Ruminations

2010-09-25T15:44:00.001-05:00

Teh Gay

First of all, there will be opinions expressed here that may cause controversy. Sorry 'bout that chief, but that's the way it is.

To begin with, let's correct some of the rhetoric surrounding the “gay” issue. I'm tired of having to point out to people, being gay is NOT “normal”; it is “natural” without being “normal”. According to Merriam-Webster, “Definition of NORMAL 2a : according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, or principle”; whereas “natural” “Definition of NATURAL 2a : being in accordance with or determined by nature b: having or constituting a classification based on features existing in nature.” In short, in other words, though being gay is NOT the “norm”, it is fully natural, i.e., there is nothing condemnable about being or not being “gay”.

Let's stipulate that peoples' sexual orientation is none of my business; the only time it becomes my business is when it comes to my being propositioned. I tend to agree with Heinlein on this one; it is always nice to be asked, I don't have to agree to it but it is nonetheless nice to be asked. However, someone's sexual practices have absolutely nothing to do with me. Unless I ask someone about the topic, it is not something that generally comes up in conversation. I don't bang on about my personal sexual orientation and don't really care to explore others' orientation.

As to the question of “choosing” to be gay or heterosexual, one needs to ask of those “heterosexuals” when did they “choose” to be heterosexual? All of us, every man jack out here, have both homosexual and heterosexual aspects. It's very similar to the old Carlin routine where, as George said, “You're in the dark, rubbing up against someone, kissing and fondling, having a good time and, when someone turns on the light and you find out the person you were fondling turns out to be the same sex, we're all trained to shriek “ABNORMAL” and run into the night screaming. But, it felt good.” In other words, what Carlin was saying is that the actions themselves were pleasing but our cultural training says it is something evil. Nonsense!

Do people “choose” to be gay? I don't know, do people “choose” to be heterosexual? If quizzed, I wouldn't be able to tell anyone when I “became” heterosexual, I just noticed early on that I liked girls, even before anything of a sexual nature had developed. Do people “choose” to become a despised minority? I doubt it. I'm certain some people “choose” to express their “gay” side (bad experiences with the opposite sex are quite possible to cause one to “choose” not to repeat those).

What I have long contended, unless one is having sex in public, either heterosexual or homosexual, one's orientation is absolutely immaterial. After all, there are laws on the books regarding PDA (public displays of affection) and, though I believe such laws may go a bit far, I feel they should be applicable no matter what kind of “affection” is being displayed.

In conclusion, whether one “chooses” their orientation or they come by it “naturally”, that should hardly be any kind of a criteria of evaluating a person. Of course, it goes without saying that I have friends, close friends, who are gay. So? I did NOT choose them because they were gay, I chose them because of who they are as people. Period.

2010-01-09T12:20:00.002-06:00

Kill the Democratic and Republican Parties? Why Not?

I have (mainly) held my tongue in regard to the present “liberal” Democratic (mal)administration. It has been almost a full year since the Obama administration has taken the reins and, on the basis of that track record, contrary to Obama's self appraisal of his governance as a B+, I would be forced to grade his administration to date as a D- if not an F!

Obama and his henchmen rode into Washington as “change we can believe in” and promptly changed....nothing! Certainly, Obama said he was going to close down Guantanamo, but he backed down on that promise. The first order of business for the Obama administration in dealing with the financial crisis brought upon us by the Wall Street banksters was...to flood Wall Street with TRILLIONS of dollars in outright gifts and “quantitative easing” (cash) so as to enable the banksters to reopen the frozen lines of credit to small businesses and individuals. The result? The TBTF (To Big To Fail) Wall Street banks still remain close fisted in regard to reestablishing normal credit flows while, simultaneously, showering themselves with multi-million dollar bonuses for a “job well done”! However, anyone who bothered to notice would note that the very economic advisors Obama surrounded himself with were, primarily, Clinton era retreads, many of whom were directly involved in demolishing the very FDR era regulations that were put in place specifically to keep the Wall Street banksters somewhat reined in.

Unfortunately, this is the same tune that the Obama administration has played on a variety of issues. Instead of breaking, openly and flagrantly, with the horrendous practices of the GW Bush (mal)administration, time and time again the Obama (mal)administration has happily embraced virtually ALL of the GW Bush era violations of the Constitution and the citizens' Constitutional rights. Rather than “do the right thing” and bring Bush era goons (including Bush and Cheney) before the bar of justice, the Obama (mal)administration has focused on “looking forward and not backward” and allowed that group of monstrous miscreants to run scot-free! I suppose that means that, should I ever be accused of a crime but am not caught red handed in the act, when I come before the judge I could say, “Your Honor, let's look forward and not backward” and be acquitted? Not bloody likely!

Regrettably, I could go on and on and on citing similar insane arguments made by this (mal)administration to excuse or even continue discredited policies from the previous (mal)administration, but to what end? Suffice it to say that this is hardly what one would call “change”.

Unfortunately, the Republicans are, if it can be imagined, even worse. I say this because, as has been demonstrated during the GW Bush (mal)administration, even at their nadir of public support there was a good 25-30% of the voting public that STILL supported all the manifold heinous policies of that (mal)administration! What that translates to, in raw numbers, is that some 75,000,000 (out of some 300,000,000) Americans are raving lunatics or, at least, closet fascists who will always side with “the powers that be”. Is it now so difficult to understand how Nazi Germany became Nazi?

The Democratic Party has become nothing more no less that Republican light inasmuch as they are funded by essentially the same forces (F.I.R.E. sector, Big Pharma, “health” care sector, et sim) as their Republican legislators. Furthermore, the Republicans simply refuse to even try to constructively address the manifold problems destroying this nation. The ONLY solution the Republicans have to any and all problems is “tax cuts” (for the wealthiest 1%) and less regulation, even though it has been more than adequately demonstrated that these “solutions” simply DO NOT WORK! The Democrats, on the other hand, to attempt to achieve some semblance of “bipartisanship”, have continually accepted Republican tropes, undercut their own principles and STILL weren't able to enlist any real Republican support!

If nothing else, the GW Bush (mal)administration finally proved that the Republican tropes of “cut taxes, cut regulations” are simply useless. However, the Rahm Emanuels (like Bubba Clinton before him) are politicking using the “triangulation” strategy. YOU CANNOT TRIANGULATE between totally unworkable (the Republican trope) and marginally workable (the Democratic alternative) and come out with a practicable policy. For all their myriad failures, the Republicans at least do one thing; they stick to their guns, maniacally, and refuse to budge. The Democrats, on the other hand, either know nothing about bargaining (you start by going for your most maximal demands and then bargain down; you don't start with a compromised position and bargain down from there)!

Horrid as it is to say, I have to agree with Lenin's maxim that to make radical change one needs to make matters WORSE to bring matters to a head. As it is, the American public is constantly faced with a choice of picking the lesser of two evils. Eventually, following this logic, the entire system becomes more and more evil (for, if you always must choose between evils, your choice will always be, of necessity, evil). As mentioned above, the Republicans are past masters at sticking to their maximalist positions while the Democrats are constantly yielding their positions and trending more and more toward the Republican position. We have now come to a pass where the differences between Democratic and Republican positions are negligible, at best.

The Republican Party has shown (at least since Reagan) that they ONLY rule for the top 1% of the population. If for no other reason, this in and of itself is a sufficient indictment for the termination of the Republican Party. By the same token, since the Democrats have insisted on becoming nothing more nor less than Republican light, they too have signed their own death warrant. It is well past time to draw down the curtain on both these diseased and discredited political parties and start anew. Perhaps, this time, we can end up with AT LEAST one party whose constituency will be the vast majority of the American people. Slim hope but at least it is a possibility.

2009-10-06T16:31:00.002-05:00

It's NOT just racism...

As the brainless bovine that make up the birther/deather/teabagger crowd emit their fact less, logic less squeals primarily about Obama, many commentators of the left/liberal variety jump on the “it's racism!” bandwagon. True, as far as it goes, many of the mindless gasbags are, at their core, racists. Many of those who lament “We want our country back!” are those that want the fictional white, middle class utopia depicted in “Leave it to Beaver” back. Sigh! Those days really never were, as I should know since I was alive back then and have memories of that era. But, this is what they want.

However, these self same regressive poo flingers are, in the main, adamantly against the very things that made the comfortable middle class life possible during the Eisenhower era. Most are adamantly against unions, though it was unions that won many of the labor victories that made the 5-day work week, the 8-hour work day and a decent, livable wage a reality. They would foam at the mouth and scream “Socialism!” were the government to go back to the Eisenhower era top marginal tax rate of 91% for those making over $3 million a year. They would go beyond apoplectic were Obama to send federal troops into a state to enforce federal law on equal access to affordable housing as Eisenhower sent federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce Brown v. Board.

All this being said, the opposition to Obama and the Democrats is not merely racist. It is a deeper, more malevolent, more malignant kind of opposition. It is an opposition that anyone representing/holding a more liberal viewpoint, no matter what the issue, is illegitimate and, therefore, unfit to rule. These are the "monarchists" in today's society who feel that they, and they alone, are morally superior enough to rule. Though these sentiments of the ruling elite are mouthed by many who “the ruling class” thoroughly despise, they are merely parroting the noxious talking points fed them by that self same “ruling class” (über rich elitists with an over inflated opinion of their own self worth). These talking points are spewed out by the multiple paps of the reichwing Wurlitzer (O'Reilly, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. ad nauseam), who hold themselves out as “average Joes” simply “telling it like it is”. The fact that they are multi-millionaires with absolutely no knowledge of life in the trenches as experienced by the vast majority of their audience seems to be of no consequence. For the purpose of leading their muttonheaded flock, they assume the mantle of “the common man” though in no wise actually having any real, personal knowledge of what the real common man faces. They are isolated in their luxurious ivory towers, having no truck with the common peasants living in squalor, whose sole purpose, according to these wealthy charlatans, is to serve them.

