We the People...

Why I Am Anti-Republican

2011-12-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

"What did Liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party?

I'll tell you what they did.

Liberals got women the right to vote.

Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.

Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly

people out of poverty.

Liberals ended segregation.

Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act,

the Voting Rights Act.

Liberals created Medicare.

Liberals passed the Clean Air Act.

the Clean Water Act.

What did Conservatives do?

They opposed them on every one of those things.

Every One!

So when you hurl that label at my feet,

"Liberal," as if it were something to be ashamed of,

something dirty, something to run away from,

it won't work, because I will pick up that label

and I will wear it as a badge of honor."

Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr.

In other words, Liberals tend to be decent people.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are most frequently survivors of parental abuse, usually both physical and emotional abuse. By abuse I mean anything from physical brutality to emotional abandonment, to alcoholism, to addiction of any kind.

Bad treatment creates good authoritarians.

And Conservatives are authoritarian or they are nothing. The abused children inevitably will say "My parents were wonderful people. And they treated me better than I deserved."

But their attachment to the status quo tells what actually happened. Severe paternal abuse, most often a combination of physical and mental and emotional abuse produces the best Marines, for example. Marines are brutalized/brutalizing units who are good for nothing but following orders and killing an enemy who is not their enemy, but the enemy of a bunch of greedy, old men whom these young men/units will never know. Sounds like robots to me.

Back to the abusive father, and sometimes the mother, as well; how they will inevitably explain that he or she was just trying to teach his son how to be a real man in a harsh world. And with those words, the speaker has pronounced his own guilt. They are his confession that he, too, was severely punished by his father. This horrific kind of abusive parenting is all too common and has produced a kind of citizenry that we cannot afford to have in this country.

Brutalized/brutalizing.

Now let's take a look at a teen handicapped girl horse whipped by her father. This is very graphic and hard to watch, even as the father's language becomes more sadistic and sexual. I counted nine uses of the word fuck. I wonder what was on his mind. And like the true sadist, he ends up saying, "You caused this!"

An act of brutality that not even a hardened criminal would contemplate. And she did it.

One is not surprised that this is representative of the sort of thing which passes for decent behavior in respectable families in Texas. The man is a judge. A "pillar" of the community. An arbiter of local morality and morés. One who has vowed to dispense justice.

One hopes that he has been relieved of his duties concerning his work in Child Protective Services. But a quick read of this article in the Huff Post tells a different story. Fascinating how the Roman Catholic Church, and I am not a big fan of the Roman Church, (my Jesuit Brother, excepted) is under such terrible fire with lawyers demanding obscene amounts of money, in the multi-millions, in recompense for things that happened to young men 20 years ago; but for this handicapped young woman, the statute of limitations has run out.

The father, one Judge William Adams had the effrontery to publish a statement of his version. Quelle surprise! It was his daughter's fault. All of it.

Right, Billy Boy. You just stick to that story.

It is with horror, but again, no real surprise, that the police spokesman reported that no action will be taken against the judge.

Apparently, handicapped teenage girls who are brutalized by their perverted fathers, and mind-slave mothers, just don't count as much as boys. I may be wrong, but it looks to me to have something to do with lawyers having their eyes on the rich bags of money in the congregations of Catholic Church goers. But justice, hmm...well, some lawyers will tell you of the pro bono work they do. They just don't seem to do it anywhere near me.

That is capitalism for you.

And Law and Order Conservatism. ■

Still Don't Believe You're Being Controlled?

2011-12-18T17:31:00.000-08:00

or those who've heard about subliminal advertising on TV, but couldn't quite put their finger on where and how it is embedded, here is a helpful video from Alex Jones. There is much to be said about this deliberate manipulation of our subconscious minds. And none of it is good. As much as consumer protection agencies may try to stop this mind-theft, rape, really, on the part of advertising agencies, and corporations, there is little to nothing to be done to stop it. The probability, nay, the certainty, of vast profit is too great. From beer, to vacations, to movies, you don't know it but when you shop you are just a zombie fulfilling the commands of advertisers. And they love it when you say that it doesn't work on you. That response is simply proof of their success.

From embedded linguistic cues which are picked up by the subconscious mind but unregistered by the conscious mind to scenes of rampant sexuality, again, subliminal advertising works on your psyche in hitherto unimaginable ways. But they will modify your responses to otherwise ordinary products, so that after some nightly television viewing you will probably suddenly find yourself in a convenience store or supermarket picking up a particular bottle of beer; and though the thought will not appear as a conscious thought you will find yourself reaching for a bottle of not only sexy and attractive but truly manly, and it will be so subtle yet powerful, that you won't stop to question why a product is so attractive to you.

And don't think that commerce is the only area of control. Government too, offers its own mode of mass mind control. You can see that in this video as well. So that if you watch television on the networks and other channels you are just a puppet to be controlled by people you will never meet. All of them interested only in one thing: controlling your behavior without you knowing it, and in fact, in ways that you are contrary to your well being. They make a lot of money doing it and you lose a lot of your money by viewing it.■

Against Empire, Against American Slavery

2011-12-16T23:21:00.000-08:00

do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism". -Paul Robeson

". . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. " Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery.

"If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity": Daniel Webster

Compassion and Conservatism

2011-12-09T14:25:00.001-08:00

Let's start by laying down the first axiom: Not only do Compassion and Conservatism not fit together in the same sentence, but not even the same paragraph. See the video for a perfect example of how Tea Baggers see the world. Then see the next video for how dogs have traveled so far up the path of evolution that they are more compassionate than any conservative you care to mention.

What started me on this subject is an article in today's newspaper, reporting that in lab experiments, rats showed more compassion than most humans.

Rats!

Researchers restrained one rat and nearby they place some chocolate which rats love. What they observed was incredibly surprising. The rats ignored the chocolate in favor of rescuing their compatriot rat. Only after they had freed the constrained rat did they turn to the chocolate and then seemed to offer it to the newly freed rat.

Saving The Planet

2011-12-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

eems to me that if we acknowledge that global warming is real, and will destroy civilization unless we stop the pollution, and then we actually throw out the economic and political theories which seek to justify the domination and destruction of the earth for profit, and we we begin to value, instead, the path of sustainability, and it turns out down the road, that the situation is nowhere near as bad as it seems, we shall have lost nothing. Rather we shall have avoided a perilous path and set about implementing a sustainable future.

If, on the other hand, we acknowledge that we ourselves have already done irreparable harm to the planet, and then we actually take the necessary steps toward sanity and do something about it, something positive--- to halt and even perhaps reverse the damage already done; and it turns out to be true that the situation is exactly as the community of respected scientists have said, or even worse than anybody suspects, at least we shall have stopped the process of the annihilation of all life on earth. In the process we shall have found a measure of wisdom and begun the long labor of redeeming ourselves, by working out a plan of sustainability and adhering to it. And the planet will continue indefinitely; again we'll have lost nothing and gained the world for ourselves and our children, and our children's children.

If we wait and continue as we have been, whether through apathy, or emotional and psychological paralysis, indulging, as we have been, the decadence of corporations and and their profitable strategies of failure; not to mention the banks, and we continue not to hold them accountable for the fact that their every negative action impacts our lives, negatively; as well as the lives of our children and generations to come, not to mention the welfare of the planet.

Let's cut out the paralyzing courtesies and the adherence to "the rules."

If the phantoms of the one percent insist on wrecking it all, for their narcissistic, fetishistic, fanatical pleasures, then we are compelled to take harsh measures. If the driver is drunk do we let him drive in heavy traffic at night? I hope not. We either leave him by the side of the road or we die having allowed the drunk to kill us. So how long will we allow the drunks to drive:

Destroy all institutions which seek to gratify every consumerist whim.

Absolutely prevent in any way possible the conservative wealthy from calling the shots, i.e. remove their ability to preserve the status quo.

If we don't take drastic measures now, we shall have failed and all the institutions of wisdom, such as the university, and any and all religions shall have failed and humanity will simply die out rather sooner than expected.

And make no mistake: the next few generations will feel the full brunt of the destruction caused by the grandiose CEO's, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the latter two of which are nothing more than tools of capitalistic exploitation not only of smaller emerging nations, but equally important --- of the earth's natural resources; and let us not forget the infamous contributions of the gods of Classical Liberalism, Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, all and any other gurus of the Free Market. I have lived long enough to have learned to hate end-game decadent capitalism, corporate capitalism really; and to have seen it's devastating effects on the environment. See the videos here of John Perkins.

The choices are simple.

Wake up or die!

But I could be wrong.■

Congress Secretly Invalidates the US Constitution?

2011-12-05T12:06:00.000-08:00

♦

udge Andrew Napolitano in a recent broadcast asked a series of What if questions without once answering them. The most chilling part of his rant is that even as he asks "What if..." it becomes very clear that what he is asking about has already come to pass.

Napolitano is a voice of Fox News. Perhaps their best voice.

As a radical Liberal I have never substantially disagreed with anything I have heard from Napolitano. He really is a guardian of Liberty. And deserves to be listened to and heard by us all.■

Vagaries of Capitalism

2011-12-02T15:05:00.000-08:00

♣

hinking about the Dem's TV ad which does its best to shoot down Mitt Romney as an inconsistent flip flopping idiot with his defense of TARP brings me to this observation about the entire enterprise of the hideously corrupt Capitalism we now see before us. So yes, if you happen to be an executive at Goldman Sachs you are, in the words of Ayn Rand, your goddess of wisdom, a corrupt mediocrity.

My first thought is that in order for this bloated form of Capitalism to go at all, huge amounts of money must be given by Congress to the largest corporations. What Mother Jones calls the Hog Trough. And these constant infusions of cash must be increasingly larger and more frequent. So the last time it was $700-800 billion, not counting the 7.77 Trillion which the Federal Reserve gave out under the table. Whatever outcry of Tea Partiers there was at $700 billion --- now imagine the pissing and moaning at the news that the total sum was unimaginably bigger. So now those institutions have more or less repaid the loans, but what about the next crisis. And be not fooled.

There will be another crisis.
Immanently.
Much bigger and more terrible than the last one.

What capitalists need to do is actually read Karl Marx and see how Marx called the shots. How he predicted with every little twist and turn of Capitalism. And Marx was writing back in the mid-19th Century. His predictions are almost eery in their accuracy. Capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries will inevitably fail and fail with increasing frequency. And Marx was not even talking about the effects of the overweening greed of capitalists, which now we can see so plainly. Banks which once offered cheap dinner plates and watches if you would just please open an account with them have now changed their tune to

"GIVE ME YOUR MONEY! PUNK!"

And they are now in the business of real estate and have made it their business to evict each and every person from their home and they don't seem to care whether they do this legally or ill. In fact it seems that several attorneys general will be taking several banks to court now.

But they can't stop what the banks have done with their appalling policies of fraudulent foreclosures. The problem is that the banks understand --- as the American public does not--- that money is about to have considerably less buying power than it does now, which is a way of saying that it will soon be worthless as the Deutshmark was in the 30s in Germany.

Lotte Lenya told the story of how she was once paid one million marks for her performance. She said she wanted to keep the check as a reminder of how she was worth so much.

So given that the dollar is about to collapse through the floor, banksters are trading worthless dollars for houses. Houses are always going to be worth something. So what if the real estate bubble has burst sinking prices and value below the horizon, so that many homes are now, as is said, underwater. The banks simply warehouse the properties until the prices of real estate come back and then they sell them for the inflated value.

Just doing business.

heh heh...

It would be nice to think that this corruption is limited to capitalism. But it isn't. The fault is in the human beings who work it. Any and all systems are inherently good in the beginning and bad toward the end. Until, like capitalism, it has become so intolerably corrupt that it either collapses of its own weight or something like the 99% Occupy Movement arises. Socialism and Communism are as vulnerable to mediocrity and Oligarchical class-ism as capitalism.

As I recall that was the favorite explanation of the Mafia whenever they whacked somebody. Nothin' personal youse understand. Just doin' business. Meanwhile your favorite uncle lies at the bottom of the Hudson River wearing cement shoes.

So the banks are the new Mafia.

Just doing business.

As Gautama Buddha said, the key is moderation in all things. Given the current condition of human kind, and the fact that greed and gluttony really are deadly sins, no system is going to come along and solve all our problems. So the answer to it all, as far as I can tell, is a matter, finally, of human decency.■

The Trouble with A Randian's

2011-11-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

♦

As far as I can tell the people who are so moved by Atlas Shrugged that they want to be an Ayn Rand follower, are missing several very important points.

They are not John Galt and never will be.
They are not Ayn Rand and never will be.
Ayn Rand would most likely call them to their faces, "corrupt mediocrities."
Ayn Rand may have despised the negative aspects of collectivism but she was also an authoritarian and insisted that everyone believe as she believed.
Her followers are just that, Followers;
Ayn Rand hated people who followed other people.

Ayn Rand's Followers are authoritarian Followers. That quality of being a Follower is easy to identify. They brook no criticism of their chosen deity, or totalitarian dictator, seeing no difference between the two. At the slightest hint of disagreement an authoritarian follower goes into attack mode with the ferocity of a Pitt Bull.

On Killing Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

♦

lease raise your hand if you didn't know that the 1% percent was and is conspiring against the Wall Street Occupiers. And it's not a clean straight forward sort of conspiring either. Nothing like offering to come forward, get together and talk. No, this is cloak and dagger bigtime treacherous strategy from the deep of the heart, for lack of a better word, of the GOP. Needless to say it's designed to kill.

And to lie.

And to kill careers.

And to lie.

And lie...

The idea is to kill not only the movement, but, Hey! Who knows? A few human bodies might turn up floating face down on the cold waters of the Potomac. Yes, the party of NO, has a long history of somehow, very conveniently not being around when an airplane crashes and a witness who was about to spill certain beans to Congress happens to be in it and, --- surprise --- he dies. Oh. dear.

Quite a lot of that sort of thing went on under Bush-Cheney-Rove. You didn't really think that JFK Jr. was the kind of pilot who would go and bungle so badly he'd crash his plane with his celebrity girlfriend beside him did you? That actually had earmarks of a Mafia/CIA operation.

Oh dear.

Then there was the matter of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone's death just before the election. Oops!

Oh dear, indeed. Click here if you think I indulge in too much paranoia.

There several other notable crashes with similar earmarks that were mentioned in Republican owned media and then it all disappeared. And for some reason, one's grip on reality was called into question if one mentioned it. Here is one more significant and unsolved plane crash which killed Bush White house IT Guru, Mike Connell. OK, planes do crash all the time. But rarely does the universe time it so that it coincides with these circumstances: He knew a lot about what was going on in side the Oval Office, did not approve of it, and was on his way to tell Congress what he knew. What all of this amounts to, for me, is that the 1% are killers; and if you get in their way you'll be offed in a twinkling.

So now the strategy elucidating at least one of the 1%'s probably many strategies, has been leaked by former aides of Republican House Speaker, John Boehner. And one very good outcome is that now we know where at least some of it is coming from. And where it is going.

Right here is a big difference between the 1% and the OWS:

OWS is way out front.
No hidden agendas
Populist
Patriotic without being nauseating.
Peaceful.
Lovers of Truth.

If we happen to think of it, you'll know about it right away. Compare that to the Republican style.

Dark, craven, memos delivered mouth to ear; whispers, footfalls and lurking around corners of the halls of Congress.
The GOP hatches plans just like slithering cobra moms leaving their newborns to fend for themselves.
Elitist
Unpatriotic, but gives lip service when backed into a corner.
No respect for the US Constitution. Regards the US Constitution as a dishrag to be pulled into any shape they want.
Republicans love lies and hate truth. They believe their wealth can create any reality they want.

• • •

So the other shoe has dropped, as it were, and we have the satisfaction of a response, albeit an illegitimate one. At the same time it tells us that the other side is every bit as engaged as we thought. The silence now is broken in more ways than one. The Washington, DC lobbyists and PR firms have been working late guttering not only the candles but their minds as well in the right wing's fevered attempt to nullify the good effects of Occupy Wall Street for the American People, and the bad effects for the GOP; and therefore, the crafty, champagne sipping 1%. Its funny to read their descriptions of the OWS people: not only are they unwashed, but also, gasp, they use drugs; not only medicinally, but also recreationally.

Oh dear.

Wasn't it George W Bush who was famous among his friends and family for filling his nostrils til they bled snorting excellent blow? AKA cocaine.

The video below reports on merely one of the many likely strategies likely to be floating around National Republican Commitee Headquarters. (whenever I think of RNCH, I have to smile remembering when Ken Melman, the head of the whole shebang, turned out to be gay, and also, he wanted to be forgiven by his gay peers.)

Here is a word of wisdom to all the people who have told me that to rail against the government was at worst psychotic, and at its best, useless, because the government is us. Well, that may once have been the reality of government in days of yore, but now, it seems that the government is not only not us, but, really, not even a friend. The federal government, it turns out wants --- if not to destroy us, the 99%, at least it is dedicated to the proposition of keeping us asleep --- snoozing in our chains. How is that different from the movie, The Matrix?

Answer: it isn't...■

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Brutality of Oakland Cops

2011-11-19T17:23:00.000-08:00

♦

here will be REPRISALS. Eventually this crisis will sort itself out and the most belligerent and egregious of the cops everywhere in America, not to mention the mayors who who conspired to use brutality against peacefully assembled citizens, will find themselves no longer in power. Kaput!

Out of work.

But they may very well find themselves in serious trouble.

And the reprisals will come from us
and they will be just.
Unlike the Power Elite we will abide by justice.

We will win back America and return it to being a nation of law. This will happen or we will fail as a nation. Simple as that.

Obama could have prevented this. All he had to do was bring a sense to his administration that he would support America after the horrible blot on the pages of history as a result of the eight years of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

2011-11-18T03:13:00.000-08:00

It's Morally Indefensible And They Know It

They’re not John Galt, not Steve Jobs, and not helping.

