Howard Zinn, The Dali Lama, Rev. Bill Federici and Gary Tomei

I mentioned the passing of Howard Zinn. Below is one of the many wonderful thoughts he expressed:

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. -zinn 1922-2010

Next the Rev. Bill Federici weighs in on China and the Dali Lama. It is bigger, if that is possible, than an issue with the Dali Lama. It is China's attitude toward any thing that does not fit their view of the world or agenda


WORLD- A column in AOL News

China Warns Obama Against Meeting Dalai Lama
Updated: 16 hours 38 minutes ago
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Lauren Frayer
Contributor
(Feb. 2) -- China is warning President Barack Obama that if he meets with the Dalai Lama, it will undermine U.S.-China relations and even hurt America's prospects for economic recovery.

The Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk, is the spiritual head of his coreligionists in Tibet, and lobbies for self-rule in the mountainous area that China claims as its own. He lives in exile in India but travels frequently. Beijing considers the Dalai Lama a separatist terrorist, and resents his high profile overseas and the warm reception he often gets from foreign leaders.

The exiled Tibetan leader plans to visit the U.S. later this month, including a stop in Washington, and the White House has said Obama has "every intention" of meeting him. "The president has made clear to the Chinese government that we intend to meet with the Dalai Lama," spokesman Mike Hammer said last month. No official date has been released.

Zhu Weigun, executive deputy head of the Communist Party's United Front Work Department, said today that such a meeting would "seriously undermine the political foundation of Sino-U.S. relations."

"If the U.S. leader chooses to meet with the Dalai Lama at this time, it will certainly threaten trust and cooperation between China and the United States," Zhu said. "We oppose any attempt by foreign forces to interfere in China's internal affairs using the Dalai Lama as an excuse."

He said that by inviting the Dalai Lama to the White House, the U.S. would "harm others but bring no profit to itself." And he added a veiled threat about American prospects for economic recovery.

"How would [such a meeting] help the United States surmount the current economic crisis?" Zhu asked. He spoke at a news conference this morning in Beijing, and his comments were carried by several news agencies.

China holds the key to part of America's future financial stability, because it holds the largest number of U.S. treasury bonds. The strength of economic revival in China, in turn, could help lead the U.S. and the rest of the world out of the current downturn. But it was unclear how China could hurt the American economy without harming its own as well.

"If China wants to pick a fight with the U.S. on this, it needs to think of the $260 billion of goods it ships to America each year and the security of the $800 billion of treasury bonds it has," said Kerry Brown, a China expert at Chatham House, a think tank in London. "Despite all this bluff, it is not going to happen... A trade war would be mutually assured destruction."

The row over the Dalai Lama's visit to Washington is the latest strain on Sino-American relations, on the heels of a big U.S. arms deal with Taiwan, which the U.S. recognizes as independent but China also claims as its own. Washington announced last week that it would go ahead with plans to sell $6.4 billion of weapons to Taiwan. In response, China suspended military relations and threatened sanctions against U.S. companies involved in the sale – a move the White House called "unwarranted."

"Maybe China needs to think about why it is having rows with everyone about everything at the moment -- climate change, executions, treatment of dissidents, trade, the Chinese yuan, Taiwan, the Dalai Lama," Brown said. He added that China "can't be right all the time, and is putting itself in a highly unproductive corner."

In today's news conference, the communist party official Zhu didn't elaborate on how China would retaliate if Obama meets the Dalai Lama. "We will take corresponding measures to make the relevant countries realize their mistakes," he said.

Next, comment by Gary Tomei

Buzz,

The article below is what touches me. Not all the hate and bile that's put out by the TV ranters. In the 1850s there was a political party known as the No Nothing Party. That's exactly what the O'Reillys, Limbaughs, Hannitys represent.
This Country was great, despite its many faults, because it valued decency and fair play. That's how we overcame slavery, the Depression,opposition to women's suffrage, discrimination etc.. That was up until the time of Regan. Then it became the time of "me" and fuck the little guy, in fact fuck everyone but me.. With Bush that practically became the national anthem.
I don't subscribe to that political philosophy. Its not only morally unacceptable, but its corrosive affect will ultimately destroy us as a nation.

Gary

Kvetcher in the Rye

by Greg Palast

In the sixth grade, the Boys' Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying aroundThe Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word "fuck" in it. Since the Boys' Vice-Principal hadn't read the book - and I don't think he'd ever read any book - he couldn't tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save me from the world's vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment. Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free.

That's, of course, how the word fuck got into Salinger's book. For the 5% of you who haven't read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn't want little kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an irreversible loss of her childhood innocence:


I thought Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.
Which is where the title came from. Salinger's Caulfield, pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a cliff's-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the edge, Caulfield's job would be to catch them before they fell.

Any other job would just turn you into a "phony," that is, an adult. All adults were phonies, even the nice ones, who took jobs they hated, taught textbooks and catechisms they didn't believe and lived lives of self-inflicted disappointments, while pretending it was all OK. Then with phony grins, they'd demand that you join their painful parade of delusion and decay.

Nearly half a century after I covered up Salinger's book in a carefully folded brown wrapper, I thought I'd read it to my twins. They were now eleven, in the 6th grade.

But I couldn't. In his 1956 book, Salinger had railed against a post-war world of boys in school blazers trying to get to "first base" with their steady dates. America itself was an adolescent, and despite the police beatings of marchers in Alabama, despite the "drop, tuck and don't look at the flash!" drills we did weekly in Mrs. Gordon's class to prepare for the Russian nuclear attack, America was still weirdly, optimistically child-like.

We knew then that the world could only get better: we would go to the moon and eventually, vacation there. JFK announced the Alliance for Progress and poverty would end in Appalachia; and Paul McCartney wanted to hold our hand. Every nasty meanie, like the police in Selma, was met by a legion of victorious innocents led by Martin Luther King. So we all held hands in a circle while Pete Seeger strummed "We shall overcome." Everyone would get a scholarship; and we really, truly believed we would overcome.

Even the social critics - Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac - were just big, mischievous kids.

Yes, there were a bunch of old phonies like Joe McCarthy and the Boys' Vice-Principal, but their days were numbered.

Then we fell over the cliff.

A bullet through the skull replaced Kennedy with Nixon. We shall overcome was replaced with the vicious "Southern Strategy;" the Cold War exploded in hot jungles; then came the idiot wasteland of the regimes of Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bushes, a degenerative march as the machine of America rusted and died.

And here we are today, begging for spare parts from China and my daughter glued to YouTube videos of Lady Ga-Ga's crotch, and my son slicing off a cop's head in Grand Theft Auto and a President, telegenic and painfully hollow, playing the lost and ineffectual shepherd over an electorate divided between the terrified and the greedy. In place of prophets, we are offered a caravan of kvetching clowns piling out of the Volkswagen on MSNBC.

There's no way to wipe the fuck off this smeared planet. I'm supposed to try. I'm an investigative reporter, meaning I have a professional commitment to the childish belief that if I shout loud enough, I can warn people away from the cliff's edge.

Well, it's better than a real job, but no less "phony," no less of a petty illusion.

I'm holding this book, the brown wrapper lost who the hell knows when, and I know it would just be laughable, inscrutably ancient to those wisened, worldly children of mine.

I've put it back on my shelf.

You stand on the cliff edge and there's no one left to catch.



Jerome David Salinger 1919-2010.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. Sign up for Greg Palast's investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com.