Let us not forget, for all the truly despicable actions of Bill Clinton, he was not guilty of the vast majority of false charges claimed by the self same rabble that is now clamoring for the head of Obama. Clinton was a war criminal, he was a poseur as champion of “the people” while selling them and their interests down the river; all this is true. He was not, however, the murderer of Vince Foster, he was not an accomplished land manipulator (he and Hillary actually lost money on White Water). Virtually all of the charges that excited the hottest denunciations of Clinton and his wife by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy were, quite simply, baseless. Again, in the case of Clinton as in the case of Obama, that minority (the mega-wealthy, over-privileged class) are adamantly fixed in opposition simply because they have absolutely no desire to have one iota of their power and privilege eroded to devolve to the masses.

So, remember, it is not simply racism, it is a wicked though small cabal of rich elitists who want more for themselves and less for everyone else.

2009-09-19T12:55:00.004-05:00

Let's talk health care, shall we?

OK, I've held fire over the entire health care debate, hoping against hope that the Congress and Obama administration would, finally, forsake the imprecations of the highly funded health care combine (AMA, PharMa, AHIP, etc. ad nauseam), but that was not to be.

The absolute pile of crap that came out of Baucus' Senate Finance Committee showed just how beholden Baucus, Conrad, and Bingaman are to their primary funders, the out of state health care lobbies. The bill itself was drafted by one Liz Fowler who, until earlier this year, was an executive VP for the health care concern Wellpoint, Inc., primary owner of the majority of Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans in the U.S. So, this being the case, is it any surprise, whatsoever, that the Baucus Senate Finance Committee bill is just one great big wet kiss for the health care industry?

After last weekend's clueless gathering of mentally deficient “9/12ers” in D.C., one could only scratch one's head in bewilderment at how these people, the very people, by and large, that are and will continue to be screwed by the health care industry, were loudest at braying approval of the status quo. What is sobering is to realize that most of that crowd of unwashed, mouth breathing, knuckle dragging mental midgets can and probably do vote!

And, more astoundingly, though they raged and screamed about “socialist medicine” few, if any in that crowd, had ever actually experienced “socialized medicine” and had absolutely no idea what they were braying about. Contrary to the “masses” that showed their abject ignorance of the subject, I have actually experienced “socialized medicine” in both Europe and Canada. Again, contrary to all the “horror stories” of restrictions on providers, restrictions on procedures, interminable delays and scarcity, all of my experiences with European and Canadian health care were very salutary. When admitted to a hospital, after obtaining necessary personal data, I was quickly ushered to a hospital bed and was nursed and treated every bit as well as I ever had been in any American hospital. When going to the doctor I merely had to present my “health care ID” and got in to see the doctor in short order. When labs and tests were indicated, there was no major delay in obtaining them. And, most importantly, NO BILLS WERE TENDERED FOR ANY OF THIS CARE!

The pathetically weak, industry dominated Baucus bill is in no wise ANY KIND of “socialized health care”! It is a huge gift package for the health care industry, with “individual mandates” that would benefit the health insurance industry with MILLIONS of new “insured”, even if the only insurance available to many would be, essentially, worthless coverage. With literally dozens of ways for the insurance industry to game the system, Baucus' “health care reform” would, actually, be less than useless, it would be positively harmful!

Unfortunately, at this point it seems that the whole “health care reform” charade needs to be scrapped and, since it is manifestly obvious that the Republicans won't sign on to anything of consequence anyway, it needs to be redrafted from scratch. And, more importantly, when the redrafting begins, it should BEGIN from the standpoint of UNIVERSAL SINGLE PAYER! If necessary, then the universal single payer MAY be bargained down to a robust, heavily subsidized public plan. The public plan can be retained as a FALL BACK position, but it certainly shouldn't be the point of departure for a real health care reform plan.

2009-08-22T14:25:00.002-05:00

Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Bail?
You betcha!

We are constantly being assailed, from all sides; the for profit media, government spokespersons, the talking heads on radio, TV and the inter-tubes, that there are companies and concerns that are “too big to fail”. They are “too big to fail” because, should they collapse, the economic reverberations would be too dire to contemplate. Therefore, due to their economic and political size, if they are in danger of failing it is incumbent upon the government (i.e., the taxpayers) to bail them out.

There is an excellent article today by Dave Lindorff, “Whatever Happened to Antitrust?”. He points out very clearly how much of the problems that the economy is now experiencing comes from the relaxation and non-enforcement of many of the antitrust laws. Many of these antitrust laws date back to the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft administrations. Unfortunately, this relaxation and non-enforcement of these antitrust rules cannot solely be laid at the feet of Bush the Lesser. It was during the Clinton administration that a premier anti-trust agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was abolished in 1995.

Additionally, IMHO, the entire concept of “too big to fail” is perverted and largely an aspect of the “American way of life”. The entire idea of “mass production” has morphed into unsupportable gigantism. Gigantism, by definition, “...is a condition characterized by excessive growth...” (emphasis added). Certainly, mass production has led to lowering of price and increase of availability of most commodities. However, this very lowering of price and increase in availability has led to overproduction. For example, were we to produce fewer automobiles the prices of cars would go up. However, that would in turn mean that vehicles would be kept longer, maintained better and people would, of necessity, place a higher value on the vehicles they have. People would, in turn, stop thinking of cars as disposable commodities, hence slowing the rate of cars being junked.

Ah, I hear you say, “But! That would mean a slow down in growth! Our economy would crash!” Well, yes, the consumerist version of our economy would crash...and more the better! A great deal of our economic problems come from that self same consumerist economy. As we have become ever more a “throw away” culture, we have amped up the use of natural resources. As it is, the U.S. has only about 4% of the world's population yet we use about 25% of the world's resources! This while, all during the Cold War, we went about the world selling the “American way of life”. Now, that China and India are becoming more wealthy and aspire to the “American way of life”, one can readily see that that situation is insupportable. Were the rest of the world to adopt the “American way of life” at this moment, it would require 4 more Earths to supply the current world population! There are no other Earths out there to provide those resources. There are two and only two possible ways out of this predicament. Either the Earth's population, ourselves included, will have to drastically cut back on their consumption or drastically cut back on the world's population. Yes, neither is a very palatable choice but, that's what we are stuck with. We must go back to a time before Edward Bernays and his heirs and their public relations forced America (and the rest of the world) into our present consumerist culture, back to a pre-consumerist world. A world where a citizen's worth was not measured by their consumption. A world where one didn't discard perfectly good items simply to get the “latest and greatest” gadget to replace it. A world where items were economically reparable and where you didn't have to discard an otherwise operable item for lack of a replacement gear. Frugality is still a virtue.

Also, if we were to slow “economic growth” and bring back the idea of frugality and repairability, there would be a growth in the real economy, i.e., local appliance repair shops, local repair facilities of all kinds. Slowing “growth” is not a bad idea. Cutting back on consumption is a good idea. Promoting population control, worldwide, is a good idea. A modicum of sanity by politicians and polities would be a good idea. I fear it won't happen until material circumstances force it upon us.

2009-08-08T06:29:00.004-05:00

Beware what you decide to believe in...

Perhaps now, with the ginned up, phony “outrage” (in many cases, paid for and subsidized by the mega corporations of the health care combine), people may understand where this commentary is coming from. Let me take, as an example, such as Rachel Maddow, who in general I highly praise and like.

OK Rachel, like many, many media types (but, especially liberals) was in full throated support of the “Iranian Twitter© Revolution”. This is understandable, Iran has a repressive, theocratic regime which, among other things, suppresses womens' rights and those of other despised minorities such as the GLBT community. So Rachel, as many other commentators, loudly applauded and supported the ongoing protests in Iran that have been Twittered and Facebooked and MySpaced around the planet. However, is Rachel aware that the mechanism used to unseat Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 was this self same one? Are Rachel and the myriad other commentators who have loudly and strongly backed the Iranian “revolution” aware that the current demonstrations follow, almost exactly, the game plan enacted by Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (Teddy Roosevelt's grandson) in Iran in 1953? The plot that Kermit and his CIA cronies used was to stage massive street protests (riots) by segments of Iranian society disaffected by Mossaddeq's reforms. There are now (and always will be) segments of society that are disaffected. If any confirmation of this is needed, one need only reflect on the fact that, even at its nadir, G.W. Bush and his (mal)administration garnered over 20% (>60,000,000) approval ratings. If even a sizable portion of those 60,000,000+ people had turned out in street demonstrations and those were reported as the demonstrations in Iran were reported, an outside observer, with little or no knowledge of the internal situation in the U.S. at the time, might well reason that the majority of Americans actually supported G.W. Bush, Darth Cheney and their policies. They would be sadly mistaken but that would, nonetheless, be their takeaway of such demonstrations and reporting.

Another variant of this kind of flawed reasoning is displayed by many, many commentators who loudly lauded the various “color” revolutions in Yugoslavia and the post-Soviet sphere. Even such luminaries as Thom Hartmann have repeatedly lauded and noted with approval those manufactured “revolutions”, again, being wholly and abysmally ignorant of the situation on the ground. Caught up and washed over by the “news” coverage of the For Profit Media, Hartmann and others huzzahed these “revolutions” as honest reflections of the “will of the people”. What is often omitted from his and other commentators' evaluations is the fact that the “revolution” in Yugoslavia as well as the myriad “color revolutions” is the fact that they were ALL covertly (and, sometimes, not so covertly) supported, organized and funded by either the U.S. government outright or through various NGOs (“non-governmental organizations”) such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, to name just two. What is often forgotten is that both of these NGOs were founded under the Reagan administration, primarily to take over various formerly CIA functions such as encouraging and facilitating “regime change”. It should also be noted that the Soros Foundation also has had a hand in the Yugoslavian and other “color revolutions”. The IRI, NDI and Soros Foundations were all instrumental in establishing, organizing and funding all of these various color “revolutions”.