Suspicions of Conspiracy Validated

2011-11-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

♦

o what we suspected all along, namely, that there's a strong conspiratorial aspect to the nationwide police crackdown on the Occupy movement, is true. It turns out that 18 cities nationwide were in on the secret. The police were told by the very top dogs that if they wanted to receive some large cash federal grants they would turn the protesters out of the parks; and feel very free to use unrestrained violence. Just don't use real bullets. Other than that, do your worst.

Several big question arise:

In which agency, and in whose fevered little right-wing brain did the vile, albeit well coordinated conspiracy originate?
Why were the mayors so easily led into being puppet operatives for federal agencies their hearts had to tell them were criminally motivated? Why so apparently eager to violate the US Constitution with treasonous action?
Why were the rank and file police officers, themselves, so agreeable to be exploited as the tools of repression? Traitorous, downright anti-American action does not necessarily go with the territory as far as fulfilling one's duties as a cop.
What are we going to do about it?

And that is the $64 billion dollar question. Finding out who had the motivation to suppress the first stirrings of dissent among the American people, who have just rolled over and over as the 1% has robbed them of their wealth, the social position in the Middle Class, and their homes, and finally their jobs.

And now they are saying ouch!

And somebody up there in 1% land is such a control freak--- added to all the other neuroses, starting with narcissism--- which are so eminently visible in the most wealthy and most powerful, that they must have it silenced immediately and for all time.

My own inclination is to want to look very closely at the International Banksters, perhaps the Rothschilds; but even as I write this it becomes apparent that Goldman- Sachs also fits the profile. ■

NYPD Destroys Occupy the Future

2011-11-15T02:32:00.000-08:00

♦

ow I wish that people would stop saying ridiculous trash such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement has already accomplished its goals. That is just plain wrong. It has allowed itself to be pushed around and made an absolute patsy. It has now failed miserably. The one overarching goal was simply to occupy and make life difficult for the 1%. And for everyone who joyfully pays tribute to the 1%. Falling all over themselves, to bow, indeed, to prostrate themselves, before their masters, those who adore and worship the Lords of Greed, have utterly erased their lives and their true happiness.

And for their part, the 1% has decided to reassert their absolute control over the world. As long as Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, The Kock Brothers, Mitch McConnell, Baron Phip de Rothschild and the rest of the sorry lot of psychopaths who are so possessed of greed that for them it feels like the normal way for a human being to be. It is not for nothing that the Middle Age Roman Church classified Greed as a DEADLY sin. Greed kills everything it touches--- including the soul. The clues are all around. Read, for example, the story of King Midas. The story has survived because it has enough Truth in it that we must keep it as a warning. Of course, you won't discover that your soul is missing until you die and that event may come sooner than you think.

Sorry, fat cats, but you may have those shit cakes you call wealth and treasure, but you lose your soul in the bargain. Goethe was a genius into human nature, and when he wrote was right. and the parable of the modern man, known as Faust. I am not saying that you will go to Hell, but I am not saying NO, either.

Like the story of King Midas. breathes, the world will be in peril.

Elizabeth Warren

2011-11-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

♦

ust a taste of the kind of lies which Karl Rove, the Sigheil, Hitler, guy of the Republican Party, and his super mendacious, "Crossroads Foundation", delights in. Any idiot knows there is scarcely a word of truth in this load of steaming you-know-what. It isn't worth anybody's time to address a single word of it. One look at Rove's horrific childhood will tell you why he is the bad seed of the far Right.

A suicide mother,
a father who abandoned his family
and the list goes nauseatingly on.

Those who are filled with Rove's brand of hatred will love it. Fortunately, they are few in number.◘

False Flag Infiltrating Oakland

2011-11-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

I would be willing to bet some serious doughnuts that the agents provocateurs in the Occupy Oakland movement are not merely plainclothes police this time, but stooges hired by the banks. It is so very obviously a false flag operation. And unfortunately it was bound to happen anyway.

Bankster Arrests:0 --- OWS arrests: 3000

2011-11-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

♦

ou can argue all over the place about what the issues are; the best way to solve our economic problems; fix the infrastructure; who is right and who is wrong; and how the government ought to be run. But if you are talking about pure logic, and reason, from a human perspective, and how we should operate in a compassionate way as a culture, that's where we run into big trouble.

One needs to understand that the neo-conservatives despise the notion of The common good. Mere mention of the common good and a Republican begins to snarl, or adopt either a dismissive attitude; or else become belligerent, saying, "What do you mean," they said, "by this thing you call common good?"

Never mind that the concept has been around from the beginning of Western Civilization and that a single moment of reflection shows that without a strong sense of the common good we would fail, utterly, as a civilization. Republicans are in love with Ayn Rand's fantasy novel, "Atlas shrugged". And Ms. Rand was no lover of the common good. The Common Good has far too many collectivist overtones for her. And for the Republicans who, by the way, are incapable of critical thinking. A self evident fact since if they could think they would not for another minute be Republicans in the first place. They would find Atlas Shrugged to be the insufferable rant that it is. And Mitch McConnell, for example, would be lost without Frank Luntz to tell him what nasty little phrase of the day, to say that will scare the most number of conservatives. Take the phrase, "Job Killing". That has the ring of Frank Luntz. Another is Tax Relief.

Pure Frankie boy.

But the problem for Republicans is that they are far more collectivist than Progressives. The Republican party whip has very little problem keeping his people marching, like The Borg, in lockstep. My own dark suspicion is that because of parental abuse, physical and/or emotional, they were molded into their authoritarian mindset.

Once one understands the profile, the rest falls into place.

♦

Republicans hate the Occupy Wall Street movement and its people for several reasons which they cannot and will not articulate. Most of the reasons proffered are totally bogus.

The list of reasons is long, predictable, and trivial:

The protesters are dirty, unwashed.
They are merely envious of "successful" people like banksters and overpaid insurance execs.
They the protesters are nothing but hippies who sleep in tents and where exactly do such people go to the bathroom?
The Occupy movement in the parks is totally inconvenient for everyone. They are messing up the parks the conservatives or real people don't ever go to, but someday they might want to, and these people making a mess of everything.
"And furthermore, by God, I always lived within my means. I never had any debt. And all these people being foreclosed on should only blame themselves."

They, the conservatives, claim to be so rational and reasonable that their way is truly and objectively the best way: a free market unencumbered by any governmental limitations at all.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has less of a problem with that view, than that they have seen the crime and injury to the rest of us which such policy inevitably engenders. Men, and women, obviously, left to their own devices, without limitations, anywhere near a large pile of money, tend to gravitate to criminal behavior. And I don't mean simply showing the underbelly of their unfettered greed.

Research shows how otherwise upstanding people will go wrong if allowed for any length of time near a lot of money. That answers a lot of questions about the Too Big to Fail banksters. And the big thing we need to remember about the Big Bad Banksters is that rather than repent their crimes in a responsible way, they seek to make their crimes into not-crimes, retroactively, by buying our Congress and our DOJ. What they are doing, in fact, is compounding their crimes.

If you haven't read the novel or seen the movie, Lord of the Flies, you might do yourself a favor and and rent the movie; but first, read the book; get it from the public library or, at this point, buy it for a few bucks second hand.

The story is an allegory of how humans act when the grown ups are not around. The young boys and the book is all about a small group of boys who survive a plane crash, during a nuclear world war, and land on a small uninhabited island. The boys revert to an uncivilized authoritarian law of the jungle mode. Piggy, fat, weak, asthmatic, dependent on his thick lenses glasses, and very intelligent, the symbol of the intellectual, is killed by the other boys. The voice of reason, and law and order, which Piggy represented cannot be tolerated in an authoritarian culture. The boys situation continues to deteriorate until the grown ups show up at last to rescue them.

Do persons charged with responsibility under criminal or tort law fail to recognize the wrongfulness of their actions and beliefs because of cognitive dissonance? Does ego bordering on hubris, work in such a way that cognitive dissonance prevents them absolutely from seeing the wrongfulness of their actions?

The question almost answers itself. The answer is yes. The egoistic blindness regarding a sense of right and wrong is so strong in even the most responsible of persons that it produces a susceptibility to the spell it casts on the unconscious mindset.■

"there is no turning back..." Michael Moore

2011-11-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

♦

Michael Moore Speaks at Occupy Oakland, October 28, 2011 from John Hamilton on Vimeo.

Now that the power elite has seen that America is awakening. They are now alert to this threat which the Occupy Movement represents. Expect big trouble from the police. Not just in Oakland. Everywhere. Tragic about the weather.■

More on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-10-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

♦

First they ignore you;

then they ridicule you;

then they attack with

violence;

Then you win.
Gandhi

•

Do not doubt that a small committed group of people can change the world. It is, in fact, the only thing that ever has changed the world.

Margaret Mead

he Oregonian's Saturday editorial, Point Made, Occupy Portland, is a perfect example of far right fear and trembling. No doubt police violence is on the way despite Mayor Sam Adams courageous stand against the loud and obnoxious Tea Partiers' insistence that he use force to disband the protesters' encampment. And they want it NOW! This tells us 2 things.

One, Those far right wing extremists are really terrified of the Occupy movement. OWS brings the TP right to face with reality. It threatens to tear the veil of illusion they wear over their eyes in their hatred of Truth. And...
Two that the Mayor is a humane, reasonable, man of honor who does not respond to the badgering of his enemies. I watched a clip on KATU in which the reporter badgered the mayor to the point where he was disrespectful. Adams gave him clear answers but the man refused to accept them. And kept at it. Myself I would have clipped the asshole in the face and hope that I'd broken some bones. But a mayor can't do that.

Bravo, Your Honor!

Bravissimo!

Whether the far right wishes to acknowledge it or not, and one can be certain that they don't, the Oakland police department, as well as the Atlanta Police, and the Chicago police department, have lost the moral imperative. This innocuous sounding phrase, this moral imperative, is the central foundation of what Kant called the Categorical Imperative, the ultimate morality, of any culture at any time, any where, as Kant showed in his milestone of philosophical writings, The Critique of Pure Reason, (that's the one where Kant's mentor, the professor who was overseeing the writing of his dissertation, after 2 weeks returned his manuscript, wherein he found on page 16, a red line drawn across the page; and under that was written, "This is as far as I can read. I think I am going insane.")

That one.

(If you have ever skimmed the pages of The Critique Of Pure Reason then you know that Kant dismantles reality, creating his own neo-linguistic argument that existence itself is void of properties. Then he puts it back together again, not merely as it is, but by creating the Categorical Imperative, as it ought to be, if we are to have a civilization at all. Otherwise, we are back to the jungle.)

When you have lost the moral imperative, you have lost the argument, the contest, the battle, the war; everything. That is how Gandhi defeated the British. The Brits finally could not bear to gaze upon their own moral failure; but finally, had to come face to face with the fact that they, the greatest rulers of the most glorious empire since Rome, were morally unfit to rule what they deemed a backward people. At least in their eyes, India was inhabited by a people fit only to serve the Whitehall officers and their wives.

So it is with this moment in History.

The police and the oligarchs with them, have lost the moral imperative. So it appears that the aggressors are the losers not the "unwashed" hippies.

Even if somehow the protesters had stepped over the line of their First Amendment Rights, which guarantees the right to peaceably assemble the cops are still thugs. They used ordnance, weaponry on unarmed citizens. That's as immoral as it gets.

Even if the protesters had stepped over the imaginary line, the police department's violent assault on unarmed citizens transformed the cops work, in a heartbeat, from being protectors of the peace--- to criminal thuggery. No ideology on earth can support such baldfaced thuggery. This is the law of the jungle so well beloved by the Tea Party folks. Of course, the Mad Tea Party people, seem always to be in need of a reflection of their own hatred. So now they have an object to hate: namely, the horribly inconvenient and "unwashed" dissidents who are peacefully gathered to inspire and encourage a change of heart, which would signal an awakening of the Wall Street banksters who have consistently stolen taxpayer money and homes from the poor and middle class.

But this is not new. The cops act with impunity because they know one thing: the media, and the general public will forget it within days. So brutality and murder is easily tolerated in America as long as the perp wears a navy blue uniform and sports a metal badge. Don't believe me? Take a look at the footage of police beating up the unarmed demonstrators of the 1920s and 30s. These were people peacefully protesting the corporate bosses' actions to destroy unions. We see the same thing in an earlier time when Women protested for the right to vote. The media portrayed such women as immoral, subversive and traitorous. They handcuffed and jailed the women. And worse. Some were wounded and some were killed.

In their rebuttal to the unarmed protesters, the OWS people in NYC and across the globe (more than 2000 Occupy camps,) the far right is whining that the oligarchy is being unfairly attacked, demonized by losers who are merely envious of the oligarch's success in accumulating their riches. Whew! That sort of thinking, if you can call it so, is so breathtakingly simplistic, one blushes for them. Such an argument is disingenuous; and smacks of a staggering intellectual dishonesty that begs one to wonder at the dismal level of intelligence of those who spout this sort of drivel. It's as if they did not get it--- that the Bush administration and the eight years of Republican total control of Congress, every move of which was dictated by the corporations and banksters through their lobbyists--- removed protections designed to protect the public from unethical exploitation by corporate interests.

The Republican Party in exercising their ideology, at last unencumbered by federal law, virtually burned the house down. Instead of a country which moved forward as a result, we saw instead the loss of tens of millions of homes to fraudulent foreclosure, banksters who offered triple A rated bundles of liars loans then turned around and bet on the failure of that product, and made billions as the product turned to dust in the hands of their Main Street clients; not to mention the bail out of failed corporations, with taxpayer dollars. And last, but far from least, the trillions of dollars given as a gift to the banks in a benevolent under the table, backroom style by the Federal Reserve. And all of this, ALL OF IT, was done on the backs of the poor.

Corporations privatizing profit and socializing losses. Business as usual in this climate of crony capitalism has become a criminal enterprise. Business as usual must stop.

It is proof positive that crony capitalism does not and can not work with out regular gifts from government; i.e. Main Street. It is a fact that the far right, those who love to quote from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, wherein he promises that the Free Market will bestow happiness on all due to the magic invisible hand which will guide all enterprise surely, that they, not a one of them, have actually read the entire work. After describing the benefits of Free Markets, Smith then warns that it can only work when all citizens are equal. You won't hear that phrase fall from the lips of a far right-winger.

My fondest hope and wish is that the good folks of the Occupy Wall Street movement will not go home until at least the Banksters responsible for the mess in which America now finds itself, go to jail for a long, long, time.

If I were less respectful of the moral imperative, and possessed of a deeply religious nature, as a result of being brought up in the Catholic Church, I would demand that such people be flayed alive and then burnt at the stake.

Unfortunately, this police violence did not begin in a vacuum. Violent reprisals against the OWS people began with the Federal Government. How dare the 99% talk back to their betters? They must be put down, contained. And to this end the Feds offered a $15, 000 grant to police departments around the country which had but one stipulation. Disband and dismantle the movement with violence. But some refused to play patty cake.

The District Attorney in Syracuse, NY, showed himself to be a man, or, as is said in Yiddish, a mensch. (I had a Jewish room mate for years. His mother was a second generation yenta. After six years I spoke Yiddish as fluently as they did.)

Back to our Syracuse DA. Bless him! In a stunning act of absolute integrity, he returned a $15 million dollar grant the Federal government had offered the city. It seems that, very quietly, the Feds are offering that much money in taxpayer dollars to cities where there is an Occupy movement.

There's just one little catch.

The Federal Agency which is so generously spreading this manna throughout America, stipulates that whichever city accepts the money, that city's police department must use violence to dismantle the protesters camps.

This is America today. Right?

Right...?

Oakland corrupt assault on protesters

2011-10-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

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hings are beginning to get out of hand. Police in Oakland dressed to the teeth in riot gear have elected to subdue peaceful protesters. To this end they've made the next move in the overture to the WAR ON AMERICANS.

Interesting to me, is the fact that not all police departments have taken the bait, namely the $15 million grants which the feds have offered to other police departments. But apparently greed got the better of the corrupt Oakland officials.

The one stipulation which went with the grant is that the feds want the police to employ brutality in dealing with their fellow citizens. More than one police department has returned or refused the grant as long as such conditions are attached. One can only applaud such integrity. And condemn the corruption of Oakland.

In other words the fascist feds have come out of the woodwork at last and identified themselves as traitors.

Do they really want us to believe that Bernie Madoff was the only person on Wall Street engaged in fraud?

Just how stupid do they imagine the public is? Well, granted there's an awful lot of cows and sheep out there.

But ultimately we must see to it that no one is above the law. Goldman Sachs is looking mighty like a target ripe for a grand jury.

Where this really began is with the Republican infestation of both the White House and the Congress during the Bush years. But then Obama came to office and, first thing, denied the U.S. Attorney General's office the authority to prosecute Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfy, and so on. He also prevented the CIA torturers from being prosecuted. Sociopaths who were all too eager to torture their fellow man.

Interesting to me, is the fact that not all police departments have taken the bait, namely the $15 million grants which the feds have offered to other police departments. But apparently greed got the better of the corrupt Oakland officials.

The one stipulation which went with the grant is that the feds want the police to employ brutality in dealing with their fellow citizens. More than one police department has returned or refused the grant as long as such conditions are attached. One can only applaud such integrity. And condemn the corruption of Oakland.

In other words the fascist feds have come out of the woodwork at last and identified themselves as traitors.

We can see plainly the cowardice of the police in the above video clip. And cowardice is all it is. It's outrageous that they would wear heavy riot gear and use lethal weaponry on unarmed and peaceful demonstrators. But when the Tea Baggin' Partiers showed up with their loaded guns, that was just fine with the police. No problem.

And to those same police I would leave this word of warning: you messed with the wrong guy when you severely injured an ex-Iraqi G.I. That was not only cruel and craven but it was a tactical error for your side that will have real consequences. You just helped to engage another few million citizens in the cause of the Occupy Wall Street movement. To the officials who ordered this appalling violation of Americans doing their Constitutional imperative: Your days of corruption, bribery, fraud, and masturbatory fantasies of Police State triumph are coming to an end. If not with the Wall Street protests then it will take another less peaceful revolution. And it will be you against your fellow American. And if the police lose, and they will, there will be reprisals. That is guaranteed. You will wish you lived in Russia.

