29 November 2007

AFTER Worlds Collide... Part II of the ZENfull future...


one generation plants a tree; the
next generation gets the shade.”

(Chinese proverb quoted in Human Development Report 2007/08)



ZENmud productions is still as high as three kites, from an overly-energized period of time spent amongst fellow world-travellers who voyaged to Switzerland for a week-long seminar entitled Climate Change II: Understanding Solutions, sponsored by Media21.


Although the week was mostly devoted to the filming of speakers and participants to these workshops, time was allowed for developing friendships of a profound nature, and these were amply rewarded. (ya tebya...)

The photo of these logs came from a municipal waste incinerating plant in the Swiss Jura mountains, from which a town supplements its heating supply by burning the detritus from various commercial logging operations.

This 'solution' was one of a wide range of Swiss governmental or industrial actions that were presented to our group. Steps taken to reduce environmental problems showed how small and large government initiatives could aid to reduce the greenhouse gasses that were driving Humanity across the REACTION zone.

That zone defines a place where short-sightedness, if not replaced by long-term sustainability, will provoke unending consequences for the biological balance of our planet.

Meeting people who share multiple common planetary concerns, although certainly their experiences, from passing through various 'prisms' of national or cultural origins, enabled an expanded shared focus, and the input from Swiss and UN authorities allowed everyone to walk away more knowledgeable about the radical times we face as 'Humanity', in the coming 80 or more years of
peak climate change.


Given that Mr Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
just a month ago or so, the concerns it reported, on climate change are even overpowering the petroleum-profit base in the Republican Party, which has distanced itself from the rapacious Halliburton-derived foreign policy that has saddened and rendered bleak, both an outlook for "tomorrow", and the world's opinion of the United States as a 'leader' that would get us there.


To the right, is the major graph (source: HDR 2007/08) that has circled the world, showing the sustainable (dark lines) future progressions, versus the unsustainable (reddish lines) alternatives that the IPCC postulated to be fully-impacting our future if no modification or adaptation actions were fully implemented.

Since at ZENmud productions this philosophy of car-less life and sustainability through 'small-living' has been a ten-year affair, assuredly more people can find new 'freedom' by rejecting the 'slavery' that cars induce... such as:

freedom from car insurance;
freedom from car repairs;
freedom from car thefts;
freedom from ROAD RAGE;
freedom from parking tickets;
and

freedom to discuss life in a bus with a stranger;
freedom to cycle to the store and return with a smaller pack of food;
freedom to breath air shared with birds and other fauna...

Whoever said "IF you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem" is talking about all of US, sharing ONE planet, until we return it to our grandchildren...

Not from Tibet, lyublyu,

Courage through the darkening days

ç*”*”*””*ç”*”* ZENmud ”*””*ç*”*”*””*ç”






26 November 2007

When Worlds Collide... Part I of the ZENfull future...

ZENmud productions is ah-ah-live again...

Hello ZENers, welcome to those from the Media21 Fall Climate Change conference.

(FN: "When Worlds Collide" was a super, childhood science fiction novel, co- written by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer; the plot concerned pre and post-event effects of two 'otherworldly planets' entering in contact with the inner Solar System, and the migration of the 'chosen' to the new planet)



Rarely does such a vibrant chance materialize, to witness so many different Worlds interacting.

For the 25 participants of Media21's second Climate change workshop, our past met our future (or certain potential components for a sustainable future), as South met North, West met East, developed met developing, and the problem - of global climate change, man-made or otherwise - was offered parallel solutions.

By seeking to stress mitigation and adaptation as the solutions to actual climate change, through recognition of the value-added concepts of increasing alternative-energy use or ecological construction (which both share components of mitigation and adaptation), Media21's Conference participants were offered abundant information of certain concrete solutions offered by various players in the waste-disposal sector, a Zero Energy home owner, and an abundant array of UN Program or Agency officials whose work revolves around Climate Change.


Monday's program included a visit to Les Cheneviers, a plant operated by the Service Industriel de Genève. Throughout the windy afternoon, journalists from four continents were ably guided through this multifunctional, state-of-the-revolution plant, combining municipal functions of waste-removal storage or, here, incineration, from which the 1,000° C flames allow this SIG facility to heat water, which generates local household heating and as electricity, for some 3,000 households in the vicinity.

ZENmud will be writing much more on this in the days and weeks to come, as the events of the past week provided more-than-ample fodder for in-depth commentary.