As was the case in the Venezuelan “overthrow” of Hugo Chavez, there certainly was a resentful core to the opposition to him. What was hardly ever accentuated in the U.S. press, this opposition was, primarily, the upper middle and upper classes who had been forced by Chavez to relinquish a tiny bit of their choke hold over the economy to the wider society. Much as was the situation in Cuba in regards to Castro, much as is the situation in Honduras with President Manuel Zelaya. Certainly, those who stand to lose power, money or position in a society are going to be upset, that goes without saying.

Again, if some outside observer, ignorant of the true dynamics on the ground, were simply to judge on the basis of “news” reports, they would have to conclude that the majority of Americans fervently and vehemently detest the very idea of change in the health care system and its delivery...and they would be very wrong!

So, this warning applies to all who rush to judgment with but a minimal, partial and/or media generated opinion, “Beware what you decide to believe!”

2009-06-26T06:26:00.005-05:00

The Right Wing Media as Iago

Over the course of just the last year there have been 3 high profile massacres/attempted massacres/murders committed by persons having extreme right wing views. Let us give each a cursory look and see what we can divine from them.

July 27, 2008 - “...a politically motivated[1][2](emphasis added) fatal shooting took place at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. Motivated by a desire to kill liberals and Democrats, gunman Jim David Adkisson fired a shotgun at members of the congregation during a youth performance of a musical, killing two people and wounding seven others.” Wikipedia entry “Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting”. When the right wing media were accused by some of having had some part in motivating Adkisson, they howled most vehemently that they were in no wise to blame. Those denials became strangely muted when, during his interview and the rambling letter he left behind specifically stated that his was a hate crime. During the police search of his home the police found:

1.Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage
2.Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism by talk show host Sean Hannity
3.The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly Wikipedia

Additionally, he specifically stated that on his wished for hit list were the Democratic members of the House and Senate as well as “100 People Who Are Screwing Up America” by Bernard Goldberg Wikipedia This hardly seems to comport with the protestations of the vehement, violent right wing talkers who say that they are innocent.

May 31, 2009 – Scott Roeder, a long time violent anti-abortion activist assassinated Dr. George Tiller at Dr. Tiller's church. Roeder had a long history of anti-government (Freemen) and anti-abortion extremism (Army of God). Roeder had already been convicted in 1996 on explosives charges (which begs the question, “How was he in possession of a handgun?”). Roeder had been reported to the FBI the day previous to the assassination attempting to glue the locks to Dr. Tiller's clinic shut. Roeder had ties (there is debate as to how close) to Operation Rescue. Wikipedia

Following the assassination of Dr. Tiller, Operation Rescue's founder, Randall Terry, had this to say (“distancing” Operations Rescue from Roeder):

“Terry: The point that must be emphasized over, and over, and over again: pro-life leaders and the pro-life movement are not responsible for George Tiller's death. George Tiller was a mass-murder and, horrifically, he reaped what he sowed.

Q: So who is responsible ...

Terry: The man who shot him is responsible ...

Q: ... because that makes it sound like you were saying that he [Tiller] is responsible.

Terry: The man who shot him is responsible.

Q: What did you mean by "he reaped what he sowed"?

Terry: He was a mass-murder. He sowed death. And then he reaped death in a horrifying way.”

“Terry Declares That Tiller "Reaped What He Sowed”

June 10, 2009 – James von Brunn walked into the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. with a .22 caliber rifle and shot and killed a security guard. Again, as in the case of Scott Roeder, von Brunn was a convicted felon so the question must be asked, “How was he able to be in possession of a firearm?” Von Brunn had, in 1981, entered the Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C. and taken people hostage at gunpoint. He was tried, convicted and imprisoned for that crime. Von Brunn had a long history (after all, he was 88 years old) of violent anti-social, anti-Semitic, anti-racial activity. He was motivated by the likes of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

Please be advised, the above is merely a cursory glance at the information available on all these incidents. I urge each of you who read this to bestir themselves to do some surfing of the net to get more details on all the above.

The main point of this piece is this: “Does the violent right wing Wurlitzer (Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, etc. ad nauseam) bear any responsibility for these and similar acts?” Let me put it this way, was Iago responsible for Othello's murder of Desdemona? If you are asking, “Did Iago murder Desdemona?” of course the answer is “No”. However, if you frame the question as “Did the act of whispering vile calumnies about Desdemona into Othello's ear cause the death of Desdemona?” the answer would have to be an unequivocal “Yes!”

Were the depraved howlings of the right wing Wurlitzer the proximate cause of the deaths above? No. Did their invective laden scream fests, broadcast to millions of people, many on the very knife edge of sanity, lead to those deaths? I ask, you decide!

2009-03-13T19:37:00.002-05:00

STOP BLOWING BUBBLES!

Time for Obama to tell his economics team to “Cut the crap!”

“You say you want a revolution?”

Einstein once famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Starting with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and FED chair Ben Bernanke and now continuing to Bernanke and new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, all have repeated explicitly that, in their efforts to resuscitate the economy, they want to “re-inflate” the housing bubble! Think about that for just one moment. These “Masters of the Universe” want to commit us to the very self same path that has brought us where we are today. By Einstein's definition, this is the very definition of “insanity”!

One of the major problems that has led to the crash and burn of the worldwide financial system and, probably the crash of our domestic economy and, maybe even a Depression, is the series of “economic bubbles” that have been encouraged and grown by such as former FED chairman, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was responsible for inflating the dot com bubble and, when that collapsed, for inflating the housing bubble. Greenspan was also highly in favor of the myriad “innovative financial instruments”, all of which were completely unregulated (by design) and with no oversight whatsoever!

This whole idea of economic “bubbles” is based on the idea of increasing lending which leads to increases in investing and, especially, increases in spending. As Paulson and Bernanke and Geithner and a whole myriad of other economic “bright boys” have said, “We need to get credit flowing again!” There's only one problem with this, to have lending you must have borrowing. The public has borrowed itself out. Borrowing means, to the individual, debt. As it is, the vast majority of credit worthy borrowers have maxed out. They are carrying as heavy a debt burden as they can. And, lending to the not credit worthy was what the whole charade of the “NINJA” (No Income, No Job, No Assets) loans was about. When you lend to people who can't pay back those loans, the loans go bad. When the loans go bad, the various “bundled debt instruments” built upon those debts go bad as well.

Loans are still available for credit worthy individuals, it is just that they are not borrowing anymore. As the old saw goes, “You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.” The borrowers aren't drinking anymore.

More than anything else, the government needs to:

Stop throwing good money after bad! The Wall Street banksters have become incredibly wealthy by gaming the system. Wall St. has, for at least the last decade, been running the market like a casino. Well guess what? They've bet badly and lost, badly. The government should NOT try to “save the Wall St. banks”. If the Big Boys (AIG, Goldman Sachs, BoA, etc.) are broke, they should be taken over (gasp, Nationalized!), restructured, broken up and, when they are made sound again, privatized. After all, that's what we have an FDIC for, right?
Get rid of the thieves! It is more than high times that all those “bright boys” that have led us to this dismal place take their medicine. Those who knowingly, willingly skirted the rules should be prosecuted, ala Bernie Madoff. ALL the boards of directors of all the Wall St. banks MUST be fired. They are all criminally incompetent or simply criminal. Either way, it's out on their ear with them!
Investigate, prosecute, jail. It is well past time to investigate those governmental agencies and officials who were tasked with monitoring the banksters and yet somehow managed to miss every single red light on the board. There are rare exceptions. Sheila Bair, Chair of the FDIC, has for years been pushing for more stringent oversight. Oddly enough, under the Bush administration all her pleas fell on deaf ears. Once the investigations have been completed, those officials and ex-officials who allowed the shenanigans that felled the financial system should either prosecuted or fired or both. And, those found guilty of collusion with the Wall St. banksters must go to jail. And not Club Fed either. I mean federal penitentiary, with bars and big, bad, nasty boyfriends.
Stop blowing bubbles! Stop trying to maintain the broken system that has gotten us here! No more “bubble economics”. If we are to persist with a capitalist economy, let it be a true capitalist economy. You invest in companies because you believe in the service/product and expect to gain from the success of that venture. If you guess badly, poof! there went your money. No more of this insanity of capitalist socialism! No more “privatize the profits but socialize the losses”!

2009-02-05T13:57:00.003-06:00

Sit down and STFU already!

Enough already! Time for the progressives and Democrats to stand up and clearly tell the regressives and Republicans to “Sit down and STFU!” in no uncertain terms.

On all the talking head shows for some unknown and unfathomable reason there are far more Republicans and reichwing ideologues being asked for their opinions on the current stimulus package and, predictably, they come out spewing the old (and discredited) bromides about “tax cuts” (for the wealthy and mega-corporations) and cuts in increasingly frayed social services for the rest of us. ENOUGH! The last 28 years (yes, I'm including Clinton's 2 terms because many of his policies sprang from the same éminences grises that got us where we are today!) where the political and economic center has been violently wrenched to the right of center and the very economic policies for tax cuts for the rich and service cuts for the rest, HAVE been implemented. Look where it has gotten us. Greater concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny minority with the attendant pauperization of the majority. With the greater concentration of wealth into fewer hands, political power has also been concentrated in fewer hands. With our political system the way it is, once a senator or representative is elected to office, the majority of their time is subsumed in fundraising for the next election. Many, if not most, legislators don't even have time to do the job they were elected to, they usually don't even have time to read the bills they vote on, much less examine them carefully and think about how it will affect their constituents. These mundane duties are delegated to their staff. Even in those rare cases where the legislator may not be compromised by moneyed interests, often times their staffs are.