Animal Kingdom, Everything Evolving

2011-10-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

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volution is still going on in nature. Even as absurdly conservative,
actually literalist, Christian Creationists loudly and belligerently proclaim that God created man. And since his imperfect creation, man, the Disobedient Sinner, needed somebody to lord it over, God made animals.

Very considerate of God.

And animals, from the beginning were spoken of as stupid, and since they were stupid, we could kill them and eat them with impunity.

The Native Americans had no such illusions.

They recognized that the animals were sentient beings, and worthy of respect. So they told stories and sang songs illustrating agreements they had made with animals. And they gave the animals human and even super-human qualities. They understood the fox. And how deceptive was the fox. When Fox wanted to be nice he would do that. But sometimes Fox was a deceiver.

Animals, for their part, lived by those agreements, animals like the spirit of the great Buffalo---and pretended to be stupid, and offered themselves as food and clothing for the Native American. The pale face hunter/trader, had no such vision or sensitivity, or even plain old friendliness, for that matter. The white man was and is as cold, cruel and stupid as they imagine the wild beast to be. Because of this egocentric and basically hostile nature of the white man, he lost all meaningful contact with the rest of Mother Earth's population. The result is that animals are ascending the evolutionary scale faster than we homo sapiens are.

In the Jataka Tales, which relate the many previous incarnations of the Buddha as He evolved from animal form to human, to Bodhisattva, and finally, to the Perfectly Enlightened Buddha, there is a story of a tiger standing on the edge of cliff, and down below he sees a starving mother and her children. Out of great Compassion, the tiger throws himself off of the cliff to his death, so that the mother and her babes could eat him.

You don't have to be a Buddhist to understand that, of all the emotions Compassion is the greatest attribute of sentient beings. The old standard translation of the New Testament speaks of it as "love," or "Charity." But if we look closely, we see that that translation has been an ongoing project since the King James was published. When I was a teenager, going regularly to Saint Joseph's Cathedral in Buffalo NY, (needless to say, my parents were Catholic and wanted us kids to grow up as good Roman Catholics.) the priests would ascend the great marble pulpit, and reading from the Gospel, read the phrase as "...Faith Hope and Charity, but the greatest of these is Charity..." The priests were always careful to define Charity as great love, and compassion for one's fellow human. Not necessarily limited to merely handing a bum a dime, nor donating that old sweater to St. Vincent de Paul, but so much bigger, wider in scope. Indeed some of the priests constructed elaborate sermons based on elucidating this quality of "Charity."

Recent translations of this New Testament passage, now use the word Compassion.
Compassion is a word which Republicans scorn. "Bleeding heart," they call it. Well, let's face it. The Bleeding Heart is what Jesus was. And a bleeding heart is what everyone who calls himself Christian must be. Bleeding Heart is a much higher emotion than Conservative Obstructionism. Sacrificing the well being of millions of one's fellow humans in order to destroy one man because you are racist, and just plain don't like the man. And you cannot live with the idea of a man of color being in charge of the Oval Office.

How very far away from the image of this little guy in the video rescuing another of his kind. He certainly won't be given a treat for doing this. This is an act of pure compassion.

Government Fraud Is Exposed...Again

2011-10-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

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There are conservatives, many of whom vote with seriously deficient IQ's, and who hate --- really hate,--- the Occupy Wall Street movement. These tend to be the very same people who thoroughly approved G W Bush's lies about WMD's as a pretext for invading Iraq; and his rendition and torture, despite the fact that the CIA in more than a few instances rendered and imprisoned innocent citizens. All of which makes these deluded people, voters, right wingers, guilty of collusion. Bush and Cheney, were credibly charged with Crimes Against Humanity.

In this video, Joshua Blakeney eloquently discusses some of the injustices which occur whenever any member of the plutocracy is found guilty of crime regardless of how heinous. The media immediately goes into blackout mode: "Huh, I don't know nuthin' Dude," the editors and publishers say. "And don't you believe nuthin' that you read on the Internet! We of the mainstream are the only real and reliable source of news and information. Trust us."

Right.

Un huh.

The other thing that occurs with remarkable alacrity is that police arrest and detain anyone who attempts to obtain real justice. For example, a man by the name of Splitting the Sky, (STS,) a Native American, upon the advice of expert lawyers attempted to make a citizen's arrest of George W Bush when he was in Calgary. But instead, the Calgary police in an ironic twist, wrongfully arrested STS. George W of course smiling his idiotic grin as he simply side stepped STS and the police moved in.■

Occupy Salem Oregon

2011-10-18T17:24:00.001-07:00

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esterday, in the late afternoon, we stopped by Willson Park adjacent to the Capitol building of the state of Oregon, where the Occupy Salem people are camped. We dropped off some coolers as they do have a tent for a food center but don't have refrigeration. Or water. The coolers were greeted with thanks. People were very friendly and we were offered a tour:

First the publicity and media communication tent. Then the medical. Then the communication tent where they've established contact with other Occupy cities not only in America.

Our guide, an easy going and voluble man with long graying hair, showed us around and brought us up to speed, telling us that Governor Kitzhaber was not being cooperative with the group. Even though Kitz is a liberal. I found this news a hard to take betrayal. I voted for the man and cheered when he won. But on second thought it is just another nail in the coffin of liberalism.

"Did you know," he said. As he spoke he waved his hand in the direction of about 20 tents of different colors and sizes; housing for committed people who were there for the long haul. "There are 1700 cities, in America alone, who are doing this. We are expecting to be joined by a delegation from Occupy Portland this very evening."

A tall, handsome young man came up to us. He turned out to be part of the medical team. "You probably won't be reading in the main stream media about what I am about to tell you," he said. "In Iraq," he said, "a huge group of American soldiers have taken a park in downtown Falugia. They are calling themselves Occupy Falugia. And they are refusing to carry out their missions. The command has tried to arrest them--- but had to give up. How do you arrest a hundred thousand armed soldiers?

We got to the big board which spells out the groups intentions. Prominent in the list is the label, Spirituality--- and next to it our pastor's name, Rick Davis, was displayed.

Improbable Coincidence Control (ICC) suddenly went into operation and as we spoke his name 3 times, exclaiming that we, and therefore, Rick, are Unitarian-Universalists, here came Rick strolling into view. As he approached Rick announced that he was organizing all the leaders of the entire religious community of Salem to take part there. Rick embraced Marian and then turned to me and opened his arms to hug me.

It seemed an auspicious meeting.

♠

Our tour guide, a sympatico sort of man, the sort of person you would hope to encounter in such a place, at such a time, introduced himself, when Marian and I arrived earlier, with the name of Sarah.

I'd felt it discourteous to ask him to spell it--- so on my mental blackboard I envisioned his name being spelled "Serra" or some such.

Rick was under no such apprehension. "Spell it." Rick said.

"S," Sarah said.

That was fine.

I was fine with "S."

And then he went on. "a-r-a-h."

Uh-oh!

The feminine spelling. And yet there was nothing feminine about the fellow. Grey hair, shoulder length, well trimmed beard, wire frame glasses, plaid shirt, worn jeans --- you know--- the usual aging hippie.

"Sarah," Sarah said, "was Jesus sister."

Oh!

Either it was the work of hippie parents or else it was his own hippie affectation. Nevertheless, Sarah was a most accomodating fellow. He took us to the wonderful huge Douglas Fir tree, very near the white marble Capitol, which grows in the center of a deep, luxurious carpet of faded evergreen needles.

Lovely spot for a service.

Peaceful.

Rick and Sarah went on and I turned back to Marian and the car, as I had reached my limit for walking. Even though my heart surgery was a full 7 months ago, I still am not yet back up to full speed and endurance. As we backed the Volvo away from the curb we saw them in the distance--- Rick hugging most everyone he met.

We drove over to the Salem Film Festival. Caught the second showing of the festival film, The Truth Is Out There. One of the film's interviews was with a Dr. Monteith, who was full of deep, dark, hidden truths about America. He came right out and said that the artificial sweetener aspartame is poisonous and causes cancer; and that the placing of so much of it out there is not for profit merely but also that it is a large part of the power elite's plan to murder a very large portion of the population because the elite are angry and fearful that common folk will consume all of their natural resources. The gloomy interview with Dr. Monteith wound up with him saying that if America doesn't awaken--- and very soon--- it will be too late. And all Freedom and Democracy will be lost forever. I flashed on the Occupy Salem camp and thanked the Universe for what appears to be a true awakening.

But after we finished a lite supper of spare ribs, fries and a cold pounder of micro-brewed Hefeveisen beer, we decided to swing by the camp on the way home. I was disheartened to see that all the housing tents were gone, and only two structures remained. One was the Food Center. The other was the media communication center, which, as we pulled up was being removed by we don't know who.◘

2011-10-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

Howard Zinn On Revolution

2011-10-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

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here is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win…. Note how often...we have been surprised. By the sudden emergence of a people's movement, the sudden overthrow of a tyranny, the sudden coming to life of a flame we thought extinguished. We are surprised because we have not taken notice of the quiet simmerings of indignation, of the first faint sounds of protest, of the scattered signs of resistance that, in the midst of our despair, portend the excitement of change. The isolated acts begin to join, the individual thrusts blend into organized actions, and one day, often when the situation seems most hopeless, there bursts onto the scene a movement.

– Howard Zinn

We Are What We've Been Waiting For

2011-10-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

ich Lowry is so unhappy about the grass roots uprising Occupy Wall Street he could only spit out such unmemorable rhetoric as pathetic, and other aspersions which, of course, merely indicate his own profound anger and disappointment that he finds himself once again of the wrong side of truth. Then too there is the other bitter pill he must swallow: namely that the Koch brothers are not funding this real grass roots uprising as opposed to the billionaires' astro turf. Occupy Wall Street as it spreads across the country, with far more energy than the the Tea-Baggers, constitute an intelligent answer to the vastly ignorant Tea Baggers. We know what we are talking about.

They loved Sarah Palin because, in the words of one Tea-baggin' lady, "She will give us freedom!"

Right. Next.

There is so much to say about this phenomenon of American Uprising, (which actually began in Wisconsin;) and pathetic and the like, are not words which will adequately describe it. Lowry seems most pissed off that the whole episode of resistance of average Americans to the criminality of Wall Street and banksters, and the appalling fact that the Department of Justice has done nothing to indict, and punish these creeps for their mendacity and craven exploitation of the American 99%. Poor Rich.

We are The People; our moment has come. The evil Republicans and I use the word after long consideration, have become inhuman in their heartlessness, their lack of compassion and their bold mindset of maintaining their fast crumbling illusion at all costs.

Joe Klein in Time Magazine the other day, quotes a woman--- Esmerelda something something, whose quick answer to his question, Why are you a Republican went like this: "Because we believe in independence. We don't believe in Social Security, state run health care, welfare, and unemployment insurance. We make it on our own." That seemed like a good answer as far as Joe Klein was concerned.

But for me, not so much.

Esmerelda Lipschitz or whatever her name, seems to be one of those Republicans who seem organically incapable of remembering that the richest of rich corporations, historically in the 20th Century, have run to Congress for a quick couple of billion anytime their bonuses start scraping down in the single digit millions. And Congress for its part is more than delighted to fork over as much as they can get away with.

We call that Corporate Welfare.

So Esmerelda prefers Corporate Welfare to really helping people who actually need it.

"Plenty for us," goes Esmerelda's mindset, "None for you." Esmerelda loves privatism of everything on earth, and she just hates everything about socialism--- except, once again, where her sacred corporations are concerned.

And a correlary of that short-sighted view is corporations get to privatize profit and socialize losses. In other words, Esmeralda's fantasy, if it were to be actualized, amounts to the Law of the Jungle. As if civilization had never existed.

And here comes Elizabeth Warrens very astute argument which snags Republicanism before it gets out of the gate. Nobody, ever got rich on their own. They love to claim that is what happened but NO, the roads which take their product to market are paid by us, the 99%. The education of the labor force which made their product was paid for by us. And so on.

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Whatever happens, whether Obama gets back into office or not, it doesn't matter, the fact is that as far as real Americans are concerned, the Republicans might as well pack up and go home. They now have as much chance of re-gaining the White House or the House of Representatives not to mention the Senate as a pig has of flying.

The GOP's Un-American Toxic Agenda

2011-09-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

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aul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, in his column, took Eric Cantor to task today. The thing about Krugman which has always struck me as fascinating, is that Krugman has usually been right on the money with his political and economic forecasts. In fact, I'd go so far as to say Krugman averages better than your local TV weather guy. One very important point Krugman pointed out about Cantor is his hypocrisy, saying that Cantor once voted against a bill designed to cut funding for disaster relief and now he is the snake-in-the-woodpile of the GOP's latest attack on vulnerable Americans. Surely nobody has missed the brutal and uncivilized GOP tactic; the pattern which now comprises a large portion of their agenda: taking poor Americans hostage whenever they want their way.

Shooting down Eric Cantor is a very sensible thing to do; but much as I love and admire Krugman, I think he misses the real point here. What has not been said loud enough of the GOP's current exercises in criminal thuggery is that the vileness which they show to the world is not even a hint of the evil which lies hidden by their deliberate muddying of the waters of American politics.

The good people of America, those who love truth, justice and the common good, as all or at least most of the intelligent do, will never bow to the vulgarity and the irresponsible heartlessness, indeed, the twisted mindset of the conservative right wingers. There are of course always the deviants and degenerates like the Koch brothers, the billionaire funders of the Tea Party, generous hosts to the wayward members of the Supreme Court, declared enemies of the Obama administration, not to mention proud sponsors of the much PBS programming. Unhappily the brothers are not alone. There are numerous behind the scenes, absurdly wealthy conservatives, and among them many religious fanatics who work unceasingly to disrupt this country's way of life to bring it to the Bible. They work to supplant the humanism of the US Constitution with their own version of American Theocracy.

May they all drop dead!

But enough backstory; on to the real evil. The hidden design is to disrupt and bring the Federal government into such an uproar of chaos and corruption, that the American people will eventually come to hate the government. When the American public comes to hate everything which speaks of a Central Government, the Anti-American forces of the GOP will have won their final victory.

Please note that I speak of the current crop of Republican and Tea party political leadership. The old guard Republicans, from the Eisenhower era are principled, compassionate lovers of truth and justice. They hate what their once proud party has become.

I really cannot say it better than the author of the essay "Goodbye To All That" in which he tells us that he was, for most of his life, a loyal conservative Republican. But now the grand old party of Lincoln, has become so over run with unsavory types like Bachman, Perry, Gingrich--- to name just a few, that he can no longer stay.
I quote:

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

Therefore, it is time to loudly call out the Anti-American forces among us. And that would be the corporate wealthy and their minions, the corrupt GOP of the decades since Reagan. ♦

Bertrand Russell On Libs and Cons

2011-08-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

he fundamental difference between the liberal and the illiberal outlook is that the former regards all questions as open to discussion and all opinions as open to a greater or lesser measure of doubt, while the latter holds in advance that certain opinions are absolutely unquestionable, and that no argument against them must be allowed be heard.

What is curious about this position is the belief that if impartial investigation were permitted it would lead men to the wrong conclusion, and that ignorance is, therfore, the only safeguard against terror. This point of view cannot be accepted by any man who wishes reason rather than prejudice to govern human action.

Isn't it wonderful how like a cool breeze in August is a bit of clear reason. Thank you Bertie for that. And there we have it. In just a few short sentences Russell has defined the difference between the two most prevalent modes of thought, really though, the two modes of perceiving the world we live in. Odd that so many Americans simply are unable to wrap their minds around truth. Preferring instead to hide their heads in the barrage of outrageous lies known as FOX NEWS.

Free Speech Re-Visited

2011-06-23T00:06:00.000-07:00

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ugene Debs, the great humanitarian and socialist, made a speech to an audience of factory workers in their Union Hall. It was this speech, (which you will find below,) delivered in Ohio, in the year 1918, the American Midwest, heart of the Land of the Free was interrupted by the marauding police who had no business being there, never-mind arresting a man for making a speech. Never-mind that the speech pointed out the history of the exploitation of the poor working class by the rich. First with the nobles, the aristocracy, and then by the wealthy corporations. And he was imprisoned for it.

The Supreme Court sentenced Eugene Debs to 10 years in the state penitentiary, as if he were a criminal; and no parole or time off for good behavior.

So much for the Constitutional guarantees and protections of Free Speech in America.

Do not speak to me of Free Speech in America.

Debs mentioned how, in the Middle Ages, the land owning lords declared war on one another and sent the poor serfs to fight their battles. And to die for their precious land owning lord. Nowadays, in this more enlightened age, the self-anointed Lords of the Universe, in their corner offices on Wall Street, declare war on distant countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, as well as the tax payers of Main Street, and send off the working class to fight their battles for them.

No, the Corporations of 1918 did not want their workers' ears to be abused with speeches which exposed the truth about how they were exploited by the rich industrialists in the never ending class war. As far back as the early 19th Century, as Thomas Jefferson left the White House he wrote that no standing army was as dangerous to American Liberty as the banks and corporations." Precious little has changed since then.

And now we have a Supreme Court which last year defined large amounts of money as Free Speech, to my way of thinking, a corrupt decision if ever there was one. The entire reason for the existence of the Supreme Court of the United States in the first place, was to create a non-partisan system of American justice which would protect the rights and liberties of the little guy. But now the SCOTUS has closed ranks on the little guy and for several decades has ruled in favor of the large corporation. And now, just last week, the highest Court handed down a decision, with, of course, the usual 5 to 4 vote, since the Roberts' Court Gang of Five always votes as a block; the decision is now being called Too Big To Sue and it certainly sets a precedent. Walmart, you see, has been consistent over the years in its' abuse of women in the workplace and finally a class case arrived in the Supreme Court. Needless to say the corrupt Supremes, namely, Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy sided with the giant corporation against the wronged employees.

