Against Empire, Against American Slavery

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

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.

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Saving The Planet

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?

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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.■ 

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Vagaries of Capitalism

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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

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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

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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...■    

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