With the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the moneyed interests, the interests of the vast majority, i.e. the public at large, suffer. While the moneyed interests virtually dictate legislation beneficial to themselves and their interests, the public interest is forgotten. For example, when the credit card companies essentially rewrote the bankruptcy laws to their perceived interest, the ability of the common citizen to get any true debt relief was essentially stripped away. However, interestingly enough, were the same bankruptcy rules to be applied to the Wall St. banksters who have gamed the system and become monumentally rich in the process, all of Wall St. would have crashed by now, all their company and personal assets would have been liquidated and all the Thains and Madoffs would now be residing under bridges. Obviously, this has not and will not happen because we do have a two-tiered legal system; very harsh treatment for the common man and extremely lenient treatment for the wealthy and powerful. Imagine, if you will, that you had embezzled say $25,000. Once the theft were detected, you would be taken forthwith to the jail to await trial. If you can afford to do so, you may be able to bond yourself out until trial. Once convicted, off you go for a lengthy stay at a state or federal penal facility. Now, look at Bernie Madoff. Certainly, he has posted an immense bond (but he had stolen an immense amount of money). Pending his trial he is under “house arrest” at his luxurious Manhattan penthouse. Even if he should be convicted (after all, he can afford to hire the best counsel money can buy), he may well be sentenced to a minimum security facility, maybe even one of those Club Feds where you pick up trash in the morning and play tennis in the afternoon. In addition, if you (a common peon) are accused of a variety of offenses, all of your assets are seized, even prior to trial, making the task of defending yourself near impossible. See the difference?

Again, we have had 28 years of essentially, Reaganomics i.e. massive tax cuts for the wealthy and mega-corporations. So, what hath these failed policies wrought? Immense concentration of existing wealth into the grasping hands of the greedy, massive destruction of wealth for the lower and middle classes. Near total neglect of the public infrastructure leading to increasing failure of that infrastructure. The outsourcing of most of the American industrial base to low wage foreign countries which has also helped wreck the unions in the United States. The massive pillaging of the Federal Treasury by private interests has left the United States, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt.

So, in conclusion, each and every time one hears the standard Republican line of “tax cuts” to remedy our current troubles, one must be very careful to say “Sit down and STFU!”. It has been tried, for 28 years running, and has directly led us to the disaster we find ourselves in today. Remember, Republicans, “STFU”!

2008-11-19T10:57:00.002-06:00

Lieberman? Rahm Israel Emanuel? Democrats?

Change? We can believe?

The American electorate, in numbers too large to ignore, voted for Barack Hussein Obama II and his slogan, “Change We Can Believe In”. So far, the Obama pre-administration has shown little if any change from the staid and rancid ways of Washington.

Yesterday the Senate Democratic Caucus, with the encouragement of Barack Obama, voted to allow the former Democratic, now Independent Senator, Joseph Lieberman, to retain his Chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. This after the “Independent” Senator Joseph Lieberman (2000 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate) deserted “his” party (Lieberman caucuses with the Democrats) to campaign vigorously for the Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John S. McCain and other Republican candidates in various other races!

In the meantime, Barack Obama has appointed Rahm Israel Emanuel (remember, Israel is my middle name!) to act as Obama's White House Chief of Staff. It would be well to remember that Emanuel was Bill Clinton's senior advisor in the White House from 1993 to 1998. After resigning his position as Clinton's advisor, Emanuel became an investment banker earning $16.2 million in 2½ years which provided the wherewithal for his bid for the 5^th District U.S. House seat. (Wikipedia)

Sigh! This is change? We can believe?

The Democrats have remained true to form. At the very least, the form they have shown for the duration of Bush the Lesser's administration and especially since their victories of 2006 and 2008. Just a day after the 2006 elections in which Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives, new Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi

“House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi promised Wednesday that when her party takes over, the new majority will not attempt to remove President Bush from office, despite earlier pledges to the contrary from others in the caucus.” ~ NYTimes

And, let us remember, Nancy Pelosi has stood by her pledge to keep “impeachment off the table” despite vigorous agitation by the progressives who were instrumental in helping the Democrats regain the House.

Democrats? Change? To use these words in a single sentence seems to be an oxymoron, much like the idea of “military intelligence”! Granted and acknowledged, it was of utmost importance to remove the Republicans from Washington's levers of power. However, the “hope” of “change” the people are investing in Barack Obama and the Democrats would seem sadly misplaced.

As I noted in a piece I wrote immediately following the 2006 elections:

“Granted, it is vitally important that the incoming Democrats do not immediately institute comity and the sense of bipartisanship. It is vitally important that the Republicans be treated under the very rules they themselves promulgated and instituted against the minority Democrats, not so much in the spirit of vindictiveness but as an object lesson of why comity and bipartisanship are irreplaceable and necessary facets of proper and fair legislation. It is fit and proper for the Republicans to toil in basement meeting rooms; that they suffer the indignity of having their lights and microphones arbitrarily cut off; that they not be notified of hearings on bills and are forced to search Capitol Hill for the location of the hearings…from which they will be summarily excluded.” ~ “Which way you goin' Billy? Can I go too?”

The Democrats did nothing to make the Republicans pay any price whatsoever for the egregiously uncivil and undemocratic behavior they demonstrated toward the opposition when they were in power. Now, that the Democrats have increased their margin of majority in the House and are within a loud shout of 60 votes in the Senate, the Republicans (and the great reichwing Wurlitzer) are bleating piteously that the Democrats are bound to demonstrate “tolerance” and “bipartisanship”. Bipartisanship? Just how much more “bipartisanship” do the Republicans want? The Democrats have been shameless in repudiating their own constituencies and seconded virtually every demand of the Bush (mal)administration and the Republicans! The Democrats have backed every Bush era ravaging of the Constitution, from the gutting of FISA and retroactive immunity for the telecoms to “enhanced” interrogations. Just how much more “bipartisan” do they want the Democrats to be? The only possible increase in “bipartisanship” the Democrats could demonstrate would be for all the Democrats to simply become Republicans.

All I can say is: "Place not your faith in princes."!

2008-10-26T13:54:00.002-05:00

Crash and Burn
(or, the ruinous end of the Empire of Dunces)

Though it is to be expected, the pandering For Profit Media is leaving the American people a thoroughly uninformed and, even worse, a hoodwinked one. This will lead to horrendous results with the present and upcoming Crash of the American Empire.

Even now, as the end of the reign of the American Empire swiftly encroaches, most Americans remain cocooned in their comforting blankets of ignorance. This is easily seen in the espoused world views of such as “Joe the Plumber” as well as the vile howls issued by various attendees of many McCain/Palin rallies. Their videotaped inanities show various degrees of: misinformation, brainwashing, illogic, ignorance, hatred and simple stupidity raised to the nth degree. Though the amateur reporters/videographers sometimes attempt to correct the misinformation espoused by the shrieking Know Nothings, rather than reflect for even one moment on such information, these obviously hateful knuckle draggers simply spew more bile and vitriol.

How does this all connect to the topic of the crash and burn of the American Empire? Most of what these benighted dunces spew are outworn paeans to American “exceptionalism” and reflect their completely distorted view of America's present condition and position in the world. These dunces still see America as the undisputed “leader of the world”, a “beacon unto the world”, an “example to the world”. It is past high time that we, as Americans, come to grips with the fact that we are not now, if we may well have been, any of these.

Since 1971, when Nixon scuttled the Bretton Woods System (which had been specifically crafted to give the U.S. unquestioned financial dominance in the post W.W. II world), by severing the dollar's convertibility to gold, Nixon essentially simultaneously opened the door to turning the dollar into the world's “reserve” currency while turning the dollar itself into a fiat currency. As long as the underlying economy of the U.S. was sound, this was a quite advantageous situation for the country. As long as the U.S.'s real economy was relatively sound, this was a wonderful idea; the dollar's status as reserve currency created a huge demand for dollars essentially acted as a massive subsidy and support for the U.S. economy.

However, over at least the last 30 years, “conservatives” and Republicans (far too often with major support of many “Democrats”) have been busily at work, hacking away at the very essence of America's “real” economy. As they steered America further and further away from a “real” economy and toward a financialized economy, through a wide variety of Randian, “free market” manipulations, more and more of America's real economy, actual manufacturing, has been increasingly offshored to low cost labor markets. What this has meant is that America's productive economy has been hollowed out, those higher paid jobs going offshore, replaced by much lower paying service jobs. In tandem with those losses we have had a shift into “financial” jobs, i.e., non-productive speculation.

With the rise of the financial sector the “Whiz Kids” on Wall Street have created a myriad of “financial innovations”, such as the now evident vaporware such as CDOs, SIVs, etc. In addition to creating these vehicles of their now revealed Ponzi scheme, the Wall Street sharpies went around the world, selling what they knew to be worthless scraps of paper as “solid” investment vehicles. As the underlying bad loans started to sour, the Ponzi scheme was exposed and the entire financial deck of cards began to crumble.

With exposure of the underhanded double dealing of the fat cats and speculators on Wall Street, the U.S. has lost what vestiges of legitimacy it had. The U.S. now stands naked before the world, the world's biggest debtor nation, it's financial markets shown to be all flash and no cash. The situation has become so bad that there is serious talk in international financial markets of abandoning the dollar as the reserve currency and turning the yuan into the new reserve currency. Before you scoff at the idea, it would be good to remember that China now has the largest reserves followed by Japan. Again, it is good to remember that the U.S. is now the world's largest debtor nation. To put it bluntly, we are bankrupt and China and Japan are our biggest creditors.

There is a very good reason why snake oil and patent medicine peddlers were “traveling” operations; you had to peddle your nostrums quickly and be off...before the local yokels either became sickened from the garbage you peddled them or found out that the “medicine” was worthless! Wall Street and the U.S. have peddled their sickness inducing products and now that the world economy has fallen deathly ill from this financial toxic waste, they are looking accusingly at the peddler and are quite irate. The pitchforks and torches are out and the tar and feathers are being brought to the fore.