Welcoming new friends, ZENmud returns energized for the new winter to come...


As we move toward mitigation and adaptation;

Courage!
Et la prochaine en français?

ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç

Ya teb...


15 November 2007

Off to Madrid...

Dear ZENers! Connected LIVE! from Madrid, you can follow the events nearly live through the miracle of WIFI... at ZENmud productions sister blog: WADAwatch



See you Live! Daily! until Saturday, its

ZENvacation week...


ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç

13 November 2007

Universal health care: response to Romney/Mankiw


In mortal combat with the enemy, their attacks were coming from all sides – their motivation was at least as strong as mine, their alliance was well-formed, and I was alone in the wilderness...

T
hen I woke up...

R
ealizing they were only technicolor-dreams, night-on-the-moonlit-porch-like dreams; mere memories of correspondents from the chat-site Topix, and our week's combat concerned a long website debate, mostly in the United States about...

U
niversal Health Care.

S
ome of the debaters are (apparently) of the Bush-fox-Rush-Daily mold, but one Studious conservative challenged ZEN Central to provide responses that required massive work...

Are you for or against 'Good Health'?

Are they for 'Claims Denial-systems', are they FOR depriving citizens of care?? Have they disclosed personal or professional interests, such as being a stock-broker specializing in the buy-n-sell of Hospital stock properties?

(ZENmud has no financial ties (other than a Jerry Garcia tie collection) to the healthcare industry; and minimal ties to the US Government at present)

I also wonder, how many US conservatives have taken the time to seek information from the English Conservatives, or the European 'Liberals' (STOP: in most world politics, being 'Liberal' means Free-Market supporters, aka US Conservatives; 'Liberal' is opposite 'Statist' or 'Socialist' over here), regarding Healthcare delivery... at ZENmud productions, we think that they really don't want to see the World-Conservative view as to healthcare.


Learning is fun, and another source of learning comes from mastering the 'Spin' that imbibes certain individuals to compare a Universal Health Care system to impending Stalinism, to foist off the worst of scenarios!


You wouldn't believe it, when reading what I've been reading. One rather “Cheeky Conservative” suggested that if America followed the 'ZENway', he'd have to pay for a woman in Cincinnati to have her cancer operation.

And I didn't think in time of this perfect response (ZENthought is a slow process), but since he had the gall to tell me my response was irrelevant, after I merely pointed out that his panic-in-the-face-of-communism's impending invasion, due to a woman's cancer operation being put onto the public burden, which was his BS analogy without basis in fact, I picked up speed a little bit.

Again, this is a ZEN-gift to Liberal argument of one of the REAL issues of the 2008 election: the exploding costs of GOOD or BETTER HEALTH, and the growing number of citizens without Health Insurance (Through all Government or Private Sector systems)!

I
t's about being the man or woman you are; about your right to the pursuit of Happiness, your faith in the mission of Congress (de jure, not de facto) to 'provide for the general Welfare', your expectations of your President to guide the nation forward, as gently, with determination, as does the Captain who guides his or her ocean liner across the vast charted sea–lanes for the first time, after promotion from lieutenant.

When your family: a sister, a husband, a mother, a son, receive the fated news of rejection by a health insurance provider, that the anticipated relief is not valid under the definitions of the script
.

He or she may shout or scream at you:

I don't care about them. I got what I earned, and I don't want to pay for anyone else's lack of foresight. Why should I pay for some woman's operation in Cincinnati???

Try this response:

Okay, look there are some 250 million people that have some form of private or public insurance coverage. There are 47 million people without. If we had a Unicare system, all 297 million people would be covered. So * You * wouldn't be paying for 'Her' operation, everyone would.


You'd be paying (figure of speech) 1/297,000,000th of the costs (Actually, if we go to 'Head of the Household' or 'shared household' statistics, it would perhaps be a ratio of 1/115,000,000th or so: but if it was a $100,000 situation, each person's contribution to that woman's BETTER HEALTH, would be less than 1 penny!


If you ever handed a begger a dime, you gave them 10x the need of a shared costs operation... And if you ever walked down the streets in Cincinnati, and saw a woman whose appearance suggested she'd had chemo-therapy session in her post-op convalescence, you could actually smile and say 'I did my share...'!”