Here is the distinguished actor and activist, Mark Ruffalo, reading Eugene Debs' immortal speech.

And while we're at it, might as well listen to Debs' short but powerful words to the corrupt court as he was being sentenced.

Closing The Borders

2011-03-14T02:40:00.000-07:00

n her book, Naomi Wolf predicted that the next step in the coup d'etat by the oligarchic corporations in their agenda for a Fascist dominated country, with a brutal dictatorship, would be the closing of the borders. The harassment of would-be travelers by way of humiliating body scanners and invasive pat downs is accomplishing just that. Unfortunately the American people seem not the least bit inconvenienced by what would have been unimaginable in the time of JFK.

And by the way, if you don't think that the illegal moves of the Republican Legislature and Governor Walker, himself, in attempting to pass a grossly unpopular piece of legislation which destroys civil rights of workers in this country was a demonstration of how fascism works, you'd better think again. You are watching it unfold. Unless of course, your local newspaper and TV news programs have been burying such stories of the back pages as the Republican owned papers in my neighborhood have been doing.

Republicanism is now more dangerous to America than the communist threat during the 1950's. Far more dangerous. These people actually do mean to take over this country. No matter what the majority of Americans want. The People Be Damned, is their motto!

And step number 8, will be requiring all citizens to have an ID chip implanted in their bodies. This process has already begun. The National ID is a significant part of the plan. Fortunately a few states have refused to participate in this subversive agenda by the banksters.

Koch Brothers Disinformation Campaign

2011-02-27T01:53:00.000-08:00

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omebody came up with a really good idea regarding foreign jobs and imports. Why not tax, at the point of purchase, all imported goods and especially from China. That would slow down imports and Wal-Mart shoppers. Which is just fine with me. I do my best to make sure that I don't buy anything made outside of this country. But it is very difficult. Everything seems to be made somewhere else.

What I started out to write about though, is the appalling situation in Wisconsin. Governor Walker is so very obviously one of the Koch brother's minions. And the Wisconsin State House Republicans yesterday voted unanimously to pass the worst and most treasonous anti-worker bill in US history. And the people who have protested are right. But the Koch brothers have begun a campaign of disinformation supporting Walker. After all, it was the Koch brothers' money that put a sleaze bag like Walker into office in the first place.

This video is the Koch brothers response to the Americans who rallied throughout America today. It is nothing but a pack of lies. Pure garbage. I show it here to give an idea of how low these conservatives will sink and how earnest they are about taking over America.

Wisconsin Legislature's Shameful Vote

2011-02-26T17:38:00.000-08:00

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hat has the Republican Party come to?

If you listen to John Boner he consistently insists that he speaks on behalf of the American People. Well, I can show you quite a few Americans he does not speak for. In fact there are about 70,000,000 people he does not speak for.

In reality the majority of Americans will vote for Truth, Justice, fairness, in other words, progressive, given half a chance.

The GOP is the party which supports pirates, liars, cheats, tyrants, and most forms of evil.

Now the Republican state Legislators of Wisconsin have rammed the obnoxious bill through, which strips government employees from ever engaging in collective bargaining, despite the fact that the people have spoken loud and clear all across America.

Americans say "No! No! and No!" and the Republican Party responds saying, "I hear "Yes!" And if they didn't say "Yes," then fuck them! They just want to be fucked over--- again! I just love it when people say "Tell us what to think." And in truth, conservatives are people who cannot stand it when anyone does not think the exact same way they do. So they are driven to get into office and rule in such a way that they can impose their ideology on everyone. And that is a real clue to the conservative personality. They love to march in lockstep. And feel threatened when everyone is not in lockstep with them.

Is that not what properly is called, Tyranny?

And, of course, what happens then, is that they then turn around and accuse liberals of being the ones who feel the need to impose their ideology on everyone. In the same way, Rush Limbaugh has this little foible which allows him to throw anything back that anyone says, that he doesn't like. If a liberal, or even a conservative, for that matter, says "Rush, you are a fascist," Rush just says, "No, you're the fascist!" I don't know whether that is a trick he likes to pull or whether he sincerely cannot see the Truth of the matter. Namely, that he and most other Republicans and conservatives are big, fat, Fascists.

The video below shows the scandalous behavior of the Republican legislators in session. They shout their vote, "Yea!" to pass the criminal bill which violates the rights of every working person in this country, before the speaker has finished his sentence. This, despite the fact that the Capitol building is filled with thousands of people who have been occupying the building for 5 days in protest. That is what John Boehner means when he says says he speaks for the American People.

And ultimately, what is this bill about? In one sentence: it is about destroying the unions. And what is the main reason the Republicans want to crush the unions? So that the corporations can complete their coup d'etat of the United States government. I wonder why these corporations are not hauled into court and tried for treason.

This is, as Norman Goldman says, repeatedly: "All out Class Warfare." And it has been going on for about 30 years. Oh, wait! That coincides with the Reagan years, doesn't it?

And why do the Republicans want to control the federal government? Simple:: Social Security has about $40,000,000,000,000 in its funds. That's 40 Trillion dollars. And the Wall Street Banksters want that money! And they want it bad!! So one of the first things that will happen when the Fascist corporations complete the traitorous treasonous take over of the Federal Government will be to privatize Social Security. The American people have just seen what happens when Wall Street is allowed to play without federal regulation. In a word, the RUIN of everything!

On Wisconsin's Much Needed Uproar

2011-02-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

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overnor Walker, of Wisconsin, is, you guessed it, a Republican. And like a true extremist Republican he believes that the rich are too exalted, too holy, to pay taxes and the poor should work without a voice, or needs, wants, rights, or unions, and be smiling from ear to ear that somebody is willing to pay them a dollar for a day's work AND then pay the lion's share of taxes that pay his and his cronies' in the Legislature their salaries. Appallingly plutocentric as that view may be, it certainly is consonant with the ideologies of the International Bankster pirates, not to mention the Congressional Republican leadership in DC.

But Walker probably did not count on the fact that the people of Wisconsin might rise in protest. And not just a little bit of a whimper either; this was and is a popular protest such as has not been seen in many a decade in this country. So the workers just won't sit still for a kick in the head--- in addition to the many kicks in the groin from the Repukes.

Well, isn't that enough to make a Rothschild swoon into a heap!

But really, my thought is that they might give up too soon and give up too much, before the cavalry arrives to kill a few workers, "...to send a message..." as is said. Just as in Bahrain the police have actually killed about four or five so far.
So where are all the other liberal protesters in the other states?

War On Terror Is A Fraud

2011-02-08T02:35:00.000-08:00

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ew evidence and eyewitnesses who were on the plane Christmas Day, 2009, with Umar Farouk Abdul Mutalab, better known as the Underwear Bomber, are beginning to shred the credibility of the US government's case in the so-called War On Terror.

The truth is right in front of our eyes.

Why do we not protest in the streets like the Egyptians and the Tunisians. Every time a new development emerges, from the Underwear Bomber guy to the Times Square Bomber and the Portland, Oregon, Christmas terrorist, who, it turns out, was developed and encouraged by the CIA, in a messy entrapment and sting event.

Why?

Or perhaps a better question might be--- why is it that somehow these events always seems to begin to stink of fraud? Put up jobs. We have all seen enough movies that we have, at least an idea of how these propagandistic staged events work from the inside. The Underwear Bomber event had a real purpose beyond the obvious. It gave the government an excuse to clamp down on American travelers at the airports. It cried out for scanners and invasive pat downs and whatever forms of harassment the "security people" could come up with. And the sale of the scanners made one Michael Chertoff, a wealthy man.

Fortunately, the eye witnesses, who happened to be on the plane that day, were also flying home from Amsterdam, are lawyers with sharp eyes and skeptical, but logical, turns of mind. They witnessed some strange goings on at the Amsterdam Airport and then later on board the things got very strange. And the two lawyers put two and two together.

John Perkins Why We're At War

2011-01-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

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ohn Perkins is the author of Several books which lay bare the harsh realities of contemporary Global Economics. The first book which hit America hard, was Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins tells how he got into being a an Economic Hit Man, and the appalling damage he helped to create. He walked into the offices of Latin-American presidents and threatened them with death if they refused to play ball with the American "Corporatocracy." Many capitulated. Some did not. And those who refused to play with the corporations were assassinated within months of the office visit, by what Perkins tells us are called the Jackals.

Somewhere along the way, Perkins had a change of heart and turned against the Corporatocracy. Now he writes of his experiences as an Economic Hit Man; exposing the cynical and exploitative activities of the wealthy corporations, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which are, more than any other thing, corporate tools of expedience. Perkins describes a typical office visit as one in which he walks in and in the most pleasant and civilized tones lets it be known that all the president of this country, or that, need do, is accept a loan of hundreds of millions of dollars from the World Bank, or the IMF, and all will be well. What he does not explain, is that the lion's share of the money will go to the oil corporations as they dig and exploit the natural resources of the country; so it is the oil companies, Halliburton, Bechtel, BP, CitiBank, Bank of America, all of the biggies who then will descend upon the country like a plague, and nothing can be done to stop them because the interest is so huge that it can't be paid off ever. And that is just fine with World Bank and IMF, because they have done their job of opening the country up like an oyster. And if the president does not graciously accept this immense sum on behalf of his country, or, on behalf of himself and his family if he wishes, and is just a little more corrupt than most, then he can rest assured that within several months he will no longer be among the living.

Perkins speaks to college students and Peace activists, doing his best to light a fire under people in this country to change the situation before it's too late. This is the context in which I first encountered John Perkins. As the local University opens its doors to the townies, though this was not a student sponsored event; but was a presentation of Peaceworks, a local grassroots organization of peace activists. We bought several of his books and presented them to him afterwards for his autograph, an activity by which we've accumulated a library of books signed by their authors. He signed our books. What he wrote on the flyleaf was "To Bill, this is your time. Don't waste it! John Perkins"

These videos document a speech he delivered to the National Convention of Veterens For Peace. These are long documentaries comparatively, but so important.

Rethinking Afghanistan

2011-01-18T02:40:00.000-08:00

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oes anybody really understand why America is still, after an exhausting 9 years, fighting in Afghanistan? I'm just saying. Supposedly, the armed forces are taking out the Al Quaida terrorists who are being harbored there. But according to the latest intelligence there are no more than 100 members of that organization left in Afghanistan. Anybody see the logic of spending billions each year on armaments, troops and innocent people's lives?

Anybody?

Because I do not!

If the reasons given for the occupation of Afghanistan are actually the reasons why we are there, then the only logical action is to clear out tomorrow. But President Obama continues to fabricate insubstantial reasons. His latest defense of the war there contains no factual information. It is all a big, useless exercise in Moonbeaming. And in fact, this places the Afghanistan War in the same league with Viet Nam and Iraq. Fake wars whose only real purpose was to enrich a few war-profiteers. Considering that the latest polls show that more than 60% of the American public now want this war over with! Done! Finished! Ended!

Take a look at some very smart people in this video, discussing this very issue. Robert Greenwald and Thom
Hartman. When these guys speak truth they will make you so angry that by the end you'll want to go out and pass out flyers for Peace in the Middle East.♦

Replacing Repealed Health Care With...?

2011-01-14T16:49:00.000-08:00

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irst of all, the Republicans are really serious about doing as much damage as they can get away with; and first on the list is getting rid of Health Care Reform. This may well turn out to be a serious error in strategy.

How so?

As most good sales people know, if you want to motivate someone to buy something, first you put the product in front of them. Let them get comfortable with it. Then take it away. Suddenly they will feel a big empty void And voilá! Another fine product sold. In the same way, the debate over health care reform was long and bitter; and when it passed, there was a finality to it. We were into a new and more civilized era. So, if the Republicans actually do remove it there just might be a big reaction across the nation that the newly arrived Republican Congress is not looking for.

So efforts to repeal may be a blessing in disguise. Follow that with the cutting of Social Security and the Republican Party can kiss the White House goodbye in 2012.

But Americans are starting to fight back. It becomes apparent that the GOP is not merely the party of NO, it is now the party of We Hate Americans But We Really Hate Seniors. So Alan Grayson's summary of the Republican outlook regarding health care was dead on:

"Republicans to seniors: Hurry up and die!"

And they send Sarah Palin out to scream "Death Panels! Death Panels!" to throw the Tea Baggers off the track; and maybe even convince a few morons that the Republican leadership's hearts are in the right place. But now that the dust has settled, we see plainly that they never had hearts to begin with, and their motives are projected onto the horizon in stark relief. So, regarding health care, Republican Congressmen from Boner to McConnell, to Simpson, Rush Limbaugh, et al, they want everything for themselves and nothing for you. Well, at least that gives them get high marks for consistency.

They are claiming that they have a mandate from the American people to repeal, but they're just whistling in the dark on that score. The American people are so against the Republican repeal of the very imperfect health care bill, by a factor of at least 65%, it is difficult to understand where they would get the nerve, or the stupidity to make such an error in strategy. Here is what happened recently, at one Town Hall Meeting.

But then too, today, Paul Krugman reminded everyone that the Health Care Insurance bill which finally got passed was the very bill which the Republicans themselves came up with back in the '90s. The madness which is inherent in the words and actions of the current batch of Congressional Republicans is not merely inconsistent and hypocritical, it is downright stupid and against the Common Good. So what else is new?

Right Wing Hatred

2011-01-13T16:01:00.000-08:00

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Of course the Republicans are going to deny any and all accusations that their violent rhetoric and imagery were responsible for the tragic shooting in Tucson last Saturday. Wouldn't you? Especially if you knew you were guilty as Hell. But--- as has been pointed out with numbing frequency,--- the right has no honor. George Orwell knew what conservatives were, way back in the day: pigs. A pig doesn't willingly share and always wants more. Conservatives are people without conscience. Probably that is why they insist on giving themselves awards all the time. Big, obscene looking, gold awards. Which is most likely why Lauren Valle, the woman who tried to give a mock award to Rand Paul, at one of his rallies, was beaten to the ground and held immobile by RP volunteers until Paul's campaign coordinator, Tim Profitt, arrived and first, stepped on her shoulder, and then on her head and face.

Please tell me when a liberal ever intentionally stepped on a conservative's face.

But then too, we forget that conservatives are authoritarians. Authoritarians can't help themselves from hating anyone who does not kowtow to authority. That is to say, anyone who disagrees with conservative ideas. And their particular conservative ideas. It is simply a feature of the personality structure of authoritarians.

Hatred is what conservatives eat for breakfast. Asking a conservative authoritarian to stop the hatred is tantamount to asking them to cut off their arms and legs.

Back to Rand Paul and his campaign coordinator, Tim Profitt. Even though Profitt was banned from further contact with the Paul campaign, his statement to the media was memorable, if only for its stunning lack of remorse. Profitt told the reporter that he felt the he deserved an apology from the woman whose face he crushed with his boot when she was being held down by other volunteers. So obviously despicable was the act that one of the rally bystanders shouted out, "Hey, hey, none of that! Stop that."

"I'm sorry that it came to that," Proffit said in his statement to the media. "And I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand's safety." For a Tea-Bagger that is probably as apologetic as it gets.

She was taken to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder and a concussion.

But Profitt was not through. As a Tea-Bagger he had still more atrocious behavior yet to reveal.

"I don't think of it as that big of a deal." Profitt said. "I would like her to apologize to me to be honest with you."

Tim Profitt, campaign coordinator and racist Tea-Partier Rand Paul

Doesn't that just sound like the sort of thing you would expect a Rand Paul supporter to say? And it took Rand Paul quite a long time to make any kind of a statement regarding the disgraceful event. And when he finally did say something he said how difficult crowd control was. He referred to the event as an "altercation." An altercation is when two motorists shout out the window at each other in traffic.

Sounds like Profitt is one of the the worst of the baddies in a Hollywood action thriller. One of those comic book one-dimensional villains. Only the unredeemably rotten-to-the-core conservatives twist reality so insanely that they insist that they are the ones who have been wronged.

Remember Clarence Thomas' "Uppity nigger" speech to Congress in which he portrayed himself as an unfairly accused victim of racism. And the GOP turned a blind eye on the fact that that the evidence against Thomas as a sexual predator was overwhelming. Bottom line: It worked.

This is precisely the tactic of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, in denying responsibility for the Arizona shooting.♦

Sarah Palin and Republicans Deny Connection to Az Shooting

2011-01-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

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emocratic Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head earlier today in Arizona, and six other innocent bystanders were killed by the same gunman, including a Federal judge. In all, the final tally was 20 people, six deaths and 14 others wounded in various degrees. Jared Lee Loughner, is the killer's name. So many incidents of violence by yet more unhinged conservatives.

This is an event of huge proportions.

All the more so since it was originally Sarah Palin who "targeted" Gifford by name as well as by district in her map in which she targeted 20 Democrats in crosshairs.

This, no doubt will injure Palin in her quest for more and more power. She already has the undying support and adulation of the lunatic fringe. But more importantly, there has been no word at all, from the right wing Republican leadership.

Notice that Whoopi Goldberg makes a very important observation in this video. "For all the talking heads, if any violence comes out of this, it will be on your hands." She did not mention Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, all of whom use militaristic war terms in their ever increasing violence laden rhetoric. At a rally last spring, Glenn Beck called upon his disciples for all liberals to be removed, destroyed, eliminated. O'Reilly has denied several times that he has any responsibility, especially in the shooting deaths not only of a much loved doctor who gave his time pro-bono to help women who needed abortions, but also the man who entered a church in Tennessee, a congregation of Unitarian Universalists in the sanctuary of the church during the service.

What is now very clear, is that the right wing rhetoric of hatred and violence must stop. Human decency demands it. Yet the talking heads at Fox News have almost talked themselves out of any and all responsibility for these many tragic events.

This catastrophe marks the end of access. Public access to celebrities and politicians. No more Congress On Your Corner appearances at the local Safeway or Mall. Security at Red Carpet events will have to be increased ten-fold.