It will be a quick, inglorious and disastrous fall!

2008-10-12T03:17:00.002-05:00

On the economy...

No, I'm not an economist...and I don't even play one on TV, however, I have had a few economics courses and I still maintain an ability to reason and face facts and reality head-on. Hence, the following observations.

1. Though it would be pleasing to do so, one simply cannot lay ALL of the blame on Bush the Lesser's (mal)administration. Granted and agreed, this (mal)administration has removed what few restraints and regulations were still in place holding back the tidal wave that has crashed about us in the last few days. However, even when the current (mal)administration took office, most of the restrictions and regulations that were developed and implemented following the last economic cataclysm (oddly enough, arising from many analogous causes as the current disaster) had been dissolved.

2. Although the causes for the current financial and economic tsunami can be almost directly traced to the Reagan/Bush I (mal)administrations, Bubba Clinton and his (mal)administration are hardly blameless. Though often painted by the right wing as “liberals” and looked back at today by many “liberals” and Democrats as a “Golden Era”, Clinton was, in no wise, a liberal. Clinton (and Al Gore) were there at the founding of the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) which served as one of those fabled devices of “triangulation”. What “triangulation” meant, in essence, was to push the Democratic Party away from its traditional base (workers, small business, minorities of all stripes, etc.) and toward more of the traditional Republican base (F.I.R.E.¹ Sector, Wall St., etc.). The DLC reasoned (erroneously it would seem) that the traditional Democratic base had nowhere to go so they could be ignored while the traditional Republican base could be wooed and won by adopting more (big) “business friendly” policies. Additionally, Clinton surrounded himself with such Wall St. fixtures as Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs chairman) and Lawrence Summers (Goldman Sachs chairman). As has proven to be the case with the current Secretary of Treasury, Hank Paulson (yet another Goldman Sachs alum), though they may accede to offices of public trust, they never forget from whence they came and hold the interests of the Wall St. entities close to heart.

3. The unseemly, unbecoming and inappropriate spectacle of the “Millionaires Club” aka the U.S. Senate crafting and voting on a Wall St., “bailout” bill (inappropriate inasmuch as ALL revenue bills are supposed to originate in the House) was truly nauseating. Nauseating because by far the vast majority of communications from their constituents was solidly against any bailout of the Wall St. fat cats that had made millions of dollars by essentially engineering the very situation they needed to be bailed out from! Isn't it interesting, when the question came to the common folk who were victims of the schemes of the Wall St. banksters and needed some help to maintain a roof over their heads, the Senators, Congress critters, and banksters almost uniformly shrieked “Moral hazard!”, “Moral hazard!” And yet, when it comes to bailing out the very people most responsible for creating the situation and circumstances that have led to the current disaster...”Listen to the sounds...of silence.”

This was unseemly and unbecoming because, without any shadow of doubt, all of the Senators and Congress critters are far wealthier than the average American and many are heavily invested in Wall St. and were, therefore, voting their own interests rather than acting as “representatives of their constituents”. Were this in the judicial arena, virtually the entirety of the Senate and House would have to recuse themselves for “conflict of interest”!

What has been shown by these last two weeks, to any who had any doubts, that the current system of government is broken; totally, completely and irremediably broken! What I find terribly disturbing was a comment from Brooke Gladstone on PBS's “Bill Moyers Journal”:

“BROOKE GLADSTONE: Rather than trusting the leaders to make the decisions that we elected them to make.” (emphasis mine)

And, though it doesn't come out from the transcript, Gladstone seems disturbed that the people aren't trusting their “leaders”! As I recall, this country was established as a “representative democracy”. The reason it was established as a representative democracy and the citizens had to “trust” our “leaders” “...to makes the decisions that we elected them to make.” is because communications were limited to the speed of a horse and even the original 13 colonies covered a large enough territory that communications between constituents and representatives were not feasible in any sort of timely manner. Today, in the era of instant communications, the “peoples' representatives” need to be much more responsive and attuned to the sentiments of their putative “bosses”, their constituents. As it is, these last two weeks have dramatically shown that the “peoples' representatives”, both Republican and Democratic, take their marching orders from their true bosses, the F.I.R.E. Sector and Wall St. and to Hell with the desires of those that actually put them in office!

At this point all I can suggest is that each and every one of the Senators and Congress critters who voted for the “bailout” and is vulnerable to election should be summarily removed in the upcoming election and replaced by someone who understands who the true bosses in a representative democracy really are!

____________________
¹ F.I.R.E. Sector = Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.

2008-10-01T04:05:00.002-05:00

Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi!

(Updated below)

Well, according to the latest news, the trillion dollar bailout has ground to a halt. Now, the Fools on the Hill (i.e., the Democrats) are laboring mightily to resurrect the stinking, rotting corpse. To that I say, “Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi!”

It is more than middling odd to see Sellout Pelosi prancing and preening for the cameras, promising that the bailout WILL be finalized before the end of the weekend. I say more than middling odd inasmuch as both congresspersons and senators, both Democratic and Republican, are reporting that they have received an avalanche of e-mails and faxes in the past few days. And, according to these representatives and senators, that avalanche of correspondence is running 100 to 1 AGAINST the bailout. And yet, here is Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Congressman Barney Frank, Senator Dodd et al., all strutting around, pleased as Punch that they are crafting a bailout package that their constituents are adamantly against! And people wonder why Congress has a disapproval rating between 73-78%?!

This is supposed to be a “representative democracy”, right? So, just who are the Congress critters and senators representing? It is most obvious that they are not representing the people who voted them into office! Perhaps they are representing their true constituency, the mega-wealthy and the FIRE sector, the people who have bought and paid for their representatives (both Congressional and Senatorial) and by God, their bought and paid for shills had better produce!

We hear, repeatedly, just put the Democrats back in charge and all will be well. What a crock! In 2006 the voting public massively voted against the Republicans and, by default, for the Democrats. Have they ended the occupation of Iraq? No! Have they dismantled the so-called “Homeland Security” apparatus whose prime concern seems to be the persecution of domestic dissent? No! Have they ended the disgrace that is Guantánamo? No! How about holding the telecommunications giants as well as the Bush (mal)administration to book for the blatantly illegal spying on the American public! Hah! The Democrats bent over backwards to bend over backwards! Even though on that issue as well, the public was clamoring NOT to grant blanket retroactive immunity, our “representatives” discarded any appearance of representing their voters.

We are told by the Pelosis and Immanuels that the most important thing is “to elect more Democrats”. To what end? When the positions held by the Democratic establishment are virtually indistinguishable from the positions of the putative opposition, the Republican establishment, why bother to “vote Democrat”?

As The Who said so well back in 1971:

“I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around me

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again

Don't get fooled again

No, no!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss”

Smile; we've been so fooled again!

Update:

Shock! Seems some of the Fools on the Hill may not be as foolish as I thought. In response to a veritable flood of e-mails and faxes the “bipartisan” bailout of Wall Street as gone down in flames.

As Speaker Pelosi pointed out, "The legislation may have failed; the crisis is still with us." This is true, but, that being the case, I would offer the following as a basis to rectifying that crisis.

Scrap the Paulson plan, period. From its inception, the Paulson plan has been of Goldman Sachs, by Goldman Sachs, for Goldman Sachs. There is every good reason to believe that Paulson's rushing to the rescue of AIG was owing to the fact that, had AIG folded, Goldman Sachs would have gotten pennies on the dollar. Nuff said.
Any bailout plan for Wall Street MUST include a rollback of personal bankruptcy protections to the status quo ante of the punitive Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Or, going one better, analogous provisions of that Act should now be imposed on the CEOs and executives of any Wall Street entity seeking a government bailout.
Provide for at least a foreclosure moratorium for homeowners earnestly attempting to retain their homes and attempting good faith efforts to continue to pay at least payments with which they were enticed into purchasing/refinancing their homes.
As part and parcel of any government bailout, executives of any entity being bailed out must return to the Treasury any monies in excess of $1,000,000 per annum in pay or compensation received for each of the preceding 7 years. If that means they must divest themselves of that “cute” ski chalet in Steamboat Springs or their summer “cottage” in Gstadt, so be it.
For the duration of the bailout, all CEOs and executives of any of these entities would be required to work for minimum wage until that entity is stabilized. If it's good enough for California's public servants, per Herr Schwarzenegger, why then, it should be fine and dandy for the high flyers who, through their own actions, caused the mess from which they now beg to be bailed out.
Start a pool to which Wall Street firms will “voluntarily” donate contributions to aid in the bailout. As we are so often told, our taxes are “voluntary” payments to fund the government; let Wall Street “voluntarily” aid themselves.

The above is far from a comprehensive list, however, it does provide a basis from which the Congress can start crafting some semblance of a viable bailout which will not favor the same gimlet eyed gamblers who benefited so handsomely while driving the economy off the cliff while further impoverishing the already stressed and strained taxpayer.

2008-09-07T15:13:00.002-05:00

American Politics as Dr. Feelgood

You've been feeling down, seem to have a mass in your abdomen, and are having problems with defecation. So, you go to one doctor who examines you and tells you you have a tumor and must undergo serious, perhaps life-threatening surgery. So, you go to a second doctor who, after examining you, tells you it is nothing to be worried about, gives you a laxative and some pain pills and tells you to come back in 2 weeks if things don't get better.