Now I'd like some Cheeky Conservative's authentic response as to what I'm not thinking about, where we have to take this to a more profound level. Obviously if we add 297 million people's problems to our grateful friend from Cincinnati, we add infinitesimal, incremental costs to the situation.


Why don't Capitalist Conservatives ever think of 'Economies of Scale' when they're dissing Unicare?

H
ow many conflicting 'Codes' and 'Forms' are hospitals, clinics, Doctors and Dentists required to fill out, thanks to the thousands of private insurance and Medicaid-Medicare forms? How about the hypothetical Unicare system having Five Forms: 1) out-patient, 2) in-patient, 3) dentist, 4) pharmacy and 5) therapy?

O
ne set of therapeutic codes for computer data entry? (if that doesn't already exist?)

B
ut there's more; the Conservatives are gasping politically, thanks again to their incessant-but-waining support of the Bush-fox-Rush theory of American supremacy.

The charts to the right were developed at ZENmud productions HQ-CH, and we are thankful to the US Census Bureau, for their report and statistics that made this possible.
(Citation follows, at bottom of post)


W
hile we know that the MSM is going to continue dissing Hillary, Obama and Edwards, as we watched them screwing Al Gore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry, the pathetic status of Republican Politix is actually revealing that which I've been saying for two years now:

Who could possibly be capable of cleaning up the remnants of the Bush-debacle-decade of total American decay and decadence?”


I'd frankly rather have a Republican clean up a Republican's mess, because I believe in Republican's theory of Government: I just can't find one that has survived Bush-ism; the true Conservatives are as underground now as are the true Liberals.


Fred Thompson? You won't read much here about him because I think his cause (and campaign) is retiring...


Rudi Guilliani? Is there a reason I don't see why he actually has momentum, that isn't veering his limo towards Ground Zero: source of all his strength, bad taste and illegitimate relationships with women, Bernie and who-we-haven't-heard-about yet...


Mitt Romney?

Teflon Republicans always look nicest... and now back to Health Care.

There was an article in the New York Times, which came to the IHT a day later, attributed to Harvard Economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw: “Beyond those health care numbers”. The good professor is an 'advisor to the Romney campaign'.


Mankiw wants us to remember, as ZEN Central also preaches, to beware of statistics; I'm certainly hoping former Mayor Guilliani is paying attention, after his recent faux-pas concerning the English National Health System.


His points are paraphrased here: 'beware of Canadian longevity and infant mortality statistics, both categories of which are stronger in the Great White North' (“Canada”); 'some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance' (“No Insurance”); 'health costs are eating up an ever-increasing share of American's incomes' (“Runaway H-costs”).


ZENmud Central is going to try and address the pertinence or impertinence of these three items:


Canada:
Mankiw stokes the research provided by fellow economists Judy and Dave O'Neill from Baruch College, who point to gun-homicides and automobile violence as impacting longevity statistics; he points out that American men in their 20's have a mortality rate 50% higher than their Canadian neighbors. His flip summary on those differences is that this may point out something about US “traffic laws and gun control, but they teach nothing about the U.S. system of health care.”


Wisely or otherwise, Mankiw doesn't mention how to factor in the desperation of US citizens, especially those at the lower-earning parts of the economic ladder, whose situations may lead to guns, robbery and murder, thus creating victims. Nor did he mention what research the O'Neill's produced, as to what actual percentages these socially-violent 'impacts' produced on the final numbers.


He then throws in the American trend towards obesity, and relates that to another research study, which congratulates the American economy's ability to “supply high-calorie foods inexpensively.” Sadly he has no comment on the American economy's continuing inability to induce low-caloric-output lifestyles (Editor's note: this article is being written on a laptop, perched on the knees of ZENmud himself, who's watching TV on a rainy Sunday afternoon).

Calories (IN) > caloric burn-rate (OUT) = GAINED weight (energy stored)

Calories (IN) < caloric burn-rate (OUT) = LOWER weight (energy utilized)


Nothing else to add to that perfect equation.


He attributes greater US infant mortality to a “correlated” connection between low-birth rate babies and teen-motherhood. And here, a problem is clear, as the professor suggests that Unicare won't change the “sexual mores of American youths.”


Conclusion(s)? It's sad to distort the very important debates of our time; in the very first example, he twists a valid comparison of two distinctly different systems, chipping away at the legitimacy of the issue.