Most people by now have seen the third video--- of the Americans for Prosperity Rally where the protesters, ultra-conservatives all, display disgraceful behavior toward a handicapped man. But some have not seen it. This is the sort of thing which must be stopped. The Koch brothers are the big moneyed, unseen hands, funding this entire rally and The AFP astro-turf organization.

Fascinating to see the right wingers go into overdrive to spin this thing away from themselves. Kinda like a man who sneaks a silent but toxic fart in a crowded elevator and then purses his lips and wrinkles his brow at an innocent little old lady next to him, so as to make everyone think it was her that did the terrible deed. That's the GOP congressional leadership burning rubber, spinning their wheels, to disavow any responsibility for this unspeakable tragedy. But this time they can't get away with it.

Not so far in the past, Bill O'Reilly brazenly denied any responsibility for the murder of Doctor George Tiller, the deeply compassionate abortion doctor, despite the fact that for months Billo had been using violent imagery while demanding retribution from his TV audience to punish the good doctor.

"Baby Killer" is how O'Reilly referred to Doctor Tiller. Tiller risked his reputation and his life due to the cranks on the right. He was willing to do what very few doctors do: handle late stage abortions. But somebody has to do it. He was a very brave and compassionate man.

Glenn Beck called on his Tea Party disciples to get rid of the dangerous liberals. "All liberals must be eliminated," Beck said.

Sarah Palin has denied any responsibility and even went so far as to deny that her infamous map with trigger cross hairs targeting 20 Dems who voted for the health care reform bill, were actually the cross hairs of a gun. What she said at the time, was, "Don't retreat. Reload." No, those weren't gun cross hairs.

Then what were they? Elvish runes?

The Truth is out there staring us all in the face, and there's no way the right can spin it away from themselves and still maintain a shred of intellectual honesty or just plain human decency. But then the right has never really cared much about such things as intellectual honesty and human decency. Just as they always do--- they leave turds floating in the public pool and then try to claim the left made them do it. Whenever they get caught they cry "it's really the fault of the liberals!"

ROTFLMAO

They must think the whole world is way stupid and that they, the usual GOP talking heads, sound really convincing. But this time they don't. Not convincing at all. I have little doubt that the GOP wordsmith, Frank Luntz, the guy who has come up with so many negative spins, such as Obama-care, and Job killing, and tax-relief is holed up in a hotel room somewhere in downtown DC, working his pencil to a nub trying to spin the Republican Party's way out of this mess. But so far, the right presents a picture of drowning men grasping at straws. The GOP just doesn't have the moxie to own their own shit.

The Republican Takeover and Repealing Health Care Reform

2011-01-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

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n the day that Republican Leadership in DC renounces their own lavish health insurance benefit program is the very day I will be happy to listen to legitimate arguments about why it's necessary to repeal the lame, watered-down, verging on piss-poor, lobbyist dictated program afforded to the people of America, which, by the way, contain less than half the benefits of people throughout the rest of the world. Not to mention the fact that, more than 70% percent of Americans, left and right, are strongly against any tampering with the health care reform bill as it is. Hey, the bill Congress finally did pass at least leaves the insurance companies still standing. That is a lot more than I would have done were I to rule the world for even half an hour.

It is simply immoral and unethical to rip big profits off of anybodies' health. Yeah, that's right, to reap obscene profit and bonuses from health care for the working class is just that---an obscenity! Not only do Americans, in general, oppose this proposed repeal but so do more than 90% of the medical community.

Here is where the Republicans have got it all wrong: 3% of Americans say that the deficit should be paid for by eliminating Social Security. 4% percent say Medicare is the problem. But 61% of Americans say we must raise the taxes on the rich. That's an awfully big gap, there. And just why is it that the Repukes insist on this extension of the tax cut for the richest Americans anyway? We know that they are little more than lackeys for rich corporations. But most of the rich are fair minded people who say they would not mind paying more in taxes. Something does not add up!

We have seen too much damage to America brought about entirely by health insurance companies trading on Wall Street promising to pump out profits for investors. Capitalism is antithetical to Christianity. For all practical purposes, the GOP is the party, not merely of NO, but the party of the true Anti-Christ!

Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and all the lobbyists on K Street, can suck my cock!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Common Good

2011-01-05T00:52:00.000-08:00

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he phrase, the common good, is everywhere these days. My wife brought home a container of eggnog and on the side, in the self-promotion copy, there it is: even the dairy farmers are using ringing phrases such as The Common Good. The commercial use of the phrase took me aback. True the dairy farm is an organic farm. The use of the word Organic is certainly code for liberalism. A liberal farmer is almost a contradiction of terms. The usual farmer is one who feels that paying taxes is a form of socialism or communism, and those who believe in that stuff are thieves who are trying to pilfer money from the farmers pocket.

But now, this commercial use of the phrase opens the door for corporations to use the phrase which we have taken as our shibboleth for liberalism. But if John Boehner can claim that he speaks on behalf of the American people, and it is a stretch to think that this might have even a grain of truth, I worry that banks can claim that they too, are working for the Common Good, even though it is all too apparent that the banksters are working for their own individual self-interest and to that end feel entirely free to be the ones who are actually lifting the farmer's wallet. Come to think of it, Fox News has made such an issue of this Common Good thing that no right winger would ever use it for any reason.

If you think that my statement about the thievery of banks is too un-generous, consider that the farmers of North Dakota formed their own state bank. Why? Because the banks were too aggressively giving the farmers a raw deal over too long a time. Check it out. Banks will steal anything not nailed down.

I first came to be introduced to the phrase one night at dinner at a restaurant, on a recent visit to Rome, Italy with 2 Jesuits. Quite liberal Jesuits, at that. Obama had just been elected. Europeans were giving us, my wife, Marian and me, thumbs up, because they loved the idea of Obama as president. We all were euphoric. My brother, Jim, the other Jesuit, got us settled in our rooms in the 17th Century pallazzo Papal owned Jesuit residence. Then he and his fellow, Jesuit, David, took us out for dinner at one of those sublime little bistros just around the corner, in Rome. In the course of conversation it became apparent that in America, as well as the rest of the world, Capitalism has failed us miserably. These are the death throes of a corrupt crony capitalism. And the reason, it also became all too crystal clear, was, or is greed, or overweening self interest. "Where's mine?" and "what will happen to me?" are the whimper and whine of the self-absorbed.
As the light dawned on me that the paradigm was worn out and a new paradigm is needed, I groped for a word or phrase. David, the Jesuit from Scotland, handed the phrase to me.

"The Common Good," David said, "is what you are looking for." He said it simply and quietly. But as I was ready to hear it, perhaps for the first time, he might as well have been shouting it from the roof top. The Common Good thundered into my ear. And has never left.

But now, that it is being bandied about in the interests of commerce, what is to stop the evil corporations, indeed, all of Wall Street, from using the phrase. To draw the unsuspecting in. The old fable of the wolf in sheep's clothing. They lie about everything else, so why would they not lie about the use of this phrase.

We will have to, at some point define the term--- narrowly. To please the critics. Though clearly many Republicans dislike the phrase. There is a video on YouTube where the Republicans on Fox News immediately yell "Socialism!" at the mention of The Common Good! But, on the other hand, let them yell their loudest. I am a socialist. A Democratic Socialist. People without morals, without ethics, who are utterly devoid of real humanity are not worth listening to. Indeed they only listen to each other. Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. So---Who would not say these beings are self-destroying ciphers and liars? They not only are against the common good, but they are against everything that is decent and wholesome. Like the Bush regime, they will lie, steal and murder anyone who should be so unlucky as to get in their way. Is this not the way of the Anti-Christ?

At the very least, are they not The Hollow Men T.S. Elliot warned us about?

I am sorry to have to say this, but the truth is I put these videos on the page in precisely the reverse order. So if you watch the last one first and the fist one last they will make more sense.♦

Lewis Black on Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourettes

2010-12-28T13:28:00.000-08:00

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henever Lewis Black gets angry, I seem to lose control and slip to the floor; rolling back and forth, laughing hysterically. Black consistently delivers one of the very funniest, and most explosive, monologues to be found. He is one of life's most frustrated critics. In this video he takes on the foibles of Glenn Beck, and points out how frequently and with what ease Beck kicks over the traces of logic in his zest to Nazi-fy anybody he doesn't like; and perhaps, anybody who is standing around, nearby. The Beckster hates Obama--- so he finds a similarity to Hitler; and bingo, Obama is Hitler. Beck doesn't care how far he has to reach, nor how tortured the logic, if he doesn't like you you're a Nazi. You have a mustache; Hitler had a mustache; therefore, you are Hitler. Personally, I would say, "Hey, Glenn, say whatever you wish to say in the privacy of your own watercloset in front of your own mirror. But when you broadcast such garbage to the nation on a channel which insists that it is a news channel, well, you're asking for it."

And when you write and publish a book, the cover plastered with a ludicrous photograph of yourself in pseudo Nazi-drag, and all you are missing is the riding crop and the monocle, you're asking for all sorts of commentary, none of it positive. Jon Stewart's on-air deconstructions of the Beck broadcasts, are very funny, too. As well as spot on. Breathtakingly so. The thing is, that Beck, himself, is so over the top with his political madness, that it is hard for comedians to match him for the lurid, not lucid, yet madly comic take on Glenn Beck's twisted version of reality. I once watched Beck being interviewed by Bill O'Reilley. It was an astounding revelation to observe how sane O'Reilley looked next to poor old crazy Beck.

Jon Stewart Exposes Glenn Beck as a Puppet of George Soros Part !

- Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod.

Health Care Reform Repeal?

2010-12-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

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s it turns out, the Health Care Insurance plan signed into being by then-Republican Governor Mitt Romney, is a winner. More than 98% of the Massachusetts population is now insured. That's a very impressive number however you cut it. And the percentage of children now fully covered is even higher.

Without raising taxes.

So why is it that Congress gave us a lame, corrupt version of a health care reform package which was, in fact, written by the insurance lobbyists? What a question! How ungrateful.

Let us begin our inquiry by giving the loudest and ugliest raspberry imaginable, to the Republican Party for their unerring sense of how to fuck-over the American people. The GOP's hysteria that "Obama Care", as the conservative word-smiths insultingly named it and framed it, (so why haven't the Democrats come up with a way to frame it so it can't be used as a weapon?) would turn our Democracy into a monument to Karl Marx, is totally unfounded. We knew the GOP leadership were scum buckets, liars and crooks, but we didn't know just how evil they really are. The only real wonder is that so many Americans have bought into Republican lies. Republicans are nothing more than goons for money. They offer Americans nothing but another rip-off on behalf of their corporate bosses. And screw the voters who put them in power. And isn't it a scream how very many working people seem to love a well-placed kick in the head?

Just to summarize for anyone who might have missed the festivities last spring and summer, Republicans hated everything about the reform bill. They took a good idea and spun it into a socialistic nightmare. The question is what kind of human being would do this?

Let's see: it was a way to make Obama look bad. And their number one priority is to make Obama look like the worst loser of the world. Otherwise they can kiss the White House goodbye forever. If they allow the Dems to do a single thing to help America the GOP loses big time.

On the score of making President Obama look bad, they have won that game; with a little extra help from Obama, himself.

As things stand now, the Republican Party, the party of total corruption, has a very good chance of winning the White House in 2012. And once they win, we can kiss any Health Care Reform, corrupt or not, goodbye.♦

Daily Dropcap (Jessica Hische) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

On Nazi Israel

2010-12-14T13:43:00.000-08:00

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ho does not remember how Vanessa Redgrave stood before the Academy Awards audience and angrily denounced the Zionists as thugs? For that she was loudly booed. Things have changed these days. The world is on to the criminal Zionists. And yet it is with faint voices that we speak out against Israeli monsters. I have spoken out condemning Zionism. I will continue to speak out against the gross criminality of Israeli aggression. Their crimes are ignored and whitewashed by the American State Department and President Obama's foreign policies which do favor Israel and victimize Palestinians. And here in the USA there is scarce mention of the inhumanity of the Zionist State toward Palestinians. Even if there were a solid array of historical evidence which proved, unequivocally, that the land truly belongs to the Jews, and that the Palestinians' claims on the land were unsubstantial; even if that were true, and it is not, Israel would still be guilty of Crimes against Humanity, policies of aggression and unprovoked, first strike maneuvers against the Palestinians.

For so many decades the world has allowed such atrocities to slide by. Hey! Nobody wanted to be labeled an anti-semite! I mean, how can you argue with the idea that God, himself, prefers Jews to all others. The People of the Book are the Chosen of The Lord. Right?

Well, hold on there. Not so fast. Let us look at some of these things. Like the Old Testament. Where the stories of Moses come from. Well, new archeological evidence points to some disputes which say that many of the Biblical personnages, such as Moses, and Joseph, were in fact, Egyptian Pharaohs, whose very names are cognates of the Biblical characters. You can check this out yourself, but it's beyond the scope of this post go into it. Also, in the case of Moses story of his birth and discovery by a princess of Egypt, the baby in a basket floating in the bullrushes and then brought up like a royal. It turns out that is a story which actually belongs to an earlier Babylonian king by the name of Sargon. The Jews served as slaves in Babylon until their release and then once in the wilderness they kept Sargon's story but applied it to their own hero, Moses. Moshei!

So a lot of fudging has been done to embellish those Hebraic stories. And even the Ark of the Covenant may be yet another fiction elided or conflated from an earlier culture. The Ark, after all, was kept in the Temple of Solomon. The Temple of Solomon was burned to the ground by the Romans. The legend of the Knights Templar is that they discovered the remains of the Temple and somehow recovered the Ark. But that is the stuff of Hollywood. So?

Who knows?

So that any claims made cannot be made as if Biblical stories are factual.

Now, it's the Israelis themselves who are more anti-semitic in their actions than anyone.

What is happening, then, is the end of Jewery, itself. If you constantly abide outside of the code of Judaism, then how can you claim to be what you are not? Survivors of the most hideous concentration camps have the stamp of authenticity about them. If you survived Auschwitz, you are a Jew and nobody can say different. And your critique counts far more than those who, by virtue of the time and place of their birth, escaped the unspeakable suffering of the holocaust. You may be a Jew by birth and inclination, but you are not a Jew like these guys are Jews. They know what is Jewish, and what is Nazi. And they know it like nobody else.

So what we have here, in the video below, is a survivor of crushing horror of ghastly Auschwitz, Hojo Meyer, speaking out against the appalling policies of Zionist Israel. He goes much further, saying Israel's policies are antithetical to the entire set of principles which constitute Judaism. And then he speaks the unspeakable: that the state of Israel is based on the principles of the Nazis. The only difference being that Palestinians are now the victims; and the Israelis their persecutors, as were the Nazis of the Third Reich toward the Jews.

So terribly tragic!

Daily Dropcap (Jessica Hische) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Why does the Media Not Want to Talk About This?

2010-12-11T03:30:00.000-08:00

♣

omething is very wrong about the TSA use of body scanners which are being sold to Airport Security throughout America, and the Tranportation Security Agency. The seller is none other than Michael Chertoff, the former head of the TSA, at a cost of more than $150,000 per machine. That is a lot of profit to Chertoff. This is a waste of our tax dollars when you consider that bomb sniffing dogs are preferred by the FBI at their own headquarters, and by the US Army in Baghdad. Dogs cost about $8,500 in total.

So what gives?

Is this whole issue about Michael Chertoff making a profit? It certainly has nothing to do with making Americans safer at airports. This video is a good one which explains what is at stake.

Oops! Where Did I Put That Nine Trillion Dollars?

2010-12-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

♦

f anyone is still asking themselves how and why Alan Grayson, Representative from District 8 in Florida, one of the precious few men in the US Congress who asks really pertinent questions of the Federal Reserve Banks' Inspector General, was targeted by the banking lobby to bite the dust, you will see the answer in this video.

The issue he is pursuing is very simply, what ever happened to the Nine Trillion dollars that was given to the Fed. Yes, we know about the $700,000,000,000 of bailout money. But what about this amount, 9 extra big ones, that's twelve zeros with a 9 before them, which nobody ever mentioned to the press; or perhaps the media just neglected to investigate.

"9 Trill? Hey, Ben? You know anything about that 9 trill?"

"Uh...which 9 trillion izzat? I don't nuffing about no 9 trillion."

"Unh...OK, then. See that, Congressman Grayson? Nobody don't know nuffing about no 9 trill."

Apparently such things are still not to be mentioned in polite company. I wonder why.

The moron replacing Grayson, I keep forgetting his name, ah, yes, Daniel Webster, is a religious nut; believes in suppressing women, and will function as nothing more than a goon who will do as he is told by the Republican bosses.

Obviously the big money who own the Republican and much of the Democratic Congress, couldn't leave a loose cannon like Grayson in Congress to expose their filth and lies. So they want to play hardball. Fine with me.

Let them choke on this: the capitalists, themselves, will bring about their own destruction. Even as they fight it tooth and nail, the oligarchy will step so far over the line, that as in Latin America, communism will become the inevitable outcome of their corruption. And I say this with great sadness.

We had all hoped that capitalism would work for everyone.

That is what Adam Smith actually envisioned: A Free Market with perfect equality and perfect freedom. And Smith was very careful to spell out those last two conditions of a Free Market. And for awhile it looked like it just might work out that way. But greed is a human condition which arises whenever a person is placed next a great deal of money. Then there can never be enough. The rich get richer because they are driven not only to have their own legitimate money, but they are compelled to devise ways to steal from the pockets of the poor. Smith, also, in the same book, The Wealth of Nations, said that a nation is only as wealthy as its poorest citizen. Could this be the real reason that the minions of the crooked wealthy hate America so much?

a message from those who dissent

2010-12-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

aw Story found this video on their channel on YouTube this morning. It is a statement of the philosophy of those who believe that Wikileaks is the right way to topple tyranny. The entire war against Julian Assange on the part of many world governments is very simply, they want to control the Internet. And Anonymous, believes that free access to the Internet is a basic human right. The problem is, if they win it will only be a temporary victory. The forces of evil, of greed, of profit at any price, of croney capitalism, of the craven conservative outlook, is, that they will bide their time crawl out from under the rock when the young idealists of freedom aren't looking. They will simper and whisper, like Karl Rove, using idiots like George W. Bush and the Evangelical Christians, as their front, to claw their way to the place where they can leverage ultimate power.

