practically condemned as criminals for their
disadvantaged state, through no fault of their own, in a corrupted racist
society worshiping wealth, privilege and all the interests of capital at the
expense of those having none.

Newly arrived immigrants also have little to celebrate, especially the
unwanted and exploited ones of color from the South forced to come here
because their nation's leaders and ours destroyed their lives at home by the
oppressive NAFTA trade pact enacted to enrich corporate giants at the
expense of ordinary working people, mostly living south of the border in
Mexico.

Muslims from everywhere, including citizens already here, have little to
celebrate as well, in a nation defiling Islam in the age of George Bush
equating them all with "terrorists" threatening the nation's security.
Thousands threatening no one have been illegally hounded in witch-hunt
roundups since 9/11, held in secret detention, unjustly deported, and given
no rights including due process to clear their names. Their "crime" is their
faith and color in a nation constitutionally mandating all its people can
worship freely now no longer valid and abandoned along with all demonized,
unwanted, poor and deprived peoples condemned for who they are because
they're not white and privileged - the only race and class in the country
exempt from the harshness directed against all others. Shame on the nation
on its day of "liberation" and all others that strayed from its founding
principles never granted to all and still only offered a chosen few.

Labor Day

Labor Day is commemorated on the first Monday in September each year since
the first one was celebrated in New York in 1882. Around the world outside
the US, socialist and labor movements are observed on May 1 to recognize the
social and economic achievements of labor movements and working class people
in them. This day gets limited attention in the US, but where it's observed
here it's commonly to commemorate the Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 in
Chicago that followed the May 1 general strike in the city for an eight hour
day leading to the violence that broke out on the 4th.

Labor Day became a national federal holiday when Congress passed legislation
for it in June, 1894, a time when working people had few rights. It took
many painful years of struggle and strife before they got any of the ones
finally achieved grudgingly from management only wanting to exploit them for
profit. Only by organizing, taking to the streets, going on strike, holding
boycotts, battling police and National Guard forces supporting management
against working people, paying with their blood and lives did they finally
gain an eight hour day, a living wage, on-the-job benefits and the pinnacle
of labor triumph in the 1930s with the passage of the Wagner Act
establishing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guaranteeing labor
had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the
first time ever.

All of it was won from the bottom up. Management gave nothing until forced
to and neither did the federal government always siding with business
interests unless and until enough people power forces Washington to yield
legislatively or face possible serious work stoppages or even a national
insurrection - all this in a democracy claiming to represent all people, the
great majority of whom happen to be ordinary working ones.

Since a worried Congress passed the landmark 1935 Wagner Act and Franklin
Roosevelt signed it into law in dire economic times when those in power
feared the worst, the state of organized labor rights has declined,
especially post-WW II. They then went steeply in reverse during the Reagan
years when the administration openly showed disdain for working people in
its one-side support for management. It continued unabated, under Republican
and DLC Democrat administrations, and today stands at a multi-generational
low ebb. Since coming into office in 2001, the Neanderthal George Bush
neocon administration intensified its assault on the social contract
government once had with its people and has been openly contemptuous of
ordinary workers with little interest in their rights and welfare.

Since the years of labor's ascendency, corporate America in league with
government shamelessly denigrated unions and the rights of working people to
organize in them. In 1958, one-third of the work force was unionized, but
now the figure is barely above 12%%, and it's below 8%% among non-governmental
employees or the lowest it's been in seven decades. Worse, most jobs are
low-pay service sector ones because the nation's manufacturing base and many
higher-paying jobs in finance and technology have been offshored to
developing nations where workers can be hired for a fraction of the salaries
paid here or as virtual serfs at below poverty wages to fill legions of
factory jobs in countries where fair practice worker standards don't exist.

Nonetheless, on the first Monday each September this nation remembers its
working people with a federally-mandated holiday in their "honor." Some
honor when it's disingenuously given at the same time worker rights are
ignored, forgotten, and uncared about by a government beholden to capital
and defiling ordinary wage earners deceived on this day with meaningless
bread and circus droppings leaving out what working people need most: good
jobs at good pay, essential benefits with them, and a government that really
cares by doing what counts most - fighting for their rights every day. On
Labor Day and all others, that kind of reverence is off the table making a
mockery of the day named for the people it claims to honor, respect and
serve but never does.