By reminding us that if we didn't have violent young men who drive too fast, seducing and screwing horny young girls, getting them pregnant, then getting shot and disappearing, while leading all of the pregnant girls to become fat welfare-mamas drinking way too much inexpensive sugar-sodas; there's Universal-healthcare for you...


Professor Mankiw proves an expert in stoking the politics of fear, and turning the debate away from an Issue-Resolution paradigm, into sewing the seeds of simplistic stress, the 'gotcha' of the Republican Party modus operandi.


How nice, if we could actually debate how to unify (at any level! “Economies of scale”) the debate on an implemented, stable health system where young woman could actually get advice on Birth Control without facing an armed-and-dangerous Pro–life activist with personal and often deranged issues against contraception... (I too can raise your fear levels, n'est-ce pas?)


What, do YOU think? Never forget, thinking in its purest form can lead to a better democracy... onward!


No insurance:
Here's the thing, Bing: there are many reasons for not 'having' (Ahem: in the US, we should strictly say 'Acquiring', 'Purchasing' or 'Being granted') health insurance. Let's look at three items (two of which cost ZENmud productions nearly a whole weekend):


First, a pertinent quote by the authors of the US Government report:
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006


Compared with other national surveys, the CPS ASEC’s estimate of the number of people without health insurance more closely approximates the number of people who were uninsured at a specific point in time during the year than the number of people uninsured for the entire year. (p. 18)


See, that brings out one of the hidden horrors of the health-for-profit system (insurance being only one component of the medical-pharmaceutical-hospital-insurance-lawyers “food chain”): in the more-transient, lower and middle economic strata, people may become UN-healthy, by reason of having to stay planted in the only job where they can maintain their health insurance.


Clearly, once anyone has 'used' their insurance to solve their own, their partner or their family's 'crisis', they attain the anti-Gold-ring: 'Preexisting Condition(s)'...if they don't lose a job, which this author once experienced after an expensive, work-related ski injury (trying to meet hotel clients), they face the burden of knowing that a change in career would present a new insurer with those two dreaded words...


And that is the key: ZENmud productions has sought without luck, an answer to the key question: what percent of non-insured Americans is due to poverty, or due to preexisting conditions? As well, a certain large percentage is due to people who are not eligible, as they are in the country illegitimately. Reconciling these problems (Republicans seem not to mind that illegal aliens are working in the country, being paid by farmers, agri-business or other bosses, that are as much the problem as the workers that perform labor) require concerted effort between two political parties.


Why they waste your life and mine to argue and play the blame-game is unconscionable. Remember one important item: a healthy workforce is more productive; a sick workforce doesn't. A healthy workforce spends money on the pursuit of Happiness; a sick workforce doesn't. A healthy workforce stimulates the economy properly: from the bottom UP. A sick workforce acts like a jake-brake on the economy: money loses velocity when workers become ill.


Runaway Health Costs:
Why Professor Mankiw has decided to offer Mitt Romney's 'Healthcare Program' in such a safe, 'Donor-friendly' (hint: that's Campaign finance, not transplant donors) fashion, is not our concern.


Pointing out that yet another Republican is supporting the God-given (?) right to make a profit at every turn of the screws that end up destroying the American citizen, voter, consumer and breadwinner, Mankiw makes a point that only 'better equipped health providers' are providing miracles and thus the cost has gone up from the 1946 level of five per cent of income to 16 per cent.


Professor, how sad it is that all those living Europeans, including the Germans, most of whose insurance will pay for one week a year at the therapeutic spa of their choice, have been able to contain costs to under 7-9%. How?


NON-profit healthcare delivery.


And as an economist, wouldn't your latent macro-economics focus salivate, when thinking what American's could do without crippling premiums, 'preexisting conditions', happy healthy children and partners, while spending that extra unnecessary 5 to 9 percent of GDP on Barneys, barns or Barns&Noble?

The professor wrote: “Fortunately, incomes are growing, and it makes sense to spend this growing prosperity on better health.”

Professor, you're a bit behind the ball I believe, from the source we both should be citing:


Household income increased 0.7 percent, from $47,845 to $48,201 (Figure 1 and Table 1).


Real median household income of White households rose 1.1 percent between 2005 and 2006 (Table 1) — the first real increase in annual household income for this group since 1999.”


Mankiw doesn't want you to look at Figure 1: any schoolboy or girl can see that Mankiw's distortion is frightening, especially in his words.


FYI: Real Median Household income (“RMHI”) PEAKED in 1998–1999, under impeached Democratic President Bill Clinton (a ridiculous Republican character-assassination, quasi-juvenile retaliation for a previous generation's great Criminal President).


RMHI DROPPED from 2000 to 2006, especially starting in December 2000, when the Supreme Court-annointed President announced that the economy was in a recession. Precipitously, apparently, it became a six year slide downhill for a great many Americans. And professor Mankiw glosses up the true increase for that median household: the median increase was $356/year. And let's not forget that median figures belie the truth: it indicates NO great increase for most of the people, offset by HUGE increases from the upper echelons.


Professor Mankiw thus can only be addressing the Republican base:


Everyone knows that the upper twenty per cent were lucky enough to see their incomes rise under the Bush 'No Class Warfare' tax cuts for the rich, a fact which makes the 'increase' observed by the professor evaporate.


So is Mitt Romney's man truly saying: “you may as well pay all of the extra three hundred bones you earned in 2006 (not that most did) to the Healthcare industry” (no doubt pleasing Mr Romney's for-profit healthcare industry campaign supporters)?


Folks that are struggling to maintain their homes in light of the sub–prime house-financing market's crisis. They are looking to elected officials for a resolution to the undesired reform of a system that deprives one-sixth of its citizens and residents the benefits of regular checkups that are the first line of defense to the expensive concept of catastrophic incident payments.


The US health-for-profit industry growth pattern is based on various models that maintain our increasingly depressive obsessions with life-sustaining/extending procedures, in whatever state of physical repair or disrepair, through increasingly expensive medical state of the art. For every increasing percentage point of European income that has been devoted to healthcare in the last 50 years, our US system has doubled that growth rate in percentage of income drained into basic health.



What economics professor Mankiw has either blatantly or innocently ignored, is the point that consumers and manufacturing are now seeing the increasing price of petroleum products, whose components become plastics, fertilizers, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fuels, films and the clothes you where skiing...

All the King's Horses, and All the King's Men, couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again...


If we find no cure for increasingly scarce oil and gas, no replacement magic fuel that lubricates the entire world economy, we still will have the greater number of decent people, whose real income has statistically stagnated since Bush struck Supreme Court gold, struggling to rein in, with no evident solution offered by Congress, the costs of healthcare. And soon, the American economy will tumble, as consumers turn off their cars to pay for “Catherine's operation”.


So Romney's advisor, this economics professor, wants people to flock to Mitt, to appreciate their zero income growth in the era of Bush the Lesser. Zero real growth thanks to increased government deficits, decreased US dollar value in foreign exchange, increased government debt and increased healthcare costs.


Funny. ("Funny."?? Not to the weary and weeping)


Everything that Bush and his misAdministration achieved, and the sad Congresses that supported him (2002-2006, and still today), is the opposite of what America needs from its next (truly-elected?) President. It is the opposite of what a VAST majority of Americans want; but it is exactly what America's 'Ruling Class' wants...


America needs a President that leads a sustained effort towards reducing American forces being over-exposed to multi-year, hostility-zone tours.


America needs a President that addresses all spiraling costs: Healthcare delivery, fuel consumption, global warming.


And Mitt Romney's economic advice on Health Care, is 'Stay the course'. Maybe Mitt will be lucky enough to be President when healthcare costs pass the cap of 20 per cent of median household income.


ZEN Central can't predict whether other candidates will actually have the radical healthcare plan that functions; no more than it can predict what event at either end of the political-military command structure will bring one of America's two armies back home.


ZEN Central analysis continues supporting the paradigm that $75/barrel is the minimum future floor-price for oil, if ever it drops below the 90 dollar mark.


Universal healthcare requires an efficient funding mechanism, an efficient and secure e-payment transmission mechanism, sustained financial and medical oversight, regional flexibility, and sustained efforts towards manipulating the markets to affected by a industry-shaking transformation.


Remember, insurance companies gave no one a choice, when pre-existing conditions became grounds for inhuman treatment of a client who's funds had produced their bottom lines;


Contemplate, pharmaceutical companies gave no one a choice, when pre-existing known side effects were suppressed in peer-reviewed research literature, allowing drugs to become block-buster killers, such as the famous Merck product Vioxx, now (perhaps) the greatest nightmare in US pharmaceutical history.


Assure yourself, that hospitals gave no one a chance, every time 'medical error' aggravates or terminates a patient's hospital stay, through malpractice or benign ignorance.


Cogitate, as to why any politician is supporting out-of-control growth of this essential industry, a uniquely non-outsource-able industry (similar to education),
whose commercial models combine super-expensive diagnostic equipment with catastrophic care, under lifetime ceilings that could be exhausted with one curable-but-durable illness or condition. No politician has created a plan to attack the lack of financial incentives for those lower income citizens or resident aliens to pass regular checkups.


And while sitting in the next automobile traffic jam, especially those which are six to twelve lanes wide, those which move as fast as molasses, are going to have to stifle their conscious minds, which offer this mantra: “My god, how can we survive this shit?”...


Courage! Unicare is coming to town...


ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç



Government document citation:
DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica Smith, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-233, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2007.

08 November 2007

Impeachment: power of We, the People...


Read any good Constitutions lately?



Imagine trying to get present-day Democrats and Republicans, in 2008, to 'sign off' on this following sentence:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.


Do you honestly think it could happen? Our Patrician Senators and Partisan Representatives are more beholden to their Fascist Lobbyists and industrial Campaign Donors, then 'quaint' notions of Liberty, Justice and Tranquility...

SIDEBAR: that 'quaint' is directly quoting Alberto Gonzales, former 'Torturer General' for the Bush misAdministration... although it's often been misquoted:

Gonzales had described the Geneva Conventions as being “obsolete”, regarding the 'strict limitations on questioning of enemy soldiers', and had called “quaint” its 'provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip...' etc.


Nevertheless, outrage is justifiable when the true quote is read: torture IS obsolete, unless an Administration (aka misAdministrationhere at ZENmud Productions) seeks to pervert our Democracy, the innate role portrayed by the better nature found in the hearts of most, or some American citizens...


When the word 'impeachment' flies today, often in reaction to the known war crimes perpetrated from the highest levels of this
misAdministration, it always amazes me how partisan the term has become.

Those of us who lived through the Nixon regime, and more recently the Clinton regime, may or may not have attached party-loyalty to the governmental actions of those days... but look above!




“We the People”


That is as pluralistic as one can achieve – we the PEOPLE:

  • as holders of the powers of government, through our votes;

  • as parents of children for whom we yearn to pass on the freedoms our fathers and mothers fought for;

  • as citizens of the world, who should care more about other living cultures;

  • as custodians of our Planet, for which no money-back guarantee has ever been offered.


Regard if you would, Articles I and II of our Constitution:

Article I, Section.2.

[.....]
The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”
(original wording for your timeless pleasure)


Section.3.

[.....]
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

And completing this survey, the Article II section on the Presidency:

Section. 4.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.


On Impeachment, then, it is important that a legal philosophy be suggested; that in the House of Representatives, elected by 'We the People', that the House must rise above partisanship, if a Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors have been committed while any civil Officer, Vice President or President hold an elected Office.


This occurred during the second Nixon presidential term: the 38-member House Judiciary Committee brought a resolution to the vote (a truly great historian's article in Time Magazine) based on their four quarrelsome days of debate:

Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.


Six sitting Republican House Members, voted with the totality of Democrats (21), by a vote of 27 to 11, to have this committee decision reported to the floor of the House. That committee vote sealed Nixon's fate: either he was to submit himself into the hands of the House, or act himself, in choosing resignation.


While the anxiety on the nation and the world, through Nixon's horrible acts of conscience, was great, the bipartisan nature of those deliberations, in the face of crimes against the Constitution, allowed the procedures put in place by our Founding Fathers to roll slowly towards Justice, and resolution of the problem.


In retrospect, the one-sided nature of the Clinton impeachment process, and trial in the Senate, had all the earmarks of petty partisan retaliation for the Nixon impeachment. In fact, the treatment of Clinton, both by his opponents and the Mainstream Media (MSM) that was becoming the Republican Party's falsifying Fascist full-strength force for uncivil governmental discourse, had minimal support from citizens who held any allegiance to both parties.


Whether this situation could be resolved, in essence through the creation of a new Constitutional Amendment, is still unclear... How do you force 'bipartisanship', which should be striven for in nearly all Federal legislative decisions? Can it be forced, could it backfire? Perhaps!

Yet a sample wording for such an Amendment could be:


"Where any decision is taken by a properly designated Committee, toward any civil Officer, Vice President or President, that such Officer shall be placed under investigation for Impeachment, that no Committee action shall be taken which does not receive support from at least fifteen percent of the Committee's sitting Members of the House of Representatives from that Officer's own Party."


One could even say that, since the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, that certain radical right-wing elements had acquired a finer perception of the powers of 'Character Assassination', which was certainly more profitable to the Press, than the resulting chaos and potential for conviction through 'Bullet-Assassination'

Thomas Jefferson, he of a thousand quotations, once said:

"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society."


How is Liberty promoted, when a Citizenry fears the future, when a Press guides and promotes that fear, and when a Country's politicians run on election platforms that stoke the fires that feed into that Fear?


In doing the work of the People who elected the Officers in our Legislative branch, those Officers: Senators and Representatives, must remember
to separate the work on their desks, from the financing of the campaigns which found them in their Offices.


In the House, the questions should be raised, as to whether war crimes constitute “high Crimes and Misdemeanors”, and bipartisan support through a House Judicial committee investigation and vote should send a Bill of Impeachment to the Senate.


This is the essence and existence of Liberty in our country.


And if in reading this, one were to ask oneself how ZENmud Central could ever anticipate any Republican support for Articles of Impeachment, given their rancune against Democrats, and their liaison with the Fascist Mainstream Media, the only possible answer is to remember how something became broken.


IT was NOT 'Democrats' that pushed Nixon out of Office: it was Nixon.


IT was NOT 'Democrats' that tried to push Clinton out of Office: it was Republicans, in retaliation, or in 'Character Assassination', who tried their hardest to thwart the will of voters who voted under their responsibilities: as “We, the People”


IT is NOT 'Democrats' who are ashamed of Bush, "Bush the Lesser" as President: it is...



We ARE the People, and the duty we hold now is towards that of our children's future, in a world that responds to the actions taken by civil Office holders that have forgotten their priorities: they are voting for their campaign financial benefactors, not for those, in whose name, they attained and hold Office.

A second presidential term, that ends without consideration of the devastation and division wrought by the current misAdministration, and without producing bipartisan support for a resolution for Impeachment, brought by the true 'owners' of the American Government, will have vast implications for the future of Democracy, in the North American continent.

Bush cannot be, has not been, will never be judged in the objective light of policy decisions gone awry: he will always be known as the worst politician of the Twenty-First Century...

ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç

06 November 2007

The Perverzions of Two Presidencies...

One can only thank, in the last fifteen years, the 'High Powers' of the Publican** Party, for their incessant proofs that they hold little allegiance to the American way of life...

**As certain right-wing smear artists call their opponents the 'Democrat Party' (instead of Democratic), some of us in the Rational community have decided to play their game, thus the 'Publican' Party is what you'll read here.


As a political party, the Publican Party powers have often failed their constituency (-ies?) through perpetual efforts to block 'health care reform', pursuing their intransigence and iconoclastic hatred of Bill Clinton for his breach, in their eyes alone, of the 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors' clause in the Constitution, of the Publican President's ineffective and so-costly policy choices in his own family-based 'War on Terror' (previously called by ZENmud the 'War FOR Terror': a much more accurate moniker if one looks rationally at the facts), a 'war' that forced the bin Laden Family and the Bush Family to go their separate ways from the Board of Directors of the Carlyle Group...


And now, in this last week, one of the Great Enablers of George W Bush, General Pervez Musharraf (a name that Bush couldn't even remember or pronounce, in his 2000 campaign debates), has proven through official actions that the Bush administration is only talk, and cannot walk, towards the promotion of world stability in any form, indubitably the sole, singular requirement requested by Big Business, as their world quest for market share gains remains unquenched, with higher costs monthly...


How's your eye on History?


ZEN remembers 1999, when Pervez perverzly denied landing rights to the airplane carrying his own 'boss', the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, thus promoting an ingenious and blood-less coup-d'Etat, by refusing re-entry of the flight carrying Pakistan's own Government?


As General, as new President, Pervez the Perverz was in the right seat as the world of Big Oil brought its American Presidential candidate, the most pampered Idiot Savant of our times, into the White House in 2000, through theft of votes, and a greater theft of Voters' Rights, through a stolen Supreme Court opinion whose very words disallowed the opportunity to use it as precedent for following Election or Voters' Rights cases...


Don't forget, amateur History Lovers, that this same President (Bush, I mean) had, as Governor, entertained the Taliban in his Governor's Office, in seeking the UNOCAL pipeline across Afghanistan and through Pakistan, to bring oil to the Caspian Sea from the oil-rich 'Stans-states...


And NEVER forget, that members of Pakistan's ISI (their very own CIA) were in intense meetings with elements of the Pentagon, on 10 September, 2001...?


Now that I've sparked your memory vault, remember where USAMA bin LADEN is 'in hiding'?


Are you ready to admit that either: a) the US military and intelligence forces are incompetent (at least in regards to capturing bin Laden); b) bin Laden is very very good at hiding; or, c) that his continued freedom from capture is serving the purposes of the US misAdministration, thus benefiting both the Pakistani and United States political 'Reign(s) of Terror'?


Because what you now see happening in Pakistan, is not what you saw happening here in the US of A, in December, 2000. President Clinton never called out the US Marines to seize the US Supreme Court, prior to its rendering of its illegal verdict.


Oh that such acts of bravery, where duly necessary, could have changed the world, and saved us from the brutality that has forever scarred the USA entry into the Twenty-First Century!


But if you cannot fathom what has happened in Pakistan, think of it this way: in the 2004 re-election of President Bush, imagine that the travesty of voters' rights being denied in Ohio had reached obvious proportions and imagine, as impossible as such could be, that the USA still had a Supreme Court that cared about laws and civil procedure; imagine that the Court had taken upon itself to render a Decision that would overturn the Bush re-election, and then imagine George doing what his good and long-time friend Pervez of Pakistan has just accomplished...


While war-criminal Condaleeza Rice continues to prove her total incompetence, her inefficaciousness, in proclaiming for the eighth or ninth time that “present conditions are ripe for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli situation”... she reiterates her fierce loyalty to the word 'insincere', meanwhile mocking rational reality by stating that the United States found 'regrettable' the 'situation in Pakistan'...


As mentioned in the International Herald Tribune's article of Monday 5 November:

“For more than five months, the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to keep General Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President George W Bush's promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.”


And this 'Third World episode' holds global import, precisely due to these two perversions of Presidencies, one by his usurping of judicial independence through military force, the second via a man of proven limited intelligence, ultimate decadence, and royalist condescension towards the Greater World realities, for which his executive job requires more of the first, none of the second, and the reversal of the third of his preternatural declensions.


The Perverzion of Pervez, the Perverzion of the Presidencies, the Perverzion of reality... why?


Is Pervez hanging on precisely because he hasn't siphoned off enough profit from the billions given him via US and other Western governments, ostensibly for winning the 'War on Terror'?


Is his suspension of the Pakistani Supreme Court being effected with war-weaponry that George gave him to find Usama?


Anyone can see that Musharraf's haberdashery improved immensely in the last eight years: one could legitimately call him the 'Best-dressed Dictator of our Modern Era' (which might destabilize Muammar Khaddafi's self-inflated ego); his retirement future is assured through the miracle of modern banking, should he survive being a 'Friend of the George(s)'...


If (and this seems very unlikely) our dear Dictator Pervez were to fall, become imprisoned or suffer the consequences of yet another coup d'état against his own regime, would President Bush be 'forced' to 'find' Usama bin Laden? Would the reign of Terror that Bush helped implement (through negligence or willingness to sacrifice US citizens in New York, Washington DC and in the war-theaters abroad) be augmented or diminished by these intertwined events??


How will our 'beloved', self-proclaimed “War President” end his final year of power-grabbing?


If Iran is your next thought, Bush may exit the White House as the last civilian President of the United States: how a country can follow such a pathological destructor, how it can reverse the damages done by an Idiot Savant
such as he is, would take a massive aid program from abroad...


The Bush presidency began with the Pakistani coup-d'état that had brought Musharraf into power, and the ZEN-sense is, that in this second coup against the Pakistani Supreme Court, lays the seeds of a premonition of our own middle-term destiny: not that those who uphold the laws within the USA could foster a similar action against the Bush-Roberts 'kangaroo-Court'... but that President Bush will certainly take, before March of 2008, his final despotic action against the People of the United States... in bringing the Middle East to a cataclysmic, catastrophic, cacaphonic climax...


Courage! Through the end-game(s)

ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç

(Hi Nadia!!)