A One Term President...Damn it!

2010-12-08T16:11:00.000-08:00

♦

resident Obama surely knew that the vast majority of Americans, certainly the young liberals who voted to put him in office, wanted him to end the meaty tax cuts for the rich. Unless he has completely walled himself off from the groundswell of public opinion which has been all but hollered from the rooftops, how could he not. Nobel Laureate Economist, Paul Krugman, could not have been clearer in his column yesterday: "Extend the tax cuts for the rich and we lose Social Security." According to Krugman it is really that simple. And that consequential. And the destruction of all signs of civilization, at the hands of the rich, is what we are really talking about here. That was the deal.

So Obama is really the Republican's Poison Pill all along. This move was too pat. Too carefully choreographed. The choreographic patterns show too clearly. Jim Bunning started the ball rolling, with his filibuster blocking the extension of unemployment insurance. Then somebody else did it. And then--- Golly whiskers, weren't they sweet, to step aside after making a very important point: the crippling power wielded by the GOP.

Alas, this is not the first time Obama has betrayed, not only the people, but his own vision. So it comes as no surprise that both White House phone lines were jammed this morning by angry progressives.

And if they could see where Obama's deal was going to lead to within one and a half years, why couldn't Obama who is so much smarter than many of us?

But then, too, it should hardly come as surprising that he made such a move that would be so toxic to the very people who put him in office. This has been, as they say, a long time brewing. Just last week, Republicans were crowing about how they were walking Obama like their pet Bijon puppy.

So here it is: Mission Accomplished.

America, you lose!

Tea baggers, you lose!

We all lose everything! Everything gained in the way of being a civilized nation, since the 1920's.

How happy the evil ones are now.

Personally, I find it worthy of note that he speaks so harshly to the very voters who put him in office. On the other hand, one can't help but observe how sweetly he deals with the Republican insects.♦

Wikileaks: Julian Assange: A Hero of the People?

2010-12-06T02:38:00.000-08:00

ries of outrage from the State department! Hillary Clinton looked stricken and pale, as she sounded dire words threatening everything from war and death, to loss of life and limb, O the brutality! Oh, Hillary, we hardly knew ye! Then, of course, the CIA, posing as a a teenage hacker tried to close the Wikileaks site down. But it re-appeared. To the consternation of everyone who has been growing very long noses: The Military left it to a Lt. Colonel, saying Assange crossed over some imaginary line in the sand, because of course Lt. Colonels must believe that secrets need to be kept secret even if they are lies because, and would that it were, that only the military thinks this way, and assume it's a valid argument, some lies are just, well, necessary and good. Add to this band of lying dignitaries seen losing it, now, predictably, the morbid right wingers, all of whom hate with undying passion, any kind of central governance--- are now calling on this very government--- which they so itch to drown in the bathtub--- to kill this SOB, Assange. Suddenly, in a stunning about face regarding the Federal government, all is forgiven. Now they love the government as long as it finds and kills the goddamn traitor/terrorist. And so far, even the White House is doing its best to frame Julian Assange as the thousand-eyed, fire-breathing terrorist of the moment. The new enemy of the people!

But there is another more serious and disturbing reason for cheering the release of these dismal and disgraceful secret documents. Namely the appalling lies of the State Department. The criminal behavior toward so-called Ghost Prisoners, by the United States. These revelations are so shameful they make one ashamed of being an American. And of course, the worst things happened during the Bush/Cheney administration. This is a transcipt of an article by Andy Worthington of the The Public Record/ Intrepid New Journalism. Read on:

Wikileaks Reveals Reasons To Dismiss US Claims ‘Ghost Prisoner’ Aafia Siddiqui Wasn’t Held In Bagram

Posted: 05 Dec 2010 11:45 AM PST

Aafia Siddiqui

In sifting through the avalanche of US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, only theGuardian, in the Western media, has picked up on cables from Islamabad relating to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared with her three young children in Karachi on March 30, 2003, and did not reappear until July 17, 2008, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was reportedly arrested by Afghan forces for acting strangely, allegedly carrying a bag that contained a list of US targets for terrorist attacks as well as bomb-making instructions and assorted chemicals.

When US soldiers turned up, Dr. Siddiqui then reportedly seized a gun and shot at them. Although she failed to hit her targets, at point-blank range, she was herself shot twice in the abdomen, and was then rendered to the United States, where she was put on trial for attempted murder, and was convicted and given an 86 year sentence in September this year.

Dr. Siddiqui’s supporters, and many commentators — myself included — who have examined her story have, for many years, had reason to doubt the official narrative about her capture in 2008, and her whereabouts for the previous five years.

While both the Pakistani and US authorities repeatedly denied that Dr. Siddiqui was in their custody between 2003 and 2008, and this is reiterated in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, in which US diplomats in Pakistan stated that “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged,” several former prisoners — and one still held — have stated that they saw her in Bagram. The following exchange is an excerpt from an interview conducted by former prisoner Moazzam Begg with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, after his release from Guantánamo in February 2009:

Moazzam Begg: When you were in the Bagram Detention Facility after being held in the “Dark Prison,” you came across a female prisoner. Can you describe a little bit about who you think she is and what you saw of her?
Binyam Mohamed: In Bagram, I did come across a female who wore a shirt with the number of “650,” and I saw her several times, and I heard a lot of stories about her from the guards and the other prisoners over there.
Moazzam Begg: And these stories said what about her, in terms of her description and her background?
Binyam Mohamed: What we were told first … we were frightened by the guards not to communicate with her, because they feared that we would talk to her and we would know who she was. So they told us that she was a spy from Pakistan, working with the government, and the Americans brought her to Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: So you think they spread the rumour that she was a spy … that would have kept you away from her and apprehensive towards her?
Binyam Mohamed: Basically, nobody talked to her in the facility, and she was held in isolation, where … she was only brought out to the main facility just to use the toilet. But all I knew about her was that she was from Pakistan, and that she had studied, or she had lived in America. And the guards would talk a lot about her, and I did actually see her picture when I was here a few weeks ago, and I would say she’s the very person I saw in Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: And that’s the very picture I showed you of Aafia Siddiqui?
Binyam Mohamed: That’s the very picture I saw.
Moazzam Begg: There have been all sorts of rumours about what happened to her — and may Allah free her soon — but part of those rumours include her being terribly abused. Do you have any knowledge of what abuse she might have faced?
Binyam Mohamed: Apart from her being in isolation — and the fact that I saw, when she was walking up and down, I could tell that she was severely disturbed — I don’t think she was in her right mind — literally, I don’t think she was sane — and I didn’t feel anything at that time, because, as far as I was concerned, she was a hypocrite working with the other governments. But had we known that she was a sister, I don’t think we would have been silent. I think there would have been a lot of maybe even riots in Bagram.

In March 2010, at a rally organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, former Guantánamo prisonerOmar Deghayes stated that, as well as Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash (a former child prisoner who is still held in Guantánamo) and Dr. Ghairat Baheer (a former “ghost prisoner” held in various secret prisons in Afghanistan) also described seeing Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram. Omar said, “They told me how she cried and sobbed, how she screamed and cried and banged her head, in despair and sorrow.”

The Justice for Aafia Coalition has also been gathering other testimony about Dr. Siddiqui’s presence in Bagram from other sources, locating the following statement by Abu Yahya al-Libi, who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, which resonates with the recollections of Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash and Dr. Baheer:

There is a woman from Pakistan. She stayed two complete years in solitary confinement in Bagram prison among more than 500 men. She would go out to the bathroom, led by the Americans, placing his hand on one of her shoulders, and the other hand on her back, and her hands and feet chained together, and she is treated in exactly the same way as a man … even in her clothing, the orange suit that the brothers wear in Guantánamo and the mujahideen in Bagram. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming, all day and night, and those ones all they do is make it worse by calling her by her number 650, that’s the number she had in the Bagram prison… “What’s the problem?” And she didn’t find a person to talk to. She is in solitary confinement, in front of her is a solitary room belonging to a man, on her side is a solitary room belonging to a man, and next to her is a solitary room belonging to a man, She didn’t find a woman to talk to, she only sees men … so the woman lost her reasoning and her mind and she stayed in this condition for two complete years… probably no one knew anything about her.

In addition, two of Aafia Siddiqui’s three children have stated that they were also held in custody during the period that their mother’s whereabouts are unexplained, adding another chilling dimension to the story. Although it is feared that Suleman, who was just a baby in March 2003, was killed at the time of her capture, her eldest son Ahmed (who was seven at the time) and her daughter Mariam (who was five) eventually reappeared. Ahmed, who was seized with his mother in Ghazni in July 2008, and was released to his mother’s family in October 2009, issued the following statement about his capture and his lost years:

I do not remember the date but it seems a long time ago. I remember we were going to Islamabad in a car when we were stopped by different cars and high roof ones. My mother was screaming and I was screaming as they took me away. I looked around and saw my baby brother on the ground and there was blood. My mother was crying and screaming. Then they put something on my face. And I don’t remember anything.
When I woke up I was in a room. There were American soldiers in uniform and plain clothes people. They kept me in different places. If I cried or didn’t listen, they beat me and tied me and chained me. There were English speaking, Pashto and Urdu speaking. I had no courage to ask who they were. At times, for a long time, I was alone in a small room. Then I was taken to some children’s prison where there were lots of other children.
The American Consular, who came to me in Kabul jail, said, “Your name is Ahmed. You are American. Your mother’s name is Aafia Siddiqui and your younger brother is dead. After that they took me away from the kids’ prison and I met the Pakistani Consular, and I talked to my aunt (Fowzia Siddiqui).”

Mariam did not reappear until April this year, when unidentified men delivered her to her aunt’s house. Now 12 years old, she was identified as Aafia Siddiqui’s daughter (and Ahmed’s sister) through DNA tests. At a press conference, Senator Talha Mehmood, the Chairman of the Senate Committee for the Interior, reported that Mariam “was recovered from Bagram airbase in the custody of an American — in the Urdu language press, an American soldier — called ‘John.’ He also said that she had been kept for seven years in a ‘cold, dark room’ in Bagram airbase.” Although this story has not been independently verified, and it may be that Mariam was held in some other facility, no other explanation has been provided to explain her whereabouts for the previous seven years.

These are just some of the reasons to doubt the assertion made by US diplomats in Pakistan, in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, and also to doubt the conviction with which Declan Walsh followed up on the cable, writing in the Guardian, “Contrary to claims by supporters of Aafia Siddiqui, the controversial Pakistani neuroscientist was never imprisoned at the Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, the embassy cables suggest.”

Other reasons to doubt the assertion include previously reported shadiness on the part of diplomats, who initially told the journalist Yvonne Ridley (who has spent many years doggedly pursuing the truth about Dr. Siddiqui) that no women had been held in Bagram, although it was later revealed that they had lied. Shortly after the incident in Ghazni, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Greene, a spokesperson for Combined Joint Task Force 101, which manages the Bagram base, “said that a woman had been held at Bagram in 2003, but that woman, identified only as ‘Shafila,’ was released.” This was a fascinating insight, because the timeframe involved — during 2003 — appears to confirm that the witnesses cited above, who saw a woman at Bagram in 2004, were not mistaking Aafia Siddiqui for this other poor woman, whose whereabouts are, of course, unknown.

Even more significant is the well-chronicled failure of senior Bush administration officials to keep State Department officials in the loop about almost anything of substance to do with the “War on Terror.”

In 2009, when I interviewed Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson told me, in no uncertain terms, that the State Department had been excluded from correspondence relating to the conduct of the “War on Terror,” although the team gathered around Dick Cheney — a “War Council” consisting of just six men — had been monitoring the State Department’s responses to the results of Cheney’s activities. Wilkerson said:

I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.

Another reason for doubting the diplomats’ denials concerns the timing of Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, and its place within the bigger picture of the capture of supposed “high-value detainees” who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in a variety of secret prisons, including, in many cases, a secret facility within bagram. Whether accurately or not, it has been claimed that Dr, Siddiqui had remarried, before her capture, and that her second husband was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), a nephew of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Dr. Siddiqui was seized just four weeks after KSM, and four weeks before Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and it is easy, therefore, to see that a confession extracted under torture from KSM — when he was beingsubjected to waterboarding on 183 separate occasions in a secret prison in Poland — could have led to Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, which, in turn, could have led to the capture — perhaps through information also extracted through the use of torture — of Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

If this sequence is correct — and it certainly makes a lot of sense — then it is appropriate to conclude that Dr. Siddiqui was held as a “ghost prisoner” in a secret prison, and it does not take too much reflection to realize that, as a result, her mysterious reappearance in Afghanistan in July 2008, the implausible story of her attempts to murder US soldiers (even though no fingerprints were found on the gun), her rendition to the United States rather than facing justice in Afghanistan, the sham of a trial that focused only on the murder attempt, and not on the terrorist materials allegedly found on her at the time of her capture, and the disproportionately large sentence are all part of a cover-up, designed to dispose of a used-up “ghost prisoner,” who knew too much — and was, conceivably, too horribly abused — to be released. ♦

Originally published on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and thedefinitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog atandyworthington.co.uk.

Why Capitalism Isn't Working

2010-12-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

♦

eality intrudes on the neatly wrapped economic theories of Croney Capitalism. No matter what the Milton Friedmanites tell us about how great Uncle Milty's theories are, the actual results out here in the real world are, in a word, disastrous. It is disastrous that so many Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure by a predatory banking system. It is disastrous that Wall Street is having its greatest season of profit at the expense of so many working Americans. After all, it was Main Street who bailed out Wall Street, not the other way around. All economic roads since Reagan have led to what we see now--- a depressed American landscape.

Even back in Adam Smith's day, he noted in The Wealth of Nations, that the Free Market system would not work unless the environment in which it found itself, was based on perfect equality and perfect freedom. We have only to see that George Bush and Dick Cheney are still strolling the boulevards and neither is on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not to mention numerous treasonous assaults on the US Constitution, as you and I would be, (on trial, that is, if not already incarcerated) if we so much as smoked a joint. Both Bush and Cheney were liars, cheats, and frauds. So we can dispense with the idea of equality under the law and the idea of perfect freedom, applies only to the monied elite.

But if that doesn't do it for you, let's take this. Let us say that the Free Market is, in reality, an imaginary carrot dangling before the eyes of the more-than-ready-for-the-glue-factory-horse of greed and profit. There is no such thing as a free market and there cannot be. Take Liz Claiborne clothes for example. Made in Indonesia with a labor cost of 74¢ per hour, product costs as much as $4 to produce then is shipped to the states and sold for about $150 per item. Since product does not truly reflect value, one asks why corporations must be subsidized on a regular basis by the Federal government.

By now we have seen the real strategy of the giant corporations and banks is to privatize profits and socialize losses. In case that phrase did not make a sufficient impression and passed right over your head, let me say it again:

The real strategy of Giant corporations and banks is to Privatize Profits and Socialize Losses.

So. What the elite and the Republican Party, and all who agree with them really want, is Socialism for only the rich.

It is not for nothing that corporations and banks are commonly characterized as pigs at the trough. They want their socialism but none for you. You are that stupid little consumer whose only function, according to the corporations and the banks, is to go shopping and buy tons of crap that you would be better off without.

And finally, here is the big secret that the government doesn't want you to be thinking about. The Whitehouse and the Congress of the United States of America belongs to , and is ruled by, the corporations and the banks. So if Obama isn't quite living up to your expectations don't blame him. He is dancing as fast as he can to hide the fact that he is the puppet of the banks and corporations. So the Federal government doesn't want you thinking about the fact that they have this nasty little secret and if Wikileaks tries to publish the appropriate documents which will expose the real state of affairs here in Amerika, Julian Assange will end up a dead man. So you will only hear that secret from someone like me and this blog, and a few other truth tellers like Alternet, Common Cause, Democracy, Now. So the secret is safe.

The big problem with this arrangement is that is spells the "F" word. As in fascism. As Mussolini said "Fascism is better called Corporatism." And who would know better than the man who invented it?

Fascism is the form of government under which we, in the USA, now exist.

That grotesque and growing segment of the American population known loosely as T-Baggers, who typically accuse Obama of socialism, and of fascism, actually are so ignorant in every sense of the word it beggars the imagination. Obama is very far from a socialist. Given his behavior during the BP fouling of the Gulf waters, he may be closer to a fascist. His heart seems to bleed for the poor dear giant corporations, whose headquarters are not even in America.

The T-Baggers choose to ignore the long and not so bright history of Corporate Welfare.

The videos here, present a version of economics that is fundamentally closer to what is actually happening in the world than anything you may have encountered thus far.

Learning from Wikileaks

2010-12-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

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bama's reaction, at least his public reaction, to the Wikileaks situation is not enviable. He seems perfectly content to let CIA torturers slide on by with nary a tap on the wrists; and has been firm on the "no impeachment" for George W. Bush who is a bona fide war criminal and if this were a nation which lived with the rule of law, he would have been tried in a court of law, and been serving a life sentence. If not a firing squad. Not only did Bush lie about the Iraqi governments possession, or rather, lack of possession, of weapons of mass destruction, and suppress the recommendations of the best CIA analytical intelligence in order to coax Congress to approve his invasion of Iraq. But now there are whole segments of conservatives who deny he ever did anything out of the way.

"He never ever lied," one chanted.

"Carpet bombed Iraq? Never. You must be thinking of Clinton." This was a response from a yet another troll on YouTube.