Columbus Day

No federally mandated holiday raises public ire more than the one
commemorating Columbus, mentioned above briefly. It honors a genocidist
whose arrival on what's now Haiti began the systematic mass slaughter of 100
million native human beings so this man and those coming later could go home
bringing "as much gold as (those sponsoring them) need....and as many slaves
as they ask." The lure and lust for it got him 17 ships on his second voyage
and 1200 men aboard them. They were expected to bring back the riches they
found including the human ones headed for bondage. They went from island to
island in the Caribbean, took their native Indians as captives, found no
gold, but took hundreds of human beings instead back to Spain with the half
or so of them surviving the journey put on the block for sale like sheep or
goats but treated much worse.

The Arawak people deserved better. They were friendly and receptive to the
new arrivals, greeting them with gifts, food and water making them feel
welcome. They were much like Indians on the mainland - friendly and
hospitable enough to make it easy for those arriving to subjugate and kill
them because they came to conquer, enslave and steal the riches of the new
land. Peaceful Arawak people subjected to this predation got their first
taste of "Western civilization" with swords and daggers that later were
guns, cannons, and assorted other super weapons of war matched against their
simple and crude weapons by comparison for hunting, not warfare. It wasn't
hard guessing who'd prevail.

It all got worse after the beginning and lasted 500 years with the deadly
cost to native Americans already explained. Still we celebrate the serial
killer who began it all, call him heroic, and honor his name and legacy on
the second Monday each October as we've done since the first celebration was
held in San Francisco in 1869. Today parades and other celebratory events
are held in his honor that include speeches by politicians who desecrate the
grave sites of the millions sent to them beginning with this man who
slaughtered the first ones as a predatory participant in what was the start
of the greatest genocide ever.

Instead of commemorating October 12 as the day this man arrived in the new
world (now the second Monday in October), Americans should condemn it as a
day that will live in infamy as it is by the few native survivors whose
ancestors perished by his hand and the many who followed for conquest and
plunder.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is celebrated in the US on the fourth Thursday of November
giving thanks to the Almighty for the year's blessings and bounty. But most
people wouldn't imagine its intent by the way they spend the day replete
with self-indulgent overeating of traditional foods for the full four day
weekend period when there are family gatherings, parades and, most important
for ravenous merchants, the official start of the Christmas holiday shopping
season beginning the day after the Thanksgiving and continuing till
Christmas eve as long as stores remain open that are about as long as people
want them to.

This holiday, like all the others, is also replete with mythology taught
young minds in school about the Pilgrims inviting native Indians to share
their bounty in a show of brotherhood and friendship with an array of foods
the early settlers never heard of that were indigenous to the Americas and
introduced to them by local native people. The Pilgrims had nothing to do
with this tradition that began with Eastern Indians observing fall harvest
celebrations for centuries before the first settlers arrived - never called
Thanksgiving even after they did.

While George Washington had days for national thanksgiving, modern
celebrations of the holiday only date from the Civil War in 1863 when
Abraham Lincoln wanted a way to boost morale and patriotic fervor of the
Union Army at a time it needed it. He tried doing it by proclaiming
Thanksgiving a national holiday for the first time. It had nothing to do
with the Pilgrims nor were they ever mentioned until 1890, and the term
Pilgrim was never even used until the 1870s. So much for tradition.

The Thanksgiving holiday is also a way to promote American ethnocentrism and
cultural superiority over all others by claiming the Almighty views our
society as special the way ideological Zionists feel Jews are "the chosen
people." It's a short step from these views to judging all others everywhere
as inferior, especially ones ranked low in the racial, religious, ethnic or
cultural pecking order - like blacks, Latinos (especially from countries
like Mexico), and today's number one demon target - all Muslim "radicals and
extremists" meaning all of them are by implication and are "Islamofascist"
terrorists as well.

Worse, they and others are what "we" say they are in a time of "universal
deceit" when "telling the truth is a revolutionary act," as Orwell told us.
He also said in our kind of society "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and
ignorance is strength." The public believing it is a testimony to the power
of the dominant media Orwell understood in his day over half a century ago
before the age of television. If he were living today he'd be aghast at what
now goes on where the dominant corporate-controlled media and PR allies act
as national thought-control police programming the public mind into
compliance with whatever the country's power structure wants us to believe -
to its advantage and against ours.