If you are like the typical American, you accept the second diagnosis without further question, take the laxative and load up on pain pills. The American electorate hates nothing more than being told any “inconvenient truths”. We, the electorate, want to be told that, as in Lake Wobegon, “...all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” We certainly don't want to hear that we have been serially lied to and misled by both parties. We don't want to hear that, through our profligate lifestyle, we may well have fatally damaged our biosphere, that to even think about remedying that damage we will have to seriously change our evil ways. This obvious obliviousness is best demonstrated by the chant of “Drill! Drill everywhere! Drill offshore! Drill in ANWR! Drill! Drill! Drill!” As has been perhaps best illustrated by Sarah Palin who, like most of her Alaskan neighbors, is 4 square behind drilling in ANWR, ignore the fact that, at best, this would only temporarily and slightly ease the problem of gasoline prices, if at all. Even more distressing, that drilling and the continued and increased use of hydrocarbons will only worsen the climatic problems that are already being evidenced. Palin has no problem whatsoever in dooming the polar bears to extinction, as a matter of fact, she has been a solid supporter of mounting legal challenges to the designation of polar bears as endangered species. Additionally, she has offered up a bounty of $150 per wolf killed (they tend to prey upon the moose and caribou she so loves to hunt).

Americans love to have their egos stroked, especially by their political “leaders” by being told that they are “exceptional” as in “American exceptionalism”. It would be useful if we actually looked at the definition of the word first:

exceptional

Pronunciation:

\ik-ˈsep-shnəl, -shə-nəl\

1: forming an exception : rare

2: better than average : superior

3: deviating from the norm: as a: having above or below average intelligence b: physically disabled~ Merriam-Webster

Of course, we like to believe that we fall into the first 2 definitions of the word, however, we should realize that “exceptional” also means:

Synonyms: aberrant, abnormal, atypical...

We always want to hear our politicians sing paeans to the “exceptional” America where “...God shed his grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea!” and damn all those who would bring up such “minor” aberrations as the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Native population, chattel slavery, manufactured wars (Mexican-American and Spanish-American) to facilitate land theft, etc. We certainly don't want to be told that any of our actions in our entire history have been anything other than beneficent. Of course, all of our wars, military incursions, sponsored coups, assassinations and other actions have always been for the benefit of others; never for the benefit of ourselves or the real owners of the political system, the wealthy and mega-corporations.

On those rare occasions when a politician does tell the American people the inconvenient truth, the American electorate immediately turns their back on that politician and raptly follows the current Pied Piper who will tickle their ego; even if this consists of pandering to the very basest of our predilections. And, like the patient who goes doctor shopping to find one who will tell them everything is OK, just take these pills and call me back later, we will be terminally surprised when we find ourselves dead on a slab because the “inconvenient” diagnosis of a tumor was correct all along.

2008-08-13T15:00:00.002-05:00

A Georgian Riff

I have just about reached the end of my patience with the mindless propaganda regurgitations about the Russian-Georgian conflict. Enough!

Virtually every expostulation from the vaunted Western media, even the more even handed ones, has "cute" little phrases like, "We still don't know who fired the first shots that led to the Georgian military moving into South Ossetia Friday...". Hello! Isn't the very phrase "...the Georgian military moving into South Ossetia..." rather a telling one? Could it be the joint NATO-Georgian war games completed just prior to the Georgian blitzkrieg may have had something to do with it? Could it be that the main Georgian assault on Tskhinvali, which made NO distinction between military and civilian targets, have had something to do with things? And, as for the "brutal Russian counterattack on Georgia", when viewed from the perspective of targets attacked, was far more selective than the Georgian assault which ignited the instant conflict. Among all the tales of horror emanating from the multiple paps of the Western house organs, we are told of the "taking of Gori" and the "civilians fleeing in terror" from the advancing Russian horde. What we are definitely NOT told is that there was a major military base at Gori (as well as a good number of NATO and American military advisors). We are NOT told that much of the fleeing was done by the 'crack Georgian military' when Saakashvili's all or nothing bet came up a cropper.

Much of the Western "coverage", such as it is, portrays the "scrappy, spunky Western oriented" Georgia as a "democratic bulwark" based on a grassroots Western style democracy which sprang from the so-called "Rose Revolution" which catapulted the Harvard educated Saakashvili to power. What essentially all the Western coverage elides is the fact that the "Rose Revolution" was stage managed, fomented and funded by the West. It also neglects the fact that Saakashvili has been, from the outset, nothing more nor less than a Western sock puppet, bought and paid for by the West specifically to be a thorn in the side of Russia. And, by gosh, Georgia has been dutifully playing its part as such. Much like the snotty little kid who acts the bully on the schoolyard and, when challenged, calls on the services of a much older, much larger brute to act as his enforcer. In the case of Georgia, we, "the West" are that enforcer.

Also, I'm really impressed at the feigned horror of the Western propaganda organs at Russia's daring to "attack targets deep in Georgia, far from South Ossetia". Odd, when the US/NATO combine illegally attacked Yugoslavia in 1999, the very first attacks that opened that 79 day bombing campaign were aimed, not at targets in Kosovo but at Belgrade...hundreds of miles from Kosovo, I certainly didn't see any shock or horror evinced from the Western media. Quite the contrary, all the Western media, "liberal" and neoconservative, were howling for more blood. From the very outset many of the very same "pundits", "opinion makers", "foreign policy experts" who are now decrying Russia's quite legitimate actions were at the forefront in demanding more carnage, more lethality, just MORE in terms of aggression against Yugoslavia. The vast majority of Russia's attacks have been aimed at military targets in Georgia and were carried out with an eye to degrading Georgia's military capability. Have there been mistakes, collateral damage? Of course. But let us not forget, every time the US/NATO hit schools, hospitals, residential areas, trains, bridges, etc. in Yugoslavia, that too was "collateral damage" (even though the "collateral damage" in Yugoslavia was far and away more disproportionate to the military damage wrought). Not so with the Russians in Georgia to date. Though the Russians have struck Georgia proper, its targets have been military with the occasional stray ordnance, hardly the situation that applied to the US/NATO and their gang rape of Serbia in 1999. Hardly like the intentional bombing by NATO of hospitals (cluster bombing of the Niš hospital and its environs, for example), embassies (the very precise bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Beograd, for example), the bombing of Slobodan Milošević's private residence (with the admitted aim of assassinating him), etc. ad nauseam.

2008-08-10T13:07:00.002-05:00

Have we looked in the mirror lately?

“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate--and quickly.” ~ Lazarus Long from “TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE”, By: Robert Heinlein

The above quote from Robert Heinlein came to mind recently while vaguely listening to TV news. The story was about the 'heroes' returning from Iraq. It caused me to recall reading news stories and watching German newsreels about the Wehrmacht 'heroes' returning from the occupation of the Soviet Union. I recalled how all the Russians who were fighting against the Nazi occupiers were referred to as either 'bandits' or 'terrorists'. Odd, isn't that the same way we refer to the Iraqis who are fighting our 'heroes' in their country? Even more odd, I recalled the story of one of the Afghan detainees now in Guantánamo who is being held as a terrorist because he threw a hand grenade at the invading U.S. troops. As I seem to recall, those wascawy revolutionaries (Americans) were doing exactly the same thing to the British troops during the Revolutionary War. Oh, and BTW, the Brits were calling our Founding Fathers and the American Revolutionaries 'bandits' and 'terrorists' as well.

Though Thom Hartmann, among others, has made the point more than once, it needs to be repeated; what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan is in no wise a war, it is occupation, pure and simple. By all rules of civilized war (what an oxymoronic expression!) defending yourself, your family and your country from invaders is sanctioned under the Geneva conventions. And, to make matters worse, what we, America, have visited upon Afghanistan and Iraq is the prime war crime of 'waging a war of aggression'. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq threatened nor could realistically be called an existential threat to the United States, and that would be the only legal justification for waging war without UNSC imprimatur, which we did not have. Not that that makes any difference to us, it counted for absolutely nothing when the U.S. (NATO) engaged in a 79 day bombing war against Yugoslavia. The U.S. is now raising all kinds of accusations against the Russians for rushing troops in to South Ossetia to defend their own countrymen (cca. 90% of the population of South Ossetia are ethnic Russians), decrying Russia's intervention on it's own border (oh BTW, riddle me this, why do we never hear of North Ossetia? Maybe because it is part of Russia?). The intervention of the Russians was asked for by the leaders of the “breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia”. Yet, somehow, while the Americans are decrying Russia's intervention in South Ossetia (after 10 Russian peacekeepers had been killed by the Georgian military), they can't seem to see the utter hypocrisy of this position, especially while America is engaged in illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan stemming from illegal invasions. Odd, isn't it?

We 'love' the Iraqis (and Afghanis) so much that we call them “towel heads”, “hadjiis”, “camel jockeys”, etc. ad nauseam. Of course, to make it easier to murder fellow human beings, it helps to denigrate them and make them less than human. After all, didn't we call the American Indians “redskins”, “savages”, “beasts”? Didn't we call the Germans “Huns”, the Japanese “Nips”, “slant eyed devils”, the Vietnamese “gooks”?

I recall in my youth how Americans were puzzled how so cultured, educated and civil a people as the Germans could have possibly backed a regime as murderous and monstrous as the Nazis. Have we really looked in the mirror lately?

2008-07-16T09:57:00.001-05:00

The Hopelessness of Lesser Evilism

“I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it.” ~ Eugene V. Debs

Eugene Debs said it all in the statement above. Election cycle after election cycle we are faced with a choice of bad or worse. Obamamania aside, what real “change” does his “Change we can believe in” offer? That certainly is not to suggest that John S. McCain would offer any more or any better change either. So, what are we left with? “Your execution is tomorrow morning. Would you rather be shot or hanged?” Quel choix!

One of the worst facets of our present predicament is that all the major sectors of our society; the political, the for profit media, the blogosphere and social norms, all push for the inevitability of the current duopoly. We are constantly told, “There is no other choice! You either back the Democrats or the Republicans; any other choice is a waste of your vote!” This is the device used, time and again, to neuter and emasculate any true populist movement, any progressive movement, any movement which is considered to be “outside the box”. “Well, I'm often told, “if the Democrats don't win (especially the Presidency) what will be of the Supreme Court! Just imagine what the Republican candidate would do to the Supreme Court!” True enough, but...what wonderful justices has the last Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, left us? Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer? Both are jurists whose outlook and opinions are quite corporate friendly. In Kelo v. City of New London, both Ginsburg and Breyer concurred in the extension of eminent domain in favor of corporations and to the detriment of private citizens or small stakeholders. My, isn't that just so 'progressive'?