So I Googled it. I typed in George W. Bush and the carpet bombing of Iraq. Google brought back 88,000 articles and mentions of Bush carpet bombing Iraq. I posted the results on the YouTube page in answer to my 2 trolls. Never heard from them again.

Add to this, the fact that George W. Bush and Cheney consistently abused executive privilege, on any number of counts. for one thing, and this is really enough to bring Bush to a court of law: by classifying the fact that they bypassed the FISA court to spy on Americans.

Now we find verification in the Wikileaks documents, that the US has been lying in its diplomatic relations with the world. It has been working with Israel to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip. No wonder Hillary Clinton is so pissed off about Wikileaks. And Obama, and the State Department. And the CIA. And on and on down the line of Federal agencies. As well as the military.

If they prefer secrecy to truth, let them burn.

As Noam Chomsky says in the video, in this great interview with Amy Goodman, "What the official response to the Wikileaks exposure really does tell us is that the upper level government officials, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, really hate democracy and with a bitter hatred."

It is so very interesting that Chomsky is quite enthusiastic, for Chomsky, about the leaks. Of course it is important to remember that Chomsky was one of the two or three people who worked with Daniel Ellsberg to index the Pentagon Papers, which caused such an uproar so many decades ago. And which led directly to the ceasefire on the part of American soldiers and their departure of Viet Nam. Ellsberg had the crooked leadership of America by the short hairs. Now all of America knew they had been lied to all along. And the Hippies, the peace niks, were right!

The uglier the the secrets the more the governing leadership screams about being exposed. I love Chomsky's comment about Sarah Palin. "I don't know how much she understands..." Thing is, he isn't trying to be funny. Nor does he intend his comment to put her down. That isn't the way Chomsky operates. From her comment on the Wikileaks documents, it seems she doesn't really understand anything. Face it Sarah, dear, you're at your best as the usual beauty pageant queen.♦

you may have noticed something new, here...

2010-11-20T19:13:00.000-08:00

If you have been to this site before or you're a subscriber, you are in the right place: The Savage Pen is now We the People. I don't remember now what made me do it. But, suddenly, We, the People seemed like the right name and The Savage Pen seemed old and not quite right. I toyed with name In Your Face.com but the name is too, well, in your face. So, We, the People, it is going to be.

I would welcome any insights, reactions and feedback on the improvements. I think they are improvements, anyway. And I hope my readers will as well. New artwork for the page and site title. It took better than ten tries to get it right. 10 different versions including a piece of artwork of the U.S. Constitution. To make it look old and like parchment. Then searching for the right background. I like the cosmos as a background; it seems to rise above petty politics, and take us out into the Universe to set the atmosphere for transcendent Truth and values, against which even politics finally must be measured. ♦

So You Think You Live In A Democracy

2010-11-20T00:58:00.000-08:00

Russ Baker is an investigative journalist, perhaps among the last of his kind, as mainstream media no longer investigates anything anymore. Lack of public interest in real-honest-to-God journalism, added to declining readership and revenues are among the reasons. Baker investigated the Bush family for five years to gather material for his explosive book, "Family of Secrets, The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last 50 Years".

This book becomes a goldmine of information to counter the lies which appear on every page of Bush's new "Autobiography."

Skull and Bones ll

2010-11-06T01:52:00.000-07:00

♣

ere, JFK speaks of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University, which, as will later be seen, is opposed to the aims of American freedom and and the Constitutional rights which are guaranteed in the United States Constitution. The entire aim of the Skull and Bones is to gather and protect power and wealth. And to keep them in the hands of the few. If the American people truly understood the real meaning of this society they would insist on its destruction. Yet, now, we have the ignorant masses, many of whom imagine that they and their families, will one day acquire the very same power and wealth. The trouble with that outlook which is promoted by the system all around us, is that the same group which now holds the power and wealth is dedicated to ensuring that you never will advance that far. All wealth and all power belongs to to this group and to them and their descendants alone. They are the money behind the anti-American and obscenely racist, white supremacy groups. Before the JFK video is another. The first in a well documented series which investigates the inner workings of Skull and Bones.

The Real Republican Agenda for 2012

2010-11-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

GOP Seeks to Kill What's Left of the Economy

epublican Mitch McConnell's public utterances about how the entire agenda of the GOP for the next two years will be focused on removing Barrack Obama from office gives me indigestion. For openers, the man is a known liar of absurd proportions. Though I am sure he isn't lying about this issue. I throw in the attribute of liar simply to give a quick sketch of the man's character. He's worse than reprehensible. But one must credit him for sticking to the tightly worded GOP script. When the GOP's treasonous highly paid wordsmith, Frank Luntz, put out the message that Republicans needed to defeat the Democratic sponsored Wall Street Reform bill, by associating it with the Iraq war and tax increases, McConnell was the first one out of the gate talking to the press about--- you guessed it--- how the bill would aggravate the war and would certainly increase taxes. He quoted Luntz--- word for word. And he said it all with a straight face. But one must give Luntz his due: the American people drank it down like it was Kool Aid and they had a powerful thirst.

Given Obama's deeply disappointing, submissive mutterings the day after midterm elections, about how we all ought to get along, and how the White House is so looking forward to working with the newly promoted John Boehner, as speaker of the House and all the rest of the screwballs in that party I have misgivings about the next two years. What America is looking for now is for Obama to grow a pair and kick the tar out of the GOP. They certainly do it to him. And then they claim that they are acting on behalf of the American people.

They are not!

The GOP's real agenda is to destroy, in the next two years, what shreds and shards of an economy are still viable. And then to blame the ensuing destruction all on Obama. And all the time they will be putting people out of work and denying them any kind of sustenance, such as unemployment insurance, they will be making mealy mouthed speeches about how Americans need see what damage Obama has done to the economy. That is what Mitch McConnell is really saying when he speaks of removing Obama from consideration in 2012. And the worst part is that Republicans are people devoid of conscience. For the last several decades they've been hammering out a mix of capitalism based on a twisted understanding of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. They didn't read Adam Smith. Nor Milton Friedman. But they did read the puerile fantasies of Ayn Rand. Rand was a great and persuasive novelist and piss-poor philosopher. Milton Friedman's ideas look good on the page but simply do not work out in real life, except to a select few.

Had they read Adam Smith they would have seen that Smith qualifies his vision of a Free Market with the chilling comment that it will only work in a nation where perfect equality and perfect freedom exist. In this fascist corporatocracy, which America has become, such qualifications are laughable.

The Situation is Critical

2010-10-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

his has been for too long now, an overpopulated world impoverished by the very fact that it is overpopulated. The conservative religionists, as a result of the hysteria caused by their irrational belief systems, refuse to allow wholesome and proper sex education. Thus they are directly responsible for the burgeoning explosion of population.

There are no longer enough of any natural resources to go around. And what few resources there are, such as oil, metal, air and potable water, are being claimed by giant corporations as if all the earth's natural resources belonged to only the wealthy. And what do they do with these resources which are in fact the only true wealth?

They squander them.

When the Amazon Rain-forest goes, the quality of air on earth will be vastly diminished in a way that is near unthinkable now. All of our options are about to be severely reduced. And more than half of the rain-forest, which is the lung of the earth, the essential organ which makes life possible, is already gone. What was once rich and fertile land of the Amazon Basin, is fast becoming a dry, useless desert.

The fact that so many people cannot see or confront these realities attests to the pervading insanity.

Since there is no other way to deal with this overpopulation, which only increases exponentially, and in itself will bring about the death of the earth, itself, as a viable planet, and sooner, not later, several groups, working in secret, comprised exclusively of the very rich and powerful, are initiating a drastic plan to rid the earth of a very significant portion of the planetary population by starving the peoples of the earth to death. And those who do not die of starvation will be poisoned.

Monsanto, which originally promised to be the solution to the world's hunger problem has shifted its mission, so that now Monsanto is the venue of delivery of the poison. And the American federal government supports all of this. Granted, it is an extreme response to the failure of reason. Given these failures of reason to reduce population or else all the sooner suffer inevitable extinction, abortion of unwanted fetuses is an extreme but necessary measure to which we, as a civilization, have been reduced. It really is that simple.♦

Milton Friedman Got It Wrong

2010-10-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

Nobel Prize Winning Economist's Disastrous Ideas

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t has taken me a very long time to get to what exactly it was that Milton Friedman was talking about. When you know where these foul ideas of the Repukes come from, it is easier to understand them. Milton Friedman, is the most radical economics thinker since Karl Marx. Like Marx, the ideas look so good on paper. Too bad his work doesn't work in reality on a large scale. Friedman is responsible for the 3 foul ideas which guided the Ronnie Reagan Administration, and which were directly responsible for the huge foul up of the American economy.

Here, in a nutshell, are Friedman's most damaging and ineffective ideas:

First, All government is too large.
Maximize profit in any way you want. (Even if it means selling defective product. Not to worry, the law prohibits the public from paying for your defective product with a defective check.)
De-regulate De-regulate De-regulate

I do have to agree with Friedman on one thing: Namely, the legalizing of all drugs. However, like so many others, I got there all by myself, without help from Friedman.

2010-10-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

f the Tea Baggers, who are mainly funded by the Koch brothers, not to mention the Republican Party, do win in elections throughout the several states so that the GOP really does take back Congress, we will know for sure that the Supreme Court of the United States has truly destroyed Democracy in America.

And for all time.

We know that power once gained will not be willingly returned. That is an axiom of the politics of power.

With its' disastrously partisan ruling on Citizen's United the Supreme Court has undone, literally hundreds of years of careful legislation which was designed to preserve freedom and Democracy in America.

Their first treasonous action was to interfere with the presidential election in 2004. That was, as any good citizen can tell you, a coup d'etat, and most definitely not a valid, nor even constitutional activity of the Supreme Court Of The United States. They stopped the counting of the legitimate votes in Florida, thereby nullifying the votes of those citizens, but then had the affrontery to appoint George W. Bush. the most destructive president ever of the US Constitution. He shredded the Constitution in such a way that we still have to repair.
Hidden in the fog of the Military Commissions Act was the cancellation of Posse Comitatus. Now the Citizen's United ruling. And although President Obama has spoken out against this ruling, for my part I deeply believe that those judges who ruled for it must be impeached and disgraced in every way. It was not merely a bad ruling, but it is treasonous to the entire spirit of Democracy in America.

Any rational American now knows that the wrong headed Republican ideas have single handedly led to the disaster in which we now find ourselves. The Banksters and Wall Street and the vast army of corporate lobbyists who bought the U.S. Congress. The ghost of Milton Friedman litters our country: Small or limited Government has been the cry of Republicans since Ronald Reagan and what they actually do is expand the government but they do it in ways that accomplish their goals. More military. And trickle down economics which turn out to be a patently invalid theory. Bush cut taxes of the rich and we now have fewer jobs than ever before. They lie outright when they claim that any smallest bit of this mess is President Obama's fault. It is all Bush, Bush, Cheney, and Bush. This being true, one asks, how could any rational human being vote for a Republican again.

Answer: Big money can do anything it wants. We are seeing that played out everywhere now. On TV all the expensive attack ads, and on the Internet on the websites of most heretofore liberal forums and message boards such as Alternet. Anything for a buck.

And for most of the elite, the U.S. Constitution is in their way. They want it all. And none for you. You are nothing but a wage slave. A serf! Nevertheless, its as if nobody remembers such trivial details. Many people are angry at President Obama, (because the GOP noise machine has been so active and so noisy decrying his every move.) and at the Democrats--- who deserve very harsh criticism for their lack of action in the past four years. Which means these low-information voters will vote for--- you guessed it, any nearby Republican or Tea Bagger, no matter how insane the ideas they may spout.

Once again, I tremble for my country. ♦

President Obama Springs to New Life

2010-09-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

♣

reat news! I hate to seem spiteful but what it looks like to me is this: as Rahm Emanuel leaves the Whitehouse, Obama springs to life. This is certainly a big, bold step he's taken appointing Elizabeth Warren to man the post, as it were, of the agency she, herself, designed. What a God Send she is! And we know how much the right wingnuts hate her. the Right wingers in Congress tried to pass a law to bar Elizabeth Warren from being put in charge of policing Wall Street! And no wonder they hate her.

She is honest!

And they can't find any dirt on her.

And it kills them.

America Wins!

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When somebody in Washington DC starts talking Truth, the right wing goes into a tail spin! We see it, but nobody says anything. I wonder why.

So now Obama has appointed Elizabeth Warren to a somewhat lesser position to act on the fringe for the organization she designed. It is a totally unsatisfactory arrangement, but it must be that the members of the Business Roundtable will assassinate the president, as they did JFK, if Obama doesn't fall in step with them. So at best this appointment is a compromise.♦

9/11--- The Truth of the Lies

2010-09-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

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ow did you know the Bush administration was lying to all of America in everything they said about 9/11 and the subsequent war of aggression in Iraq? How did the liberal members of Congress know they were being lied to about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction under Saddam Hussein? Without even taking into account the fact that Saddam was subsequently condemned to death by a Court of puppet judges and puppet lawyers largely set up by the Bush Administration to give the appearance of legitimacy to the Death Sentence which was already a done deal. Granted that Saddam Hussein was a monstrous tyrant. But the people of Iraq expected nothing better; brutal, tyrannical government has been the history of that region for centuries. And its' people tended to be faint hearted, indeed, downright listless, about the prospects of democratic elections. Add to that, as we have seen, without the strong arm of a totalitarian government, the Middle Eastern countries, along with Asian and African emerging nations, tend to sink into utter chaos accompanied by, as much as brought on by the rot of petty warlords and other attributes of total corruption. Freedom, democracy--- too difficult.

The time I spent in India and Nepal, opened my eyes to the corruption inherent in the poorer countries. Nepal was, indeed a corrupt monarchy. When government officials are not decently paid they tend to shakedown the citizens as well as the tourists.

You'll have to include the entire corporate media in this riddle, as they had all the details of the 9/11 attack at their fingertips mere minutes after the attack; not to forget that certain TV news anchors reported the collapse of the World Trade Center, and some well known anchors as much as 30 minutes before the actual event. So back to the original question: how do you know they were all lying?

Easy:

Their lips were moving.

How I wish all Congressmen and women had the clear vision and moral fiber of Dennis Kucinich. But, let's face it, certain parts of the American population--- I call them Korrupt Kristian Kocksuckers,--- would rather send their very own moral midgets to Washington to give voice to their treasonous values or lack thereof. The people who elected Rand Paul would be better off dead. Their backward values, and his, are not the way this country or any country on the planet, or even in the Universe, ought to go.

Their racist attitudes are an abomination.

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About the only real value to America of the war in Iraq was that it sent a lot of the Korrupt Kristian Kocksucker offspring to be killed in the Middle East.

The newspapers report that for every 3 men killed in battle, another 10 commit suicide. The way I see it, those are the men who awoke to find themselves fighting a corrupt war for a corrupt administration. Add to that, the bottom feeder values of those who indulged in torture, and you have an army of fragile human beings who have lost all sense of meaning. How could they find their lives anything but empty, given the circumstances of such moral vapidity.♦

Robert F. Kennedy challenges Gross Domestic Product

2010-09-07T01:45:00.000-07:00

Speech More Relevant Than Ever

♣

t becomes more and more clear with time: Robert F Kennedy and his brother, John F Kennedy were assassinated because they both talked TRUTH. I ask myself, "What large organization would kill to suppress truth?"

Answer: The GOP hates truth! Listen to the lies of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Alan Simpson, as they distort facts and figures, and any information having to do with Social Security, Medicare, Health Care Reform, Credit Card reform, Wall Street reform. I'll stop there, as those are enough contentious issues about which the Congressmen named above are known to equivocate, if not downright lie.

And lie they do.

Not just some of the time, either.

All the time.

Want more examples? Look how long it took Ken Mehlman to come out as a gay man, after years of bald-faced lying about his own sexual orientation, as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mehlman actively helped Republicans to pass virulent anti-gay legislation. How much self-loathing is involved in that? How about how the Republicans still lie about the fact that they work entirely for the benefit of the super rich and multi-national corporations while making loud protestations about being concerned about the poor and middle class. Like my Political -Science professor said in class one day, "The most audacious and ruthless ripoff sales job in history was when the Republican Party sold poor people and minorities on the idea that it was to their benefit to switch their allegiance to the Republican Party."

GOP leadership was then, and they are now, plainly and simply, outrageous liars, defenders of Greed, who conduct rituals of Satanic worship at their Bohemian Grove ceremonies, under the image of the Owl. And if you saw the movie, Eyes Wide Shut, you saw Tom Cruise exposed in what looked suspiciously like a Republican Satanic revelry. My immediate reaction to the scene was that it was a reference to what might happen if a liberal ever were to enter a Republican caucus, with or without disguise: The man the gold mask, dressed in red ceremonial robes. The basso chanting of Satanic verses. It is a fact that the worship of worldly wealth and material goods is not an attribute of Christianity! Jesus of Nazareth was very clear about that:

"Consider the lilies of the field." he said. "They spin not, neither do they toil."

Stop me when I go wrong here, but I take that statement to mean that money is not a big part of Jesus' message to the world. In fact, I would feel safe assuming that he meant just the opposite. And yet so many Christians seem to equate Christianity with massive amounts of shekels. Take for example, Eric Prince, the scion of an extremely wealthy, Christian family. Eric is the founder of Blackwater, the name now changed to something less meaningful. Fascinating, how it has recently come to light how Prince created a plethora of false-front subsidiary companies in order to garner as many government no-bid contracts as possible and still maintain a low-profile. Prince hired an army of mercenary soldiers who were paid princely sums compared to the paltry pittance of the US Army grunt. Prince could well afford to pay his guns for hire hundreds of thousands in salary, as he himself was taking in billions in profit. There was a first rate movie a year or so ago, with Ben Affleck, as an aggressively questioning Senator, Russel Crowe, as an investigative journalist, and Helen Mirren, as the owner/publisher of a paper very much like The Washington Post. State of Play was the title. (2009) The movie strongly alluded to that very situation. The point is that these Republican types who flourished during Bush 2, were not merely wretched liars, who cravenly hid in shadows, but corrupt beyond imagining. And any truth tellers were dealt with either, as Valerie Plame--- outed by the Whitehouse, as a CIA agent, putting her life at risk, not to mention her associates; and smearing her husband, Joe Wilson, for telling truth about the buying and selling of yellow cake uranium; or Defense Strategist, Richard Clark, who was kicked out and then smeared by the Whitehouse.

