Go back to sleep America.  The election is over.  The “lesser of two evils” or as Glen Ford so aptly labeled him the “more effective evil” has won and all is well with the world.

You cast your faux fear vote for your faux president who was actually selected and installed by the corporate powers to serve the corporate police state that’s been put into place over the past 30 years and is now accelerating at an alarming rate.  The irony is many actually believe their vote matters and global warming doesn’t exist and we’re fighting the good wars and fracking will save us from peak oil and taking our rights away will keep us safe and we’re number one.

Sure we’re number 1.  Number 1 in income inequality, #1 in incarceration rates, #1 in building and exporting weapons, #1 in military spending.  In fact, we’re the #1 terrorist organization on the planet.  Our main exports are: murder, torture, death and destruction.  We’ve managed to create terrorists where there were none.  Terrorism is like a cancer and when it’s attacked it metastases and spreads around the globe.  Our child poverty rate is 23.1% second only to Romania.  We rank in the low 20’s in science and math scores so go back to sleep America.

The sociopaths have taken over the asylum and are hollowing or harvesting our country out from the inside.  Our manufacturing sector has plummeted from 70% in the 1960’s to a meager 17% today.  Corporate power, aided and abetted by our bought and paid for legislators, are exploiting us and destroying the environment in the process. 

I believe these white male supremacist hate the feminine and therefore degrade, defeat, demean, abuse, rape and pillage Mother Earth every chance they get and when she fights back with a Katrina or a Sandy they deny climate change.  These male white supremacists ...

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fueled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians. The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning.

Katrina’s message was that we needed to face the dangers we had turned our back on when the country became obsessed with terrorism: failing infrastructure, institutional rot, racial divides, and poverty. And larger than any of these was the climate -- the heating oceans breeding stronger storms, melting the ice and raising the sea level, breaking the patterns of the weather we had always had into sharp shards: burning and dying forests, floods, droughts, heat waves in January, freak blizzards, sudden oscillations, acidifying oceans.

The third horseman came in October of 2008: it was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale -- of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up. This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy -- though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August -- it should be Climate Change.  If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about ...

The ruin and hardship inflicted by a natural disaster can reveal truths that political propaganda tends to obscure. When Hurricane Sandy destroyed swaths of the Northeast, darkened our largest city and plunged a huge section of the nation into crisis, the anti-government ideology of the Tea Party Republicans — and of its panderers like Mitt Romney — was exposed as pretense and nonsense.

Suddenly responsible for saving their communities and their people, politicians of every stripe reached out for help from the big Washington government and the liberal Democratic president many of them had previously reviled. They were duly impressed by his alert, active and concerned response.

None of this should have surprised us. What we learned from Sandy is the same lesson that Katrina ought to have taught us years ago: The right wing disdain for government can imperil your health, your family's safety and your nation's security.

Yet we clearly needed to learn it all again — and the events of the past few days have been starkly instructive.

At the center of the storm's aftermath stood New York governor Andrew Cuomo, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, different in political outlook but united in their commitment to provide relief to their communities and in their own need for assistance from the federal government. None of these men is an anti-government ideologue. Surrounded by suffering and wreckage, they looked to Washington because no other power could begin to cope with the boggling problems they confront, both immediately and as they contemplate reconstruction.

The partisan divisions of a national election shouldn't matter at such a moment, as Christie observed impatiently when a Fox News anchor suggested that he provide a photo opportunity for Romney in the disaster area. What rightly ...

I’m not sure when I realized that we were in the middle of a full-blown disaster. Maybe it was when I saw the outline of a National Guard soldier hanging off the side of a hummer on a blackened strip of Rockaway Boulevard. Perhaps it was when I received a panicky email from an assemblyman’s office saying that “ppl are starving in Broad Channel.” I’m sure the comparisons to Hurricane Katrina and September 11 helped speed the realization. All I know for sure is that by Thursday, when widespread gas shortages swept New York City and out-of-staters began offering to donate bio-diesel trucks, I understood that we were organizing in the midst of a crisis.

Communication and travel in the affected areas has been difficult for lack of electricity and cell reception, but reports are nevertheless circulating among the network of volunteers who have mobilized since Tuesday morning, when Hurricane Sandy abated. There were stories of elderly women eating food out of dumpsters in still-blacked-out Lower Manhattan; a large ship cresting the median of a highway in Rockaway; the Red Cross aid station in the center of a desolate parking lot in Staten Island, guarded by NYPD barricades and serving only military rations; trick-or-treating through the pitch-black streets of Red Hook; the anxiety over running out of gas; kids navigating the former streets in a canoe; seniors stuck in their homes; families told to abandon their pets because the emergency shelters can’t accommodate animals. In some of these isolated pockets of the city, the logistical challenges are so daunting that federal authorities were just getting their feet on the ground as late as Thursday afternoon.

Meanwhile, a grassroots network of community-run relief stations and free kitchens has sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The response began small and grew rapidly. On Monday there appeared