Giving thanks on a special day of Thanksgiving also serves another purpose.
It has special religious overtones that in the US are Christian ones as this
country always was a Christian nation with over three-fourths of the people
in it identifying themselves of that faith. It's been that way even with the
traditional separation of church and state, but today the thinking and
influence of fundamentalist Christianity in American Protestantism poses a
special threat to those outside it. This extremist movement became dominant
in the 1980s under Republican rule and reemerged even more virulently with
the election of George Bush. What's disturbing and dangerous is that
hard-right ideologues like Pat Robertson, who thinks it's all right to
assassinate foreign heads of state he dislikes like Hugo Chavez, are close
to the seat of power where their views hold great sway.

The US was founded as a secular state, and the Constitution's First
Amendment guaranteeing freedom of religion has been interpreted by the
Supreme Court as requiring a "wall of separation" between church and state
prohibiting the government from adopting any religion or denomination as
official and requiring the government to avoid undue involvement in
religion, its trappings or expressions.

That status is now in jeopardy following the introduction of the
"Constitution Restoration Act of 2004" in the Congress and reintroduced in
near-identical form in 2005. If reintroduced again and adopted in the 110th
Congress, it would turn the US into a de facto theocracy even though its
supporters deny that's its intent. Don't believe them.

Support for the bill is led by Dominionists like Pat Robertson and at least
those remaining of the 28 House and Senate sponsors like him in the last
Congress, who support tearing down the sacred wall between between church
and state so the US can be governed by Christian dogma as they interpret it.
It would make lawbreakers of those of other faiths, or none at all,
disobeying whatever parts of Christian canon the bill designated the law of
the land - a very scary prospect for about 75 million non-Christians in the
country and many others of Christian faith who won't go along.

If adopted, this bill will remove the Supreme Court's authority to challenge
the right of anyone in or affiliated with federal, state or local government
to acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or
government" - the Christian God, that is. Any judge at any level
interpreting the Constitution otherwise would henceforth be subject to
impeachment and prosecution in the new United States of America ruled by the
Pat Robertson types of influence in it. Anyone jittery? It would also likely
elevate the Thanksgiving holiday to one of obligatory Christian observance,
even for non-Christians, advancing its current optional religious overtones
to mandatory status.

Already the way Thanksgiving is celebrated today in the US is a sham. While
barely thanking the Almighty for the year's blessings and bounty, if it's
done at all, no heed is paid to the many millions of poor, deprived and
oppressed peoples around the country and world whose desperate state is the
result of our government's actions. It also ignores the systematic
dismantling of constitutional rights at home along with the denial of
essential social services to growing millions who otherwise aren't able to
get them. And it fails to acknowledge our own dereliction in failing to take
personal action opposing these abuses against humanity and the rule of law
because we're too distracted or involved in other things - like
over-indulging on a day to remember our blessings.

Those giving thanks on this day should reflect on their obligation to oppose
these crimes of state and the harm they inflict on others and our own
well-being. They need to demand real change by holding elected officials
accountable and removing those failing to act responsibly. They also need to
learn their history discovering how it began - that the nation they call
America once was the land of its original inhabitants for many thousands of
years who lived on it mostly in peace until we, as uninvited settlers,
arrived, took it from them and slaughtered nearly all of them in the process
for the past 500 years. It's not just thanks we should give on this day.
It's forgiveness for this enormous crime our forebears committed most people
don't even know about shamefully.

Journalism Professor Robert Jensen has it right in his article called No
Thanks to Thanksgiving. In it he suggests we would go a long way toward
progressing morally if we replaced our "white supremicist" annual
Thanksgiving Day tradition of overindulgence with a "National Day of
Atonement" accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting for the
"original sin" of our forefathers even if our own came much later or from a
different part of the world. Establishing that as a sacred tradition would
be an important step toward a day when we might really have something to
"give thanks" for every day in a land with leaders resolved never to repeat
the crimes of the past and just as committed to public service instead of
only to an elite part of it.

Christmas

Christmas is observed worldwide by Christians and many others on December 25
by tradition (other than the Eastern Orthodox Church doing it on January 7)
to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it's widely acknowledged not
to be his birthday. Along with its religious significance, it's also a time
for other celebratory events like winter festivals, Kwanzaa from December
26 - January 1 for Africans Americans reconnecting to their African cultural
and historical heritage, and for Jews the Hanukkah Festival of Lights
commemorating their struggle for survival and for Jewish children to serve
as their Christmas with gifts from parents just like their Christian friends
get.