But some were simply killed outright.

There were an awful lot of private airplane crashes during Bush 2, which just happened to be timed so that certain key people who were scheduled to testify in court within days, sometimes hours of the hearings were killed. Oops! Dead. And the local police usually had all the information within minutes after the crash, if not in some cases, beforehand. Any voices of outrage were immediately silenced. The video below puts into perspective the role of one Mike Connell, a super-partisan Bush supporter during the 2004 elections. Connell was responsible for the publication of the Swift Boat fiasco which falsely accused John Kerry of so many fictitious acts, among other dirty GOP tricks.

Mike Connell was served with a subpoena, compelling him to appear in the federal courtroom in Ohio at the same College Park, MD airport where his single engine plane took off from, on his final solo flight... Mike Connell's private jet crashed the day before he was to testify. At the time, it was said that Karl Rove had warned Connell to keep his mouth shut. Nor was this death an isolated event. There were more than a few such perfectly timed crashes of private jets. There was a Senator. There was the Whitehouse computer guru, a devout Christian who was disgusted by what he had seen at the Whitehouse. He left and volunteered to become a witness, and who, like Connell, was scheduled to testify in Federal Court, but was deplaned, shall we say? the night before. It seemed that anyone who knew anything about the Bush administration and was deemed to be at risk of spilling their guts to a court, was beyond foolish to get into a private jet. The timing of the crashes was such that, to anyone watching, the Bushies were blatantly telling the world that if you speak what you know, or even give the appearance that you might, there would be consequences.

Interestingly, these gangland-style assassinations, have, so far, tended not to occur under President Obama. Funny, how those things work. Suddenly, now that the Bushies are gone, airplanes seem to fly without falling down from the sky.

Back to the Kennedy brothers' assassinations. Corporate Media likes to blame the Mafia; and perhaps the Mafia was involved, but it's far more likely that the Mafia collaborated with the Republican leadership of the time.

This speech by Robert Kennedy has become more relevant rather than less relevant as we have moved into the 21st. Century. In fact, this speech was brought to my attention by Alan Grayson, the Democratic Congressman now running for his life in Florida. The Koch's have taken careful aim at Grayson, to remove him from Congress. Unfortunately of the four or five candidates the Republicans have, they all turn out to be flakes. Too bad the GOP has no real candidates and yet---and this is really frightening--- The GOP is being touted as the big winner across the board. Then the Koch brothers will have totally bought the United States Congress.

Yes, but that is illegal, you may say.

Well, the Supreme Court says otherwise!

Of course, the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizen's United is an outrageous, obscene even, partisan ruling which completely gives corporations the upper hand in all future elections in America. And that includes foreign multi-national corporations. We now know that money is even more important than name recognition in elections. That is to say, that money buys television commercials and print ads, and public relations firms and all sorts of carefully placed articles and letters placed in magazines and newspapers.

But after all, the Supreme Court has done worse. Much, much worse! In the 2000 presidential election, they intervened in a national presidential election, selected their own man and declared him the winner. That was not merely an oddity.

It was, in fact, a coup d'état!

The Supreme Court of the United States of America exceeded its Constitutional power, by a long shot, and abridged the electoral process, which they, each one without exception, were bound by oath to uphold. So much for the effectiveness of an oath taken by a government official. Any government official at all.

For this they ought to have been shot for treason.

Every single Supreme Court Justice who participated in this appalling action at the very least should have been brought to trial and condemned as there was no defense of such a clear cut violation. They could not have claimed anything but Nolo Contendere. No Contest. Which is, obviously, an admission of guilt, made in hopes of mercy from the court.

After such a treasonous and criminal action, one would think the GOP is no longer entitled to criticize liberal judges whom they like to call Activist Judges...legislating from the bench. But that would not take into account one of the most difficult attributes of the Republican Party, namely, that they have no honor. There is no lie, no act of corruption so low that, even when shown to be dead wrong, which would bring from their lips, an apology, or an admission of guilt or even responsibility. This is the major downfall of the Republican Party. This one defect is what places the GOP, generally, in the position of keeping close company with stupid people. If not being entirely stupid themselves, individually, their collective actions follow precisely the behavior of stupid people. This behavior is named after the scientists who defined the behavior of stupid people who proclaim loudly their ignorance, such as the screamers at the rallies in the summer of '09. Known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It seems that stupid, ill-informed, opinionated people, are incapable of understanding that, in fact, they are wrong and their position is based in unskilled ignorance. They cannot be dissuaded from their position however much it conflicts with factual information. It is axiomatic that unskilled people, especially of low IQ, exhibit such behavior. Conversely, the skillful person, it has been found, in the same study, tends to underestimate his or her own skill and competence. ♦

Outlaw Tasers

2010-09-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Brutalization of the DOJ

ately, it seems that if local police all across America are not shooting and killing innocent citizens, then they are tasering harmless old folks and pregnant women. Then, when they are brought to court to account for their crime, they invariably claim to have been in fear for their lives. This alarming and relatively new trend points to poor training at the Police Academies. And this abusive stance is not confined to big cities. I do not know what the trainers are saying to these men and women, but by the time they get out onto the streets they have become brutally aggressive, when they are not being brutally defensive, and at other times simply brutal.

This civilization is not about that.

We are not yet a Third World or Emerging Nation where civil servants work for pittance and consider themselves lucky to be working at all. As far as I know, they are well paid, and given early retirement with good livable retirement pay packages. Nevertheless, look at the types of people who are hired. There is a famous case in Hartford Connecticut, where a man was not hired because he was deemed too smart. So the policy is to hire only the low mentals. And that is why these guys are so quick on the draw. They are ten times more likely to be emotionally and psychologically underdeveloped, and the complaint is not merely the much too quickness of trigger-happy and all too frequently, racist cops, too concerned about citizens obeying their every little command immediately and far too lax about dealing sensitively, with troubled people in complex situations. We have heard cops complain that we are asking too much of them, by asking them to be heroic and aggressive when necessary, and then sensitive, when needed, and to immediately know the difference. Instead we have far too many instances of thugs in uniform beating up and shooting children, and tasering pregnant women. And always, the local mayor must side with the officer in question or else invite the threat of rancor and insurrection among the ranks of the police themselves, and their union. What we have here is a good argument for hiring more intelligent and well-adjusted men and women to urban police departments. Send the low mentals who can't restrain themselves from tasering innocent old ladies and the very young.

In the video below, we see the extreme example of police officers invading a law abiding citizen's home, and brutalizing him because they were too frightened of a 64 year old man who was obviously unarmed, and merely rising out of his chair after asking the police officers to leave his property.

They tasered him for no good reason!

In fact, it appears that they tasered him because he didn't beg for a taste of their boot leather.

If these goons are not found guilty and fired from the department dishonorably--- and made an example of by imprisonment for the maximum sentence, it will be just another instance of corruption at City Hall. The detective in Washington DC, whom you will see in the video, is obviously on the side of police brutality. He dances all around the issue, all the while making excuses for the cops' cowardice. Brutalizing an injured 64 year old, unarmed man in his own home! This was all a matter of police arrogance. This is a serious issue which demands much more discussion by civilians in dialogue with the City Halls leadership of most cities and towns across America, and upper level police officials. ♦

Ben Bernanke Translated

2010-08-31T02:56:00.000-07:00

"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort." : Marshall McLuhan - (1911-1980)

"...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich." : Noam Chomsky

"I Was Wrong Again!" What Ben Bernanke meant to say

The Fed chairman delivers a big, but boring, speech on the economy at Jackson Hole. Here's a translation

By Andrew Leonard

August 30, 2010 "Salon" --

s a man, Ben Bernanke is prone to understatement, a tendency that was reinforced very early in his term as chairman of the Federal Reserve when a dinner-party comment he made to CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo sent financial markets into a tizzy the next day. Therefore, any speech he gives -- in particular, major speeches on the state of the economy at a time of high national anxiety -- must be read through a special filter. I call this filter the Bernanke-Hype-ometer, and I have applied it to the address he gave at Jackson Hole, Wyo., Friday morning. (Bernanke comments in bold, followed by Hype-ometer translations.)
The annual meeting at Jackson Hole always provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on the economic and financial developments of the preceding year, and recently we have had a great deal on which to reflect.
Hey, just this morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis downgraded the second quarter GDP growth rate to a miserable 1.6 percent! So, even after juicing the economy every which way but loose the last two years, we're headed in completely the wrong direction. Congress won't do anything to help, so now everyone wants me to stop the bleeding.

However, although private final demand, output and employment have indeed been growing for more than a year, the pace of that growth recently appears somewhat less vigorous than we expected.
Remember how I was the wrongest person on the planet when I said the subprime mortgage bust was "contained" and wouldn't cause a worldwide financial crisis? Haha, man that was dumb. Well, guess what, I was wrong again earlier this year, when I decided the time was ripe for the Fed to stop bailing out the economy.
Incoming data on the labor market have remained disappointing.
The working class is unbelievably screwed. This is kind of bumming me out.

Overall, the incoming data suggest that the recovery of output and employment in the United States has slowed in recent months, to a pace somewhat weaker than most FOMC participants projected earlier this year.
Double-dip recession, here we come!

Despite the weaker data seen recently, the preconditions for a pickup in growth in 2011 appear to remain in place.
At this juncture, the risk of either an undesirable rise in inflation or of significant further disinflation seems low.
OK, sure, unemployment is in the toilet, but don't expect us to do too much about it, because the only thing we really care about is inflation, and as far as we are concerned, everything's fine on that front.

The FOMC has also acted to improve market functioning and to push longer-term interest rates lower through its large-scale purchases of agency debt, agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and longer-term Treasury securities, of which the Federal Reserve currently holds more than $2 trillion. The channels through which the Fed's purchases affect longer-term interest rates and financial conditions more generally have been subject to debate.

OK, let me lay it out for you. The one thing the Fed is really prepared to do to help the economy is to keep purchasing debt, such as Treasury securities. By keeping our unbelievably monster huge portfolio of debt high, we theoretically lower the cost of borrowing throughout the economy. That should spur faster growth. We stopped doing this a while back, but so many people started refinancing their mortgages that our holdings of mortgage-backed securities began to disappear, which, ironically, meant that by not acting, we were actually contributing to a tightening of the money supply. That's a big no-no when economic growth is flat-lining. So when the economy started to go downhill again, we changed our strategy -- but not until after a big fight with members of the conservative faction of the Federal Reserve Bank's Board of Governors who believe that even such a cautious step was far too aggressive. These guys just don't care about unemployment. Some of them even think it's time to start raising interest rates! Hahahahaha.

By agreeing to keep constant the size of the Federal Reserve's securities portfolio, the Committee avoided an undesirable passive tightening of policy that might otherwise have occurred. The decision also underscored the Committee's intent to maintain accommodative financial conditions as needed to support the recovery. We will continue to monitor economic developments closely and to evaluate whether additional monetary easing would be beneficial. In particular, the Committee is prepared to provide additional monetary accommodation through unconventional measures if it proves necessary, especially if the outlook were to deteriorate significantly.
I am not going to be responsible for yet another market crash. So I stomped all over the reactionaries, because even a blind man can see investor sentiment is as fragile as a 2-year-old on a sugar crash. I really don't want to be remembered as the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over TWO recessions. So let me tell you plainly: If the shit really hits the fan, we're going to open the taps wide open, buy every Treasury bond in sight, drop money from helicopters, and keep the U.S. economy on life support.

This is why, incidentally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is back over 10,000 points. Yay me!

A rather different type of policy option, which has been proposed by a number of economists, would have the Committee increase its medium-term inflation goals above levels consistent with price stability. I see no support for this option on the FOMC.
Paul Krugman, who is one hell of a pain in the ass, believes that the Fed is far too concerned with keeping inflation low. He keeps whining about unemployment, and thinks that if we just did so much as announce that we are prepared to accept higher inflation, and then pursued monetary policy along those lines, the economy would get a steroid boost that would finally shake it out of its doldrums. Sorry, but that is completely nuts and it is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Ever! Please shut up, Paul.

Inflation expectations appear reasonably well-anchored, and both inflation expectations and actual inflation remain within a range consistent with price stability.
I know, I know, the Federal Reserve is entrusted by Congress with two mandates -- promoting full employment and keeping inflation low. But everyone knows that we only really care about price stability, so never mind what I said before about the shit hitting the fan. As long as inflation is fine, we're only going to take baby steps.

Despite this recent slowing, however, it is reasonable to expect some pickup in growth in 2011 and in subsequent years.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue. ◊

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.

Another Swing And A Miss for Congress

2010-08-26T02:41:00.000-07:00

Congress Misses the Ball

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Photo/Wikimedia

federal grand jury last week indicted retired pitcher Roger Clemens on charges he lied to Congress.

In February 2008, Clemens, a seven time Cy Young winner, voluntarily met with a House committee and testified he didn’t knowingly use steroids or human growth hormones. The only evidence against Clemens appears to be the testimony of his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who claims to have injected Clemens with the drugs about 40 times between 1998 and 2001. Clemens says he was led to believe the injections were Vitamin B-12 and an anesthetic, Lidocaine, both legal under Major League Baseball guidelines. McNamee cut a deal with the Department of Justice to avoid prosecution. Clemens could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Probably half the country thinks Clemens took illegal drugs. Probably half the country thinks he didn’t take the drugs and was set up by his trainer. But that’s not the important issue.

First of all, does anyone know why the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform even held a hearing about steroid usage among baseball players? Was there a dry spell and the Committee couldn’t find anything in the government that needed to be reformed?

If the committee thought public figures taking illegal drugs was bad, why didn’t it look inside itself first? If it did, there would be a high probability it could easily have found members of Congress and their staffs who also took steroids, snorted coke, or mainlined harder drugs. Stoned and wasted Congressional staffers pose a greater danger to society than any athlete.

This is the same body of legislators who created the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the early 1950s to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and association. It also ordered contempt of Congress charges and perjury against witnesses who told the truth—but not what Congress wanted to hear.

This is the Congress that in 1994 didn’t ask for convictions for perjury for any of the seven CEOs of major tobacco companies who testified under oath that nicotine wasn’t addictive. But that, and much more, is history. The present 21st century Congress has much more to answer about its actions.

This is the Congress that ran in fearful circles, put its tail between its legs and in 2001 passed the PATRIOT Act, which stripped Americans of six Constitutional amendments and the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Four years later, Congress reauthorized the Act to prevent several sections from automatically expiring. The terrorists had done their job well—they put so much fear into Americans that the Americans created their own terrorism.

This is the Congress that failed to question the Bush–Cheney administration’s claims of why it needed to spend about a trillion dollars and invade Iraq.

This is a Congress that was slow to respond to well-documented evidence that the U.S. was committing torture—and which, against the professional advice of the CIA and FBI, housed large numbers of elected legislators who saw nothing wrong with torturing those who may or may not have been terrorists, the election year “buzzword.”

This is a Congress that had provided negligent oversight of companies that provided billions of dollars worth of service in the war zone—and fraudulently overbilled the taxpayers.

This is the same Congress that allowed the banking and investment industries to make billions by scamming Americans, gave multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses to its senior management, and helped bring about the greatest recession since the 1920s.

This is the Congress that by negligence allowed lax oversight of environmental regulations.

This is the same Congress that was blind to the Bush–Cheney administration’s failure to properly regulate the oil industry, and probably should be considered to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the BP oil spill.

This is the same Congress that has allowed a Republican minority to become the street bully and block needed legislation, including legislation to assist small business. But because of a weak Democratic response and archaic procedures, the entire Congress must suffer a black eye.

This is the same Congress that did pass health reform, but allowed itself to be sunk by the fear of a Republican filibuster that what was passed was a watered-down version of what was necessary.

There are so much more important issues than investigating steroid usage among millionaire athletes that it is easy to believe that Congress muffed its responsibility to the American people by its righteous political gesturing to make voters believe their elected officials actually cared about health.

If Congress is so upset that others lied to them and the American people, maybe it could ask the FBI to investigate and the Department of Justice to bring indictments against not only some of its own members but also some members of the Bush–Cheney administration.♦

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu.

The Corporation

2010-08-18T00:46:00.000-07:00

The Corporation is Insane

accine for cows which are toxic to humans but nevertheless approved by the FDA. A designer clothing line which pays workers .74¢ an hour and sells shirts and other clothing for $59.99 retail and more. The ruthless corruption of the Monsanto corporation and the corruption of the FDA and the Patent Office. If you have never seen this documentary before, it will blister your brain. At least it will stun you if you have a conscience, and a sense of right and wrong. The cases explored herein provide excellent argument as to why we, as a nation, or perhaps all of world culture, must now consider dismantling the entire structure of capitalism in the world. To discover the horror stories of FOX NEWS and Monsanto concerning Monsanto's anti-biotic additives in cow's milk, which are now causing such terrible problems for American children, from cancer to premature onset of secondary sexual characteristics in very young girls. And the appalling miscarriage of justice meted out to two honest journalists at the corrupt hands of a Federal Courts of Appeals. The same courts, by the way, which have given monstrous corporations license to do as they wish in the market. When you see how you have been groomed as a mindless consumer, you will, I hope, get very angry. But more than that, much of this material is so horrifying that your mind will wipe it out, totally erase the impact of the film within a half an hour. But here is an excerpt from the movie where it is shown how the corporation is now and has been for quite a long time, insane. This not an exaggeration; the charge of psychopathology is deadly serious. Watch the check list carefully.

Here is a trailer of the 23 part documentary as shown and is available on YouTube.com.