By Marc D. Goldfinger

“It is not by chance there are many of us.

It is not by chance we sing to each other.

It is not by chance the Gods let us touch.

It is not by chance, like plug and socket, we fit together.”—from A Room of Bone — a poem in Relationships by Marc D. Goldfinger; Ibbetson St. Press, Somerville, MA

George W. Bush has left the stage of the world.  It is Barack Obama’s time.  Yet as Barack Obama knows well, it is not only his time, but it is also our time.  Obama is our president and we are the people.  In his speech many of his reflections called upon us to do our part, for he knows that alone and isolated, a president who works against the will of the people cannot work.  We have just witnessed eight years of decline, eight years of waning hope, eight years of spending the birthright of our future, eight years of hopelessness, death without purpose, eight years of the heart of a nation breaking into tears of sorrow.

The glory of Barack Obama is that he is truly the heart of the United States, yet he realizes the heart is only a source of inspiration if all the other organs work well.  Barack Obama knows that a leader is only as strong as his ideals; that if he doesn’t lead well, the people will not follow.

Barack Obama does not take his new trust lightly.  He knows that the world is at a pivotal point as far as the human species is concerned.  He is aware that the path we take from this point is crucial, and it takes us all to task.  It is our responsibility to work with our new president, to help him achieve his goals and also to speak out to him when we feel that he is going off the path.  Because Barack Obama is a president who knows that he has much to learn from those around him.  Obama is a president who is humble, who will keep his ears to the ground, his eyes to the sky, his hands on the plow, and he knows that he must not only say what is necessary — he must follow through with his actions.

Sixty years ago, men and women of colour were relegated to the back of the bus; men and women of colour could not drink at the same water fountains as white people; men and women of colour were not free in the United States.

Barack Obama knows that, in just sixty years, there has been a paradigm shift in our country.  That is what makes it great.  It is not that everyone has changed in sixty years, but enough of us have changed to make this new world possible.

Barack Obama raises the hopes of the people of the United States.  But it is not only the people of the United States who have their eyes on this man with “The Audacity of Hope”, it is the people of the world who have their eyes on him because he raises their hopes too.  The world is watching him; the world is watching us; the world is waiting and hoping that Obama is what he says he is, and what he has shown us he is to become the president of our land.

I am a cynical man, but I have hope for humanity.  It has been a long time since I have been inspired by a leader, and Barack Obama has won my heart.  And not only my heart, but the hearts of many, people in the United States and people all over the world.

There was a time, a long while ago, when humanity was given hope.  There was a president who said, after Russia launched Sputnick, the first satellite, that we would be the first nation to reach the moon.  And God knows, if there is a God and I believe there is one, that we joined together, each in our own way, and in 1969 humanity walked on the moon.

Barack Obama offers us a new challenge.  He does not say that we will be the first to walk the moon; Obama says that we will lead the world with fierce love; that we will “offer our hand if you will unclench your fist.”  Obama says that “this is the time to put aside childish things.”.  I believe he knows that war is the enemy of us all, and those who choose war over life are the ones who delay the new rebirth of the Human Nation.

It is not just the United States that must grow; it is all the nations of the world who must unclench their fists, just as we must join them.  Those of us here in the United States with clenched fists must stop, think and open their hands so they can work with us.  Barack Obama knows that this is a world where, if anyone is left behind, whether black, yellow, white, poor, rich, red or just average, if anyone is left behind, we will all be left behind.

This is not a time where we must fight and claw to be the first to walk the surface of the moon.  This is a time when we must join hands and work together to walk and ride and sail across a clean, peaceful Earth.  There is only one way to do this.

Again, I repeat Obama’s words, which he took from the Bible, and those words are that “we must put aside childish things.”  This I know to be true — war is one of those childish things we must put aside.  As Obama said, “When it was time for us to face the future, we faced it and did not falter.”

Barack Obama is more than the heart of a nation.  He can be the heart of the world.  Instead of strapping bombs to ourselves and destroying the future, we must strap tool belts around our waists, whatever tools we use to build, and work to turn our backs on the errors of the past.

There was a president who took us to the moon.  Let Barack Obama be the president who takes us all home, and let him be the president that inspires us to work so that all people, all over the world, can be safe in a home of their own and walk the world in peace.

Published in Spare Change News, Jan. 29 — Feb. 11th, 2009.

Now the work begins, undoing all the damage that the Bush presidency has done.  Hopefully, all the soldiers will be brought home from Iraq.

The fact is, this is more than Barack Obamas job to remake the vision of our country.  It is our job too.

Under the regime of Bush & Cheney, we have again become The Ugly American.  Barack Obama inspires hope in me and I know that I have to do my part.

Use less fuel.  I bicycle, I have a small motorcycle that gets 60 mpg, a Honda Rebel 250cc, and a nine year old Honda Civic that gets close to 30 mpg.  My wife has a newer Honda Civic which gets 35 mpg.