The Christmas season is also a time for what can only be characterized as
the national obsession of shopping and consuming that traditionally begins
the day after Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas eve and then picks up
again and continues into January largely resulting from a compulsion to buy
and holiday gift cards, year-end bonuses and other resources gotten or
borrowed to do it with - for all the things not received as gifts and
anything else Madison Avenue creative minds can convince people to want then
or any other time of year.

If one dominant trait characterizes American culture above all others, it's
a variant of the consumerism of the kind economist and sociologist Thorstein
Veblen called "conspicuous" in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure
Class. Back then Veblen wrote about the habits of the "nouveau riche" of
that era that had accumulated great wealth and spent lavishly to display it
"conspicuously" rather than to satisfy needs. If he were living today
writing on consumerism, he'd have to write an entirely different book in a
society hugely different from the one he knew. His title might be something
like The Theory of the Spending Class or A Society Obsessed with Spending or
Consumerism encompassing everyone able to spend any amount above the bare
subsistence level or what's done for basic needs everyone has.

The term "consumption" originated hundreds of years ago referring to the
infectious disease now called tuberculosis or TB. But its original meaning
bears significance in today's consumerist society even though the kind of
consumption meaning to spend that everyone does for essentials is worlds
apart from gluttonous consumerism covered in this section that refers to
discretionary shopping and spending for things people don't need but buy
anyway with all the negative effects on those doing it beyond their means or
even within them as well as the overall harm to a society addicted to excess
consumption.

"Consumption," the disease, or untreated TB, was called that because it
"consumed" people from within causing them to slowly and painfully waste
away and perish. The analogy today is the great mass of consumers spending
beyond their means and relying heavily on high interest-bearing credit cards
charging up to 20%% or more. It's placed millions precariously in debt over
their heads and growing numbers becoming unable to service it because of
unexpected financial exigencies like from uninsured medical expenses. It's
resulted in a near-plague of personal bankruptcies that in 2005 affected
over 2 million people, 30%% above 2004, and may rise still higher in 2006 and
succeeding years unless people curb their spending habits. Even those
surviving that fate face an endless burden of high debt service handled by
monthly credit card and/or bank or other lending agency payments that enrich
them at the expense of borrowers never able to get out from under an
obligation grown oppressive.

This would never happen in a society free from an addiction to spend
excessively that in the US is extreme enough to be called a national
pathological dysfunction and diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD). It's a psychological or psychiatric anxiety one characterized by
obsessive or repetitive thoughts and related compulsions or tasks and the
rituals employed to relieve the obsession. In the US, it's an obsession to
shop and buy, and the compulsion is to go out, spend and do it. When done
excessively the way it is here, it fits the clinical definition of a
pathological social disorder that turns out to be deadly for many who get
themselves in debt bondage increasingly resulting in bankruptcy.

In the West, but especially in the US, many tens of millions of otherwise
normal people are "obsessed" with the need/desire to shop and accumulate all
the things they never knew they wanted or needed until the Madison Avenue
mind manipulating masters convinced them their lives couldn't be fulfilled
without them. Economist Paul Baran once described their influence as being
able to make us "want what we don't need (all unessential consumer goods and
services) and not....what we do (like good health care, education, clean air
and water, safe food, and good government providing essential services)."

For those afflicted with the national neurosis of consumerism, relief is
only possible through ritual shopping and spending, even if it means doing
it with borrowed funds at high interest rate carrying charges and the risk
of future insolvency. Clinicians would characterize this behavior any time
of year as abnormal and harmful, but during the Christmas shopping season it
becomes a socially pathological orgy rising to the level of an
out-of-control spending frenzy.

It's also an effective societal control technique as consumers out shopping
or distracted by the vast array of other bread and circus attractions around
them (the commercialized sights and sounds of the season to create a buying
mood), are focused away from affairs of state and all the harm those in
power do through them. While people are glued to their TV sets or out at
malls shopping for the latest fashions, toys or trinkets, most don't pay
enough attention to their government waging wars of aggression, destroying
civil liberties and the rule of law, cutting social services, harming the
environment, and failing in its social obligation responsibilities to
society because they conflict with the elitist agenda of power and privilege
it wants the public knowing nothing about.