“But, I'm told, “if we have McCain as president, then Roe v. Wade is history! What of a woman's right to choose?” Well, for those that haven't noticed, the several states, in the main, have been nibbling (sometimes gobbling) away at Roe v. Wade so there truly is little to lose at this point. What will happen if Roe goes the way of the dodo, is that we'll go back to the status ante, i.e., in more progressive states women with means will be able to get abortions; those without won't. That really isn't much of a change of the status quo, truth be told. Will there be states where a woman won't be able to get a legal abortion? Certainly. However, that is more or less the situation today. In many places in the United States as of this writing, women have to travel hundreds of miles, sometimes across state borders to get a legal abortion.

Also I hear, “But with the current make up of the court we at least have had some minor victories! After all, the present court reinstated habeas corpus!” True enough and, certainly, were more conservative jurists to be placed on the Supreme Court even these minor 'victories' might well be lost. However, it must be remembered, starting from the Reagan presidency, through Bush the Elder, Clinton and, especially Bush the Lesser, the lower courts have been seriously skewed to the right. There are now so many 'conservative' jurists serving that it is extraordinarily difficult to even get a case before the Supreme Court. Certainly, there are laudable exceptions, even among the reich wing coterie now infesting the benchs at the Circuit and Appellate levels. This is cold comfort though for the many that are turned away from the courthouse and the Democratic Congress has only made the situation much worse with their ill begotten FISA 'reform' legislation, granting retroactive (read: ex post facto) immunity to telecommunications companies who blatantly and with full foreknowledge, violated the existing FISA laws. And here I thought that “I was only following the orders of my superiors!” had been discredited at Nuremberg! Silly me.

We are all constantly told, “But, those that voted for Nader in Florida in 2000 gave Bush the presidency!” Oddly enough, many of these are the same people who, rightly IMHO, argue that, if all the votes had been counted in Florida in 2000, Gore would have won. To those “Democrats” (yes, I'm looking at you Eric Alterman, among others) who go into apoplectic fits when attacking the very concept of Ralph Nader, all I have to say is, “Pick ONE!” Either Gore actually would have won the election (had the Reich wing of the court not given the chosen one the election) OR the fraction of the voters that voted for Nader rather than Gore cost Gore the election (an extremely doubtful proposition). It is EITHER one or the other; you can't have both! The fact that Gore ran a rather bland and centrist campaign, with the misbegotten Lieberman as his running mate, doesn't seem to enter the equation.

Then there is the stolen election of 2004. Again, we had a rather bland campaign, run ineptly, with ABB (Anybody But Bush) as the mantra. The Democratic Party spent enormous time and money specifically to exclude Ralph Nader from as many states as possible BECAUSE the election was ABB. Well, they managed to narrow the choices, as John F. Kerry's campaign managed to narrow the differences between Republican and Democrat. In the end, even though AT THE TIME OF THE VOTE COUNT it was rather obvious that there had been egregious shenanigans executed, this time in Ohio as opposed to Florida. And we had the embarrassing spectacle of the very early capitulation, without any opposition on the part of Kerry (though even his running mate, Edwards, was livid at the campaign not challenging the obviously stolen election).

These are the fruits of 'lesser evilism'. We are constantly forced, by the rigged and managed primary and electoral process, to weed out any truly progressive voice from the campaign (the Democrats went so far as to field a primary challenger for Dennis Kucinich's House seat as well as numerous and various chicanery to exclude him early on from the primary race). After Kucinich was eliminated from the primaries, the attention of the Democratic machine turned on John Edwards, the next most progressive and possibly 'outside the box' candidate. What we, the populace, were left with were “a woman and a black” as candidates. Neither of the two remaining candidates was in any wise progressive (both are almost equally in thrall to the same corporate and financial task masters). In reality, there was very little difference between the 2 of them, in any substantive way. In the final analysis, we have a greater choice when in a Chinese restaurant and choosing “One from column 'A' or one from column 'B'!

2008-06-25T17:20:00.008-05:00

What's wrong with the Democrats?

Are the Democrats really progressive?

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." ~ Thomas Jefferson

Perhaps the very worst problem afflicting the Democrats (of course, the same and worse bedevils the Republicans), is mindless acceptance of any orthodoxy put forth by the Democratic hierarchy. These are myriad and multiple and they hobble the thought pattern of the vast majority of those who style themselves as 'liberal' or 'progressive' Democrats.

Among these orthodoxies are:

The overriding insistence on 'gun control'. Quite simply, the Democratic Party has long insisted on, what is in essence, unilateral disarmament of the populace in the face of increased militarization of the various federal, state and local police agencies. The simplistic dual arguments are, a) what good is an armed populace when faced with the overwhelming power of the state and b) guns in the hands of the people are the basis for crime, school shootings, domestic violence, etc.

Quite simply, both these arguments are bosh. If, as the commonly expounded thesis is framed, an armed populace can muster no resistance to overwhelming armed force, why are both the Iraqi and Afghani insurgencies proving to be such a massive problem to the world's sole remaining hyperpower? You mean we, the U.S., with the largest nuclear stockpiles, the most advanced military in the world, undeniable air, land and sea dominance, can't gain control of a society armed primarily with small arms and homemade weapons? Where does that leave that argument?

The common Democratic meme is that "guns are evil!" According to this argument, it is the mere presence of guns that make society 'dangerous'. Of course, this neglects the fact that there are societies which are even more heavily armed, per capita, than the United States. Switzerland, for example, has virtually every home stocked with military weapons. Virtually every home has a military (i.e., fully automatic) rifle. Every 3rd house has an operating machine gun, every 5th house has an RPG (with ammunition). Canadians are as well armed, in terms of handguns and long guns, as the United States. Oddly enough, neither of these 2 heavily armed countries have anywhere near the level of gun violence as the United States. What the Democrats (and other gun grabbers) refuse to face is the fact that perhaps, just perhaps, there are social factors in the United States that lead to the high level of violent crime that we experience. The main reason, IMHO, for this is well encapsulated in a quote from Shakespeare:

“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves if we are underlings.” ~ William Shakespeare quotes
The idiotic idea of 'political correctness' (which, BTW, is also embraced by the Republicans, on the other side of the spectrum). The government cannot, no matter what, force people to accept groups 'not like them'. This is not to say that the government doesn't have every right, even a positive duty, to withhold any semblance of government support (tax credits, tax rebates, special legislation, etc.) from any individual, group or entity that discriminates on the basis of age, race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. What it does say is that the government goes beyond the pale when it attempts to 'legislate' tolerance or even acceptance of people of different practices, no matter what those practices are. The Right has its demands for say, 'prayer in school'. Fine, you then legislate 'prayer in school', now on whose religion will that prayer be based? In areas where you have relatively homogenous religious communities, this may actually work. However, in any diverse area (virtually any town or city of any appreciable size) you will have a diversity of religions and religious practices. By favoring any particular religion or religious practice you will, automatically, be slighting others. So, you see the problem.

On the left you have the demand that people 'accept' say people from the GLBT community. First and foremost, it is of NO concern (or should be of no concern) to any but the individuals involved what any person's sexual orientation is. It certainly should never be allowed to be the basis of any kind of discrimination (whether housing, employment or any other activity or social benefit). Certainly, you will have those who insist that if they are say, renting a property, they should be able to discriminate on any basis they choose. If this is the case then, again, should any discrimination on any basis (race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc.) occur, then the individuals/organizations so discriminating should be disallowed any federal, state or local benefit (tax breaks, etc.). As I said earlier, one cannot force tolerance or affection upon an individual, however, social pressure (especially by peers, co-congregants, relatives) can well modify social behavior.
The repeated acceptance of the 'lesser evil' argument in terms of Democratic candidates. The Democratic process, as has been seen in at least the last several election cycles, always tends to exclude truly progressive and independent candidates and favor 'Establishment friendly' candidates. This means that true progressives and progressive policies get short shrift from the Democratic Party as it increasingly panders to its most 'Establishment' (read: corporate friendly) candidates. In this way, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party (one could argue, the most energized and solid base of the party) has been increasingly disenfranchised and the policies championed by most true liberals and progressives fall by the wayside or are so dramatically emasculated as to render them meaningless. For example, in this presidential race we are faced with Tweedle Dee (war criminal John McCrazy) and Tweedle Dum (Barrack Obama). Both are solidly enmeshed in the concerns and affairs of their corporate backers (though the outcome would have been the same had it been McCrazy and HR Clinton). Early on in the contest, both by For Profit Media's not-so-benign neglect as well as their outright derision, truly progressive candidates such as Dennis Kucinich and, to a lesser degree, John Edwards, were sidelined and forced from the race. This is a recurring pattern that is seriously, if not fatally, undermining the so-called progressive Democratic Party. Today, the Democratic Party is in most particulars, barely distinguishable from the Republican Party.

If there is to be any semblance of hope for truly progressive and liberal Americans (more than likely, a solid majority of the populace) all the above will have to be overcome by a revolution from within the ranks of the Democratic Party itself.

2008-05-18T16:06:00.005-05:00

"Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is" (h/t CTA)

(P)resident Bush, while on an official visit to Israel and addressing the Knesset, violated a couple of longstanding taboos. First, the injunction that 'politics ends at the water's edge', i.e., that domestic politics (dirty laundry) should cease once one leaves the confines of the United States. Obviously, making blatantly political statements in the legislature of a foreign land, even that of an ally, violates this injunction.

