Learning from Wikileaks

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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."

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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...

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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. ♦

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So You Think You Live In A Democracy

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

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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.

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The Real Republican Agenda for 2012

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

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.

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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.

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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

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.