And that’s just the beginning.  A new beginning for all of us.

Do I pray?  Yes, I do.  But it takes more than that.  My actions speak louder than my words.  I can say anything I want here but if I don’t live it, it becomes meaningless blather.

May the world, and the United States, heal, heal, heal.

Our species stands poised on the edge.  We face challenges never faced before.  The choice is ours — the collapse of civilization as we know it — or a world where life is held sacred and promises kept.

May whatever God you believe in calm your spirit and enrich your soul.

Turn off your TV!  Sit back.  Take a few deep breaths.  Relax.  Getting frightened doesn’t change anything.   Look around you.  Is everything okay where you live.

If it isn’t, then you have to deal with it.  If everything in your humble abode is okay, then be there.

This too shall pass.  Forget the media.  For them, this is payday.

I’m going to vote.  I’m going to follow what I believe.  You can do the same.  Follow the path to the truth.  I’m not going to tell you what that path is.  Inside yourself, you know it.

Pay attention.

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

“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 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.

From other news sources — “Human-caused stresses, including global warming and over fishing, are encouraging jellyfish surpluses in many tourist destinations and productive fisheries”—-National Science Foundation.

Some problem areas are off the coasts of Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan, and the Yangtze estuary.

Jellyfish thrive in areas that are compromised by pollution, but not in the increasing number of Dead Zones where nothing can live, and are dramatically increasing in number.

Dead Zones are waters that are so depleted of oxygen that they cannot support life and there are over 400 of them, that we know of, and they are increasing in size.

The world’s largest Dead Zone is in the Baltic Sea and it loses 1.3 million metric tons of food a year.

It sounds as if our oceans are becoming close relations to our currently disintegrating stock market. Many of the Dead Zones are caused by global run-off of agricultural fertilizers from our giant agri-farms and also, believe it or not, from polluted air. Everything is connected.

The Earth was not ready for our throw-away human way of life. It is imperative that the new leaders of all countries make themselves aware of what needs to be done to save the Earth from our dysfunctional ways of life.

War, fossil fuel misuse, over-population, greed. Our species feels entitled to whatever it can take from the Earth and disregards the cost to other species, the oceans, the air, and the fresh water ways that are being degraded by the garbage we pour into it.

When a civilization collapses, it isn’t pretty. Stock market crashes are just the tip of the iceberg. It takes more than one man leading a country to solve the problems we face.

If the United States were to elect Barack Obama, and it would be in our best interests to do so, we must lead him to a better way of life. Unfortunately, I believe that John McCain is more concerned with the art of war than in making our world a better place to live. Sarah Palin is just unaware. Period.

Our civilization is facing a crisis that is totally unique. When Rome was falling, another place was rising. When Greece was falling, another place was rising. In today’s times, all of our civilizations are linked together and what we are facing is a global collapse of our civilization.

If we let this happen, the survivors will live in a savage land ruled by the least of us. The barbarians will have won. The sounds of whips and chains will resound around the world for the humans that remain.

Right now, there is much more at stake than a stock market bail-out. So much more. We must rise from our complacency or pay the unimaginable price.

The Four Horsemen, Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death are riding our way. I will close with a poem that was written by an unknown author, unknown to me, in 1764, courtesy of Jose Gouvieaa of The Highway Poets –

English Folk Poem

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the Common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the Common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the Lords and Ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man and woman
who steals the goose from off the Common,
And geese will still a Common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

fin—-

The Perfect Storm
by Marc D. Goldfinger

No one is jumping from buildings
during this crash because of the
Bush parachute bail-out. The rich

get paid off with our tax dollars
while a poor woman from Boston
is put out on the street. The bank

is foreclosing on her. She will have
to move to one of those new tent
cities; they’ll call them Bushvilles

this time instead of Hoovervilles
like during the last depression.
The last depression. No one bailed

out the fat cats that time; everyone
went down except for a few
carpetbaggers and liquor dealers.

It’s the Perfect Storm this time; even
the weather is telling us we’re on the
wrong track. Hurricane Kristina, Gustave

and the war in Iraq; the greed of the CEO’s,
I’m a friend of George W. is the new
Greed Anonymous greeting. Bush

didn’t have the 7 billion dollars for child
health care but he’s got 700 billion dollars
for the cats on Wall Street; you can hear

them if you try; yowling on the top floors
in the sweet suites while the rest of us
get foreclosed and put out on the street.

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.

This is just the beginning of the end. As I sit here I ponder the fate of a country that would be foolish enough to elect John McCain and Sarah Palin. True, McCain was a soldier. It is a sad fact that many soldiers are dying and getting shattered by the current wars that our idiot republican president, George W. Bush and his puppet master, Dick Cheney, have lied to lead us astray.

Our country is dying and the new angels of death are McCain and Palen. Elect them and you will be pulling, not an election ballot, but the switch on an instrument of death because they will finish us off.

I have nothing else to say today.

“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.