At the Walter Reed Army Medical Center the soldiers who have served honourably in an intolerable war that should never have taken place are housed in dingy rat and roach infested quarters while they wait months and months, stretching into over a year for some, to find out their fate.

Will they be sent back? Are they fit to be sent back? Why should they be punished for our country’s inability to provide troops for what has now turned into a civil war.

The U.S. has de-stabilized the Mid-East, sent our good men and women to die, suffer, be wounded phsically and mentally and then, denied livable quarters and, even though disabled, denied disability payments.

A brain-injured corporal was told that his damage pre-existed his head wound and was denied disability. His wife had to call a House of Representative staff member to get him a 50% disability. Why should this happen?

I quote “this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution.”–Major General George W. Weightman.

Meanwhile, Great Britain is pulling out. They are pulling their 7,100 soldiers while crazy George W. is sending a “surge” of over 20,000 of ours into the meat grinder that his regime has created.

Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts says, “No matter how the White House tries to spin it, the British government has decided to split with President Bush and begin to move their troops out of Iraq. This should be a wake-up call to the administration.”

Unfortunately, our president and his men are not asleep; they’re dumb and dumberer. The damage to our country will take generations to clear up.

God help us. Please George, Dick, and Condoleeza — quit before it’s too late. Or is it already too late?

You know it’s a damn shame that Punk George doesn’t want to give the same kind of support to our vets once they’ve been damaged by this war that never should have happened.

Recently Marine Private Jonathon Schulze, 25, of Stewart, Minn., the recipient of two Purple Hearts for his service, attempted to check into a psychiatric unit in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He was suffering from extreme PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) brought about by the horrors he experienced while serving near Fallujah in 2004. He tried to check in on January 11th with bags packed and they turned him away, placing him 26th on a waiting list. He told intake counselors that he felt like killing himself more than once. Desparate, he called again on Jan. 12th and they still did nothing.

He hung himself four days later.

They don’t put you through bureaucratic bullshit when they send you to the war zone.

Why doesn’t George W. go over there, don a uniform, and fight.

Before this war began I wrote an editorial for the Spare Change News in Cambridge Mass saying that if George wants a fight so badly, he should get in a ring with Saddam Hussein. I also said that it would be cheaper and less lives lost, maybe none, if we went into Iraq and rebuilt all the damage we did during the first Gulf War, new hospitals, new schools, a new water infrastructure, etc.

But no, George and his puppet-master Dick Cheney and Donald Duck Rumsfeld wanted a war and they didn’t care who died as long as it wasn’t them.

We’re going to be paying the price for this war for a long time to come.

My condolences to all the parents of the brave men and women who had to go over there.

Believe me, Private Schulze wasn’t the only suicide because of VA neglect. Marine Corporal Jeffrey Lucey of Belchertown, Mass was another victim of this fiasco brought about by our incompent leaders.

George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Duck Rumsfeld and others should be arrested and tried for war crimes in a just world.

There are more terrorists now than ever because of this war. If you feel safer now, you’re asleep.

On another subject, the Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear (can you pronounce that word yet George) weapons, advanced the clock to five minutes before midnight. The last time they moved the clock was 2002.

“We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age,” was the statement by the clock’s board of directors. North Korea, Iran, even the United States new love affair with “bunker buster” nuclear bombs and the existing 26,000 American and Russian weapons keep the clock ticking.

How many nuclear weapons does it take to destroy a world? We’ve got ‘em, they’ve got ‘em and one day, some asshole’s gonna start using them again.

The threat of Global Warming, which is not an illusion folks, also helped to move the Doomsday Clock to five minutes before midnight. By midnight, I don’t mean it’s time for a snooze either, my friends.

The closest to midnight the clock has ever come was two minutes to in 1953, right after the United States and the Soviet Union started testing hydrogen bombs. The farthest it was was in 1991, when the “Cold War” appeared to come to a close.

And, on a much lighter note, while Bo Diddley was recently performing his work at the Reggatabar Jazz fest a week ago from Feb 15th, here in the Boston area, this photographer got right up in his face and started flashing away. Bo Diddley said, and I paraphrase, Hey, Don’t come in my kitchen and eat my chicken without asking me if you can have a piece. Where’s my money for all these pictures you’re taking without my permission? he asked.

Then some dope in the audience threw three dollars at Bo and his band. Bo picked up the money and counted one, two, three and then turned and counted his band members, one, two, three, four, five — and threw the guy some bad eyes.

Bo Diddley is a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and is copied by many musicians. But, artists are usually phenomenally underpaid. Oh, there’s a few really really rich ones, but most artists die poor, depressed and unknown.

When a good artist makes it, at least respect him. I wonder what those clowns that dissed him in the audience add to the world?

I received the Bo Diddley info from the Boston Phoenix courtesy Katie Johnston Chase. Thanks.

Mission Accomplished, heh heh.

I just started reading Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater; I was lucky enough to get an original version published in 1950.

I’ve read excerpts of his Confessions but I never had the entire version. As a former heroin addict for over three decades, I’m quite interested in his version.

I’ve written a 36 chapter book called Tales of the Troll. It concerns addiction and ecology and some of the old Gods are in it and some new.

The heroes are heroin addicts and angels. My other book, not counting numerous poetry books is a book of essays on addiction complicated with other major mental illness. It’s a miracle I made it out alive.

If I drank the way I used heroin I wouldn’t be alive today.

Yes, I do get published. You can do a search engine on Yahoo or Google for Marc D. Goldfinger and see a smattering of my work.

