<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>This is an excellent list serve which is worth checking into. It is a very open list and gets many varied opinions, but the following says it all:</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><br><br>OK, folks its time to get down, time to take on the Bush regime. Why? Because they're after our democracy. When push comes to shove, you have to push to keep your democracy, otherwise you will be shoved into a corner and told you cannot have it anymore.<br><br>For years, the Bush-Nazis have been spying on us. They have been spying on me, they have been spying on you. The Republican party is no longer the party of Lincoln. Lincoln founded a new party and waged war on slavery in order to preserve "government of the people, by the people, and for the people". Bush and his Project For A New American Century (PNAC) cronies wage war against their own people, and against the rest of the Earth, for the domination of white people. Lincoln was the grandchild of a Quaker woman and understood Quakerism ... he was visited more often in the White House by Quakers than by religious people of any other denomination. Bush spies on Quakers, regarding us as enemies of his regime and of our country. Bush schemes to put people of color and non-Anglophone people in their place, the horrid and squalid place that stood out most blatantly during Hurricane Katrina.<br><br>We Quakers are no one's enemies. I have corresponded extensively with Bush's own brother Jeb on the topic of Restorative Justice, which Jeb believes in. I have even written to this President offering to put together a Restorative Justice Prayer Breakfast for his White House. No reply. I have great differences with this President, yet I have even complimented him on his courage for visiting prisoners in prisons during the course of his political campaigns -- something that most politicians wouldn't do. No reply.<br><br>Why do I call them Bush-Nazis? Because they are the practical heirs of German Naziism. Why? Because George Walker Bush's own grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped fund the Nazis' rise to power in Germany -- right into the time of World War II -- 1942 to be exact -- when he was busted under the Trading With The Enemy Act, a law passed in the US Congress in 1917. As Michael Moore so rightly pointed out in his documentary film 'Fahrenheit 9/11', even in 2001, the Bush family was 'in bed' financially with the Bin Laden family, in the lucrative investment house known as the Carlyle Group.<br><br>Was Prescott Bush put in prison for trading with the German Nazi enemy? No. Why? Because the investors, who put many billions of dollars into the German war machine and even profited directly off concentration camp slave labor, included some of President Roosevelt's best friends. People in the big banking cartels who actually issue the dollar and control western finances. Firms like Brown Brothers Harriman, still one of the largest and most profitable private banks in the world. People like the Harriman and Rockefeller families, and many more 'illustrious' US, British, and other family names. Instead, Prescott Bush was given another job -- running the War Fund, and shaking down the country's rich families -- the ones that had been profiting off the greatest of miseries -- and getting them to make huge contributions for war relief. Restorative Justice in a very big way indeed.<br><br>What most people still don't know is that the German Nazis were funded -- their rise to power was backed -- by US, British, and other funds, some of which were funneled into Hitler's party beginning in the early 1920's. Essentially, the Nazi brown-shirts were 'hired' as union-busters by German industry, by the big steel conglomerates especially. Fritz and August Thyssen were the leaders of the main firm funneling money to the Nazis. They were later joined by Friedrich Flick, and after the war they merged with the Krupp steel firm, Germany's largest. Today, Thyssen-Krupp is Germany's largest industrial conglomerate, and their name can be found on a huge number of products, including the elevator in our downtown parking garage in Brattleboro, Vermont. And Brown Brothers Harriman, which provided the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) cover for Bush and the Harriman brothers funneling investments of the Nazis, the one that was busted in 1942 for Trading With The Enemy, today remains<br>one of the world's largest private banks. And when the last Thyssen, the majority shareholder still running the UBC after the war, died in the early 50s, Prescott Bush cashed out his seven figure 'winnings', his and his father's shares in UBC, and funded his first run for the Senate. He made it on the second try, beginning the Bush political dynasty. One of their 'pet politicians' from the time of the late 1940s, running on an anti-communist line and helping push the McCarthyite attack upon democracy, was Richard Nixon.<br><br>The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln. They stopped representing "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" quite some time ago. Today, they may not be Nazis, but they are what I call PNACzis, and their scheme is very much like that of the Nazis of old. They tell us Big Lies, knowing that many of us will believe them. They tell us we are being attacked, and try to marginalize those of us who are pacifists as 'endangering the country'. Today, when the Bush Regime has been exposed for secretly spying on us, secretly torturing people in secret prisons in many overseas countries, they try to paint the people who have blown the whistle on these practices as traitors. They try to make villains out of the true heroes of democracy. This is serious business, folks.