They also fail to understand their over-indulgent consumerism feeds the
corporate beast allowing it to grow, prosper and become even more predatory
in a society based on savage capitalism, out-of-control greed, corruption at
the highest levels in business and government using our misappropriated and
stolen tax dollars, and iron-fisted militarism and homeland security
enforcers supporting an imperial juggernaut on the march to make the world
safe for big capital that needs armies of over-indulgent consumers to help
it get bigger. The more we shop, the further it marches in search of new
markets, resources and cheap labor replacing the more expensive kind at home
that may have its future consumption impaired if if doesn't cut back on the
excess amount of it now.

Adam Smith, the ideological Godfather of capitalism, understood the dangers
of concentrated wealth and power and wrote about it in his seminal work The
Wealth of Nations. He explained an "invisible hand" of unseen forces worked
best in a free (meaning fair) market with many small businesses competing
locally against each other. He railed against the concentrated mercantilism
of his time like the British East India Company of his native UK, where he
was Scottish born, even though it prospered quite well on ordinary
consumption when there was no such thing as the kind of consumerism endemic
in the US today.

If Smith were still living, he'd be appalled by today's kind of monopolistic
capitalism that was unimaginable in his day, but he understood its danger in
writing about what he called the "vile maxim of the masters of
mankind....All for ourselves and nothing for other people." Smith's work was
important in its day, but in modern Western society he'd likely have
discovered there is no "invisible hand" making markets efficient.

Today markets need countervailing government intervention (called
regulation) to make them work best for everyone, not just the ones
controlling them for their own self-interest that's the way they work today
with corporate giants allowed freewheeling unrestrained freedom letting them
quash defenseless weak competitors that can only survive and prosper if
regulations call for a level playing field where no one gets unfair
competitive advantage over anyone else. That doesn't exist today as giant
transnationals make their own rules, and they're all stacked in their own
favor.

Further, under today's neoliberal market rules, the compulsion to consume
exacerbates the problem. It lets monopoly capitalism function like a giant
vacuum cleaner growing ever larger by sucking into corporate coffers and
growing bottom lines all the resources from addicted consumers including all
they can borrow in an endless cycle of binge shopping and spending in a
culture gone mad with the need to accumulate and overindulge especially
during the Christmas holiday season.

Whatever Christmas once was, it no longer is, and it corrupts society and
the spirit of the man whose day of birth it honors and the message of love
and faith he gave his followers. It came in his teachings, deeds and sermons
like his famous Sermon on the Mount when he said to "turn the other cheek"
and preached the central tenets of the Ten Commandments that include loving
thy neighbor, not killing and doing unto others as you'd want them doing to
you. The consumerist US society is one of receiving, not giving; of
accepting predatory capitalism or at least not opposing its harm; of
ignoring essential people needs and rights; of swearing fealty to shopping
and spending while turning away from or not caring about our fellow men,
women and children throughout the year, especially at this holy time for
Christians whose thoughts should be on those most in need and what can be
done to help them.

It's a sad testimony to our society and how most in it are easily
manipulated to support what benefits those with wealth and power at the
expense of the greater good of all others. Christmas in America is now the
defiled spirit of out-of-control excess unmindful of the unmet needs of most
others close by and around the world our culture of savage capitalism
exploits for profit. For them, Christmas is only "Bah Humbug," and Santa
only Scrooge - all take and no give.

New Year's Day

The first day of the new year comes one week after Christmas and is just a
continuation of the long holiday season beginning after Thanksgiving,
reaching a climax around Christmas, ebbing slightly for a day or so and
building again to a final celebratory welcoming of the new year with another
overindulgent bout of eating, drinking, partying, and using whatever funds
remain for more discretionary spending in January and thereafter in
succeeding months gorging on nonessentials.

The new year is also a traditional time for resolutions including some with
merit like losing weight, resolving to stop smoking and getting fit. Most
are quickly forgotten, and the most important ones are never made: to work
for peace on earth, good will toward others, loving they neighbor, and
respecting the rights of all people everywhere, treating them as we'd want
them to treat us in a society of caring and sharing with equity and equal
justice for all. Wouldn't that be a wonderful solemn resolution for the new
year along with a sacred commitment to keep it throughout the year and every
one thereafter once the holiday season ended. Long ago in simpler times
before the old world was called the new one and was named America, it was
that way. It can be again if enough of us want it to be.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson