Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

• The Google and Verizon net-neutrality plan is bad policy that will only benefit the two companies. The FCC should quickly reject the proposal.
• Stop Google And Verizon From Setting Our Public Internet Policy

Ryan Blethen, Seattle Times | WA

The only thing transparent about the Google and Verizon plan for net neutrality is how disingenuous it is.

The proposal from the two outsized corporations would essentially starve the open Internet in favor of a well-maintained, pay-to-play Internet and completely wall off wireless Internet from even the most minimal open-access rules.

What I find most maddening about the Google-Verizon plan is that it could have been headed off if not for the lethargy of the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory agency charged to work in the public's interest. Google and Verizon filled the void with a proposal that would harm consumers and restrict innovation while ceding control of the Internet to broadband oligarchs.

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• The phony 'debate' over the construction of an Islamic cultural center near the former World Trade Center portends darker things to come.
• The Right's Shameful Muslim-Bashing

Stephan Salisbury,  Tomdispatch.com

There is a distinct creepiness to the controversy now raging around a proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan.  The angry “debate” over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen.

It’s not just that opposition to the building has coalesced around a phony “Mosque at Ground Zero” shorthand (with its echoes of dust, death, and evildoers). Many have pointed out -- futilely -- that the complex will be more than two blocks from the former World Trade Center, around a corner on Park Place, and will feature an auditorium, spa, basketball court, swimming pool, classrooms, exhibition space, community meeting space, 9/11 memorial, and, yes, a prayer space for Muslims. The shorthand still sticks.

• Most jarring is the sad irony of all of these people at the podium, with their supporters spread across our National Mall, celebrating, in part, their worship of guns, while invoking, quite blatantly, the legacies of two great Americans whose magnificent lives were cruelly cut short by bullets.
• Glenn Beck's 'Restoring Honor' Rally Denounced By Civil Rights Leaders

Paul Helmke, Huffington Post

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Joanne Thielen

A disturbing magazine cover crossed my desk last week (August 1-7) announcing, in big bold print, that Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the NRA are hosting a "Restoring Honor" rally next month (September).

It's being held at the Lincoln Memorial, a place that honors America's most revered president: the one who saved our union, freed African slaves, and breathed the healing balm "of malice toward none" at the conclusion of our bitter Civil War -- and who was killed by a gun.

"Out of the mirror they stare, 
Imperialism's face, And the international wrong." (W.H. Auden, 1907-1973, writing in 1939.)

Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research

Twenty years ago this August, with a green light from America, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He had walked in to possibly the biggest trap in modern history, unleashing Iraq's two decade decimation, untold suffering, illegal bombings, return of diseases previously eradicated and what can also only be described as UN-sponsored infanticide.

The reason for the Kuwait invasion has been air brushed out of the fact books by Britain and America, and been presented as the irrational and dangerous act of a belligerent tyrant who was a threat to his neighbours. He had, they pointed out piously, attacked, then fought an eight year war with Iran, and exactly two years to the month, after the 20th August 1988 ceasefire, invaded Kuwait, on 2nd August 1990. 

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