<br><br>In 1996, after helping organize Restorative Justice programs in Vermont that won national awards, I was Secretary of a United Nations Working Party on Restorative Justice. My security clearance at the UN was revoked after I witnessed, and challenged, a good-ol-boy conversation about what crony was going to get a huge, lucrative contract to build a 3600-unit prison in Kuwait. I would still like to know where that prison is, who built it, and whether it is one of the 'secret prisons' where the USA's Bush regime sequesters those it considers its enemies. Kuwait, you will recall, is the country used as a staging area for both of the US invasions of Iraq.<br><br>Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently acknowledged that he 'ghosted' (secretly arrested and held for months) certain persons. These prisons, these 'secret CIA prisons' that the USA is running overseas, they are holding today's 'disappeared ones'. You remember the 'disappeared ones', the 'disaparecido' of South America. How many of them were pushed out of airplanes over the open, shark-infested ocean? Many. How many lie in unmarked graves, or are dust, scattered to the four winds? Very many. How long will it be before you and I get 'disappeared'?<br><br>Three years ago, the Bush regime used the US diplomatic corps, specifically the UN Embassy in Yemen, to track several people, including a US citizen, who were considered enemies of the Bush regime and alleged to be in cahoots with al-Qaeda (whatever that is). Did they arrest them and charge them? No. Did they seize them and 'ghost' them into a secret prison somewhere? No. Instead, they launched a Predator drone aircraft and 'took out' an SUV crossing the Yemeni desert, four men including a US citizen, with one Hellfire missile. What kind of justice is this? The kind for which G-d once flooded the Earth, warning us when dry land rose again out of the waters that we must found systems of true justice; ones no longer based upon revenge.<br><br>The 'fire next time' is just around the corner. Or maybe it's been here now already for quite awhile. Who are the ones who will help us stay safe, when our own governments wage war against us in secret? There is a reason why the people are now rising up against the secret spying and the secret prisons and the secret torturing ... it is because they know that this is not democracy, that we have lost our Republic when the US government can engage in these activities with impunity. Many of us realize that the reason the Bush regime backed out ot the Rome Treaty, establishing the International Criminal Court, was not to protect US 'peacekeepers' from 'frivolous prosecution', but rather to protect the high muck-a-mucks from their eventual prosecution ... as war criminals.<br><br>Is George Walker Bush a war criminal? Is Richard Cheney a war criminal? Is Tony Blair? Is Donald Rumsfeld? Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith ... are they war criminals? Is the Project for a New American Century a criminal conspiracy? They are, after all, calling for exploring biological weaponry -- genotype-targetable microbes -- as a "useful political tool". They are, after all, calling for the "full-spectrum dominance" of the US military, industrial, and economic machinery -- not to mention our global prison-industrial complex -- over the rest of the world. They are, after all, pursuing secret policies of repression and violence against those they perceive as their political enemies. They do, after all, seek to preserve the petrodollar hegemony as an effective tool of control over the world's strategic resources.<br><br>If this is still a democracy, if this is still the Republic that we love, then they deserve a fair trial. In the spirit of Nuremberg, my fellow Americans, let us see that they get it.<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>=========================================<br>COLLEGIUM IUSTITIÆ ÆQUITATEM RESTITUENTI<br>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br>John Woolman College of Equity-Restorative Justice<br>Peacemaking and Conflict Transformation<br>c/o John Wilmerding <wilmerding@earthlink.net><br>217 High Street, Brattleboro, VT, USA 05301<br>Phone: (01)-802-254-2826<br>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br>"There is no time left except to make peace work<br>a part of our every waking activity."<br>-- Elise Boulding, Quaker Scholar & Peace Activist<br>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br>To join (or leave) the College's email list, send<br>an email message to
wilmerding@earthlink.net<br>or to
cerj@igc.org, including your first & last name,<br>your email address, and your state, province or<br>country of residence. A partial CERJ list archive is<br>at this site: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://lists.topica.com/lists/CERJ/read">lists.topica.com/lists/CERJ/read</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>========================================= <br><br>=========================================<br>COLLEGIUM IUSTITIÆ ÆQUITATEM RESTITUENTI<br>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br>John Woolman College of Equity-Restorative Justice<br>Peacemaking and Conflict Transformation<br>c/o John Wilmerding <wilmerding@earthlink.net><br>217 High Street, Brattleboro, VT, USA 05301<br>Phone: (01)-802-254-2826<br>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br>"There is no time left except to make peace work<br>a part of our every waking activity."<br>-- Elise Boulding, Quaker Scholar & Peace Activist<br>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br>To join (or leave) the College's email list, send<br>an email message to
wilmerding@earthlink.net<br>or to
cerj@igc.org, including your first & last name,<br>your email address, and your state, province or<br>country of residence. A partial CERJ list archive is<br>at this site: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://lists.topica.com/lists/CERJ/read">lists.topica.com/lists/CERJ/read</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>========================================= <br><br> <p></p><i></i>