Sara Gran, the author of Dope, a noir thriller put out by Penguin, says “Marc D. Goldfinger beats the hell out of most writers working today.” I was happy to be validated. I’m 61 years old. The closer you get to the edge, wherever the personal edge is, the less time one has to say what they have to say.

So say it now.

The hurricanes. The stock market crash. The Bush bail-outs.

Why is it that there is always enough money for war, to bail out the rich, but not enough money for healthcare and food for the poor?

Bushvilles are springing up all over the land as our country edges toward collapse. McCain doesn’t have a clue as to what to do; why is it that he is challenging Obama at the polls? Is anybody paying attention to what is real?

The human species is getting ready to take care of itself. The perfect storm is hurtling towards us. Well, the Earth will be better off in the long run.

Shock the vote! ! !

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept . . .— Psalm 137

In Reno, Nevada, a small group of tents populated by homeless people sprang up by the railroad tracks. People with nowhere else to go. Within a short time there were over 150 tents, so close to each other they could barely breathe, filled with people who had come to Reno to look for work.

There was none.

This wasn’t only happening in Reno. It was happening in Seattle, Washington, Athens, Ga., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Cal., and Portland, Oregon. Tent cities being born all over the U.S.A. as the foreclosure explosion took off and the hurricanes hit Texas and Mississippi and the stock market crashed.

This isn’t a recession — it’s a depression and these communities filled with homeless people are the result of the Bush administration’s greedy policies that protect the rich corporations and have no regard for the people.

In the 1930′s they were called Hoovervilles, named after the president of that era. These new tent cities are Bushvilles, directly caused by the policies that have driven our country into 10,000,000,000,000,000 of debt.

Debt caused by the Iraqi War, the corporate bailouts, the sell-outs, the collapse of our infrastructure.

“It’s clear that poverty and homelessness have increased,” said Michael Stoops, acting Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Between the wars, the hurricanes, the business practices of our current regime and the collapsing stock market, we now have The Perfect Storm creating Bushvilles all over the United States.

God help us because it appears that we are not helping ourselves. Well, it seems that the corporate rich are helping themselves to everything and leaving the crumbs for us.

If Barack Obama doesn’t win the election for president, it will be the end of the United States of America. We’ll all live in Bushvilles.

If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — just so long as I’m the dictator.

George Walker Bush said, sending ripples of laughter through the room. A a joke from the lips of our soon to be President of the United States, December 18, 2000.

Colour this by numbers. George W. Jr. was the director of Harken Energy of Dallas, Texas and a major stockholder of that corporation. Can it be that he knew nothing when he dumped $848,560 worth of its stock only one week prior to a poor earnings report that sent it’s stock tumbling? Is insider trading okay?

Okay, let’s move to the present. There was a telephone call placed from Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s cell phone to Boy George W.’s mansion at 11:50pm election night. Harris said she never made the call, that Al Cardenas, chairman of the state Republican Party, borrowed the phone and made the call.

The other story told was that Dan Bartlett said the Florida Secretary of State’s website went down and old Jeb(Bush), who was in Austin on November 7th, called Harris. Then Katherine returned the call.

There are a lot of stories. There are stories about Black voters not being able to vote. Then there are the “chad” stories. Then there are the Republicans storming the (vote)counting houses in Broward County(Florida) stories.

Here’s an interesting story I pulled off the internet.

“A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study the U.S. election event closely because it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made the following comments:

“Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former Prime Minister and that former Prime Minister was himself the former head of that nation’s secret police/intelligence agency.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover from the nation’s pre-democracy past (the Electoral College).

“Imagine that the self-declared winner’s ‘victory’ turned on disputed votes cast in a Province governed by his brother!

“Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner’s opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

“Imagine that members of that nation’s most despised caste, fearing for their livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner’s candidacy. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner’s brother.

“Imagine that six thousand people voted in the disputed Province and that the self-declared winner’s lead was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines’ margin of error.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed Province or in its most hotly disputed district.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a Governor of a major Province, had the worst human rights record of any Province in his nation and his Province actually led the nation in executions.

“Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

“None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner’s will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of a third world country.”

Now imagine that the President-Select was voted in by a majority of 5 from the high court of 9, the Chief Justice (Rehnquist) being a man who owned two homes, one in Phoenix and one in Vermont, that existed in developments that prohibited, by contract, selling to Blacks and Jews, by another Justice (Scalia) who called affirmative action “the most evil fruit of a fundamentally bad seed”, and, last but certainly not least, a justice (Thomas) who was selected for the high court by the President-Select’s father.

Who said that it couldn’t happen here.

Written on Dec. 28, 2000, published by Spare Change News in April, 2001.

Friend and neighbor you have taken away, my one companion is darkness. – Psalm 88

Matt Damon thinks the idea of Sarah Palin being a “heartbeat” away from the presidency is “a really terrifying possibility. You do the actuary tables and there’s a one out of three chance that McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it’ll be president Palin.”

“I need to know,” says Matt, “if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. I want to know that because she’s going to have the nuclear codes.”

Naturally Palin’s spokesperson called Matt another one of Barack Obama’s celebrity friends who “continue to tear down Governor Palin with little more than blatant name calling.”

It’s more than name calling folks. Sarah Palin is a creationist and Matt Damon is merely quoting what creationists believe.

I’ll give even odds that Sarah Palin doesn’t even know what an actuary table is.

But enough of this. 911. This is the white man’s trail of tears. Truly, it is a sad day for all of us. What human beings do to each other convinces me that we are all insane.