Second, the (P)resident also egregiously violated a corollary to 'Godwin's Law'. For those that have forgotten, Godwin's Law basically states:

"Godwin's Law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Hitler or Nazis or their actions." (Wikipedia)

For the record, here is the statement in question:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

A couple of points worth note. The “American senator” to whom Bush refers just happened to be Sen. William E. Borah, Republican senator from Idaho. Odd, isn't it, that Bush refuses to name the senator, eh? Further, it is most odd that G.W. Bush should even dare to mention any favorable connection to the Nazis, especially inasmuch as G.W. Bush's own grandfather, Prescott Bush, was deeply involved in the extreme right wing plot to topple FDR and install a fascist government in his stead in 1933. Moreover, Prescott Bush was one of Nazi Germany's primary financiers and was even convicted of 'trading with the enemy' for his financing of Nazi Germany. And yet, and yet, G.W. Bush has the temerity to even dare to try to tar Barack Obama with the Nazi brush? How outrageous is that?

“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?” Here we have the sootiest of kettles calling a relatively clean pot black and his spokesperson, Dana Peritonitis trying to say that, of course, the Nazi 'appeaser' barb was not intended to tar either Obama or the Democrats. Oh really? Then, who was it intended to defame? The Republican Party (a senator of the party who made the statement referred to by Bush)? The Bush family (remember, Prescott Bush was a nasty piece of work who attempted to overthrow his own government and replace it with a fascist regime and, further, was a prime funder of Hitler's Germany)?

In any vaguely sane and honest society, with a truly independent and free media, the airwaves and print media would be blaring forth the above facts and drawing the requisite conclusions. Other than very few commentators and the internets, what one mainly hears are the Sounds of Silence.

2008-05-10T22:55:00.006-05:00

Need we learn from the Iraqis?

I know. The title of this piece is a bit odd, isn't it? However, mayhap, the Iraqis are pointing to something that we have forgotten or simply grown inured to.

In interview after interview, discussion after discussion, perhaps the premier complaint of the Iraqi civilians are the practices of the American military in Iraq. And what, pray tell, are these practices that raise the ire of the Iraqis? Well, excepting (but only to a slight degree) the fact that American troops have a nasty habit of casually shooting Iraqi civilians without cause, those practices are, by and large, standard operating procedure for most American police departments. The practice of (barely) announcing their presence and then battering or blowing the door off the hinges is standard operating procedure. Then, once the door is demolished, troops rush into the home, screaming at the shocked inhabitants of the dwelling, frequently cursing, forcing everyone to the floor, usually forcible and mandatory shackling of everyone in the household.

What is so disquieting is the fact that virtually all of the above have become so much S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) here, in the 'homeland', that they hardly raise an eyebrow anymore. Is it that we have become desensitized through watching endless hours of 'COPS'? Is it because we have repeatedly been instructed that the police are only 'ensuring our safety' hence we must unquestioningly follow orders automatically?

It doesn't seem to matter that, each year, more civilians by far die at the hands of the police than police at the hands of 'criminals'. Though much is made of each and every law enforcement death (the yearly memorials to those police who have fallen; the funerals of slain police that rival in pomp the funerals of Chicago mobsters in the 20s), very, very little is made, especially in the mainstream media, of the many, many deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of law enforcement. Only because they are so well known, we have the incidents in NYC of Amadou Diallo (41 shots) and Shawn Bell (50 shots). That is NYC. Then there was the incident in 2006 where police shot and killed 92 year old Kathryn Johnson during a late night 'no knock' raid. Johnson wounded 3 police officers, Johnson herself was shot and killed. From a 2006 Christian Science Monitor story about the Johnson raid,

“The number of no-knock raids has increased from 3,000 in 1981 to more than 50,000 last year, according to Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.

Botched raids are relatively rare, but since the early 1980s, 40 bystanders have been killed, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.” ~ After Atlanta raid tragedy, new scrutiny of police tactics

These are the very practices that, applied in Iraq, have caused that populace to rise in resistance and riot. Granted, Iraq is being oppressed under the heel of an onerous, vicious and violent occupation. However, is it really that much different from what is happening increasingly here, in the 'homeland' or, more appropriately, the 'heimatland'? Here is a link to a very recent (May 7, 2008) occurrence in Philadelphia where 3 men were dragged from their car; beaten, kicked and abused. This is the same Philadelphia (different mayor, different police commissioner, same attitude) which framed and is dead set on executing Mumia Abu-Jamal. Rodney King is alive and well and living in Philadelphia, it seems!

Do the Iraqis have the right idea? Perhaps we should ask ourselves that pivotal question.

2008-03-28T18:17:00.003-05:00

On the one hand…then on the other hand…

According to Thom Hartmann, there is an increasingly greater probability that the Democrats will lose the Presidency in November. On the one hand, I find this to be highly problematical inasmuch as I truly do fear the competency, mental and moral, of the Republican contender, John ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Iran’ McCain. On the other hand, with the very real and deep sense of foreboding I have about myriad events I now see as unavoidable i.e., the serious probability of an economic crash, severe and prolonged economic depression, possible or even probable military engagements which will end badly, I feel it may not be such a bad idea for a Republican to inherit a Republican’s hash of a government. Should McCain accede to the Presidency and the above mentioned events I have mentioned above and others materialize, I believe that the Republicans will repeat the condition that maintained after the reign of Herbert Hoover, and bar the Republicans from the White House for a generation, if not more.

However, the reason for the loss of the White House to the Democrats this fall, if such should be the case, gives lie to the oft repeated Democratic line of “We have 2 equally good candidates for the Presidency.” It should be noted that there are not ‘2 equally good candidates’, this fact is self-demonstrating. Ms. Clinton (and her wretched cabal) from the start have been operating from the position that she, somehow, has a legitimate claim to the Presidency. She (and her cabal and enablers) have demonstrated that they truly could care less for the Democratic Party, especially the liberal and progressive members of that party, and that her ambitions take precedence over the good of the party, the country and the American public. She has shown that she is a shameless, serial liar. She (and her myriad supporters) continue to claim that she ‘misspoke’ or had a lapse in memory. If this is any indication of her mental capabilities this, in and of itself would and should disqualify her from the Presidency (just as it should McCain). However, as is the case with her self-glorifying ‘memories’ of her Bosnia junket, she misspeaks not once, not twice, but time and time again, each time ‘misspeaking’ in such a way as to better burnish her (non-existent) bona fides for ‘bravery’. She lies, repeatedly, when she claims “35 years of experience” which will “enable her to lead from Day One.”! The vast majority of those “35 years of experience” were either as the wife of a governor or president, hardly what one could credibly call ‘relevant experience’! If I were to apply for a position as a micro-biologist and the sole ‘experience’ I could cite was that I was married to a micro-biologist, I’d be laughed out of the office! Most of the rest of those ‘35 years experience’ were as a corporate lawyer for the likes of Tyson and Wal-Mart. Surely, a true champion for the ‘common man’…NOT!

Please don’t get me wrong, this is certainly NOT a paean in favor of Barack Obama. To my untutored eye he is every bit as much a ‘political animal’ (in all the worst ways possible), controlled by many of the same corporate interests and lobbyists as are Hillary Clinton and John McCain and the vast majority of those, of both parties, that ran or regularly run for office. The best outcome of a monumental failure of the Democratic Party to take the White House this cycle, is the final and total collapse of the Democratic Party. This is good inasmuch as it will allow the Blue Dog Democrats (Republicans in donkey garb), the Rahm Emanuels and the rest of the DLC, right wing ‘members’ of the Democratic Party to migrate to their true home, the party of entrenched power and money, the Republicans. With the collapse of the presently constructed Democratic Party, from the rubble a more truly democratic party i.e., “relating to, appealing to, or available to the broad masses of the people” (Merriam-Webster) might emerge. A party that would be attentive to the concerns and plight of “broad masses of the people” as opposed to catering to and groveling before the 1/10 of 1% of the ultra wealthy, the mega-corporations and true special interests. A party that would be dedicated to

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (Preamble to the U.S. Constitution).

It’s about time, don’t you think?

2008-03-19T14:18:00.002-05:00

The Cons say: Praise Welfare! (as long as it is for the Corporations!)

Here is a one-two punch for y'all.

Here is an excellent article on Counterpunch.org It's a Welfare State ... If You're Rich by Walter Brasch.

In the same vein, I offer you the video commentary of Jim Hightower, a Texan in the Molly Ivins mold:

Read well and ponder on the 'morals' of the mega-wealthy. They are all for privatizing their profits (keeping all the wealth for themselves) all the while socializing the costs (all failures and bailouts are to be paid for by we, the peons...err, people.)

2008-03-08T23:04:00.004-06:00

Lest we delude ourselves with nostalgia…

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the myriad abuses by the Bush (mal)administration of domestic, Constitutional and international law. However, we must keep firmly in mind that the path to many, many of these abuses had been laid by previous administrations, at least some of them Democratic ones.

Bush and others of his cabal have stated repeatedly that the U.S. "does not torture" and much has been made by Bush apologists about various practices and whether or not they fall under the definition of ‘torture’. William Blum has turned an excellent phrase in this regard, "Like pornography, torture doesn't require a definition; you know it when you see it or feel it." Albeit Michael McConnell has stated that he would find waterboarding to be torture if done to him, our oh so independent Attorney General, Michael Mukasey just can’t find it in him to declare waterboarding (or, for that matter, any other ‘coercive’ questioning techniques approved by the WH) as being torture. For, to do so, he would then be forced to start legal proceedings to determine who has sanctioned, permitted or approved of these procedures and then to prosecute them for it.

However, even before we get to our own instances of torture, horrendous as it is, we must examine the practice of "extraordinary rendition" of persons to states where it is fairly certain that they will be tortured. Why this, you ask? Well, it so happens that the practice of "extraordinary rendition" did not begin with the Bush (mal)administration. No, on the contrary, it was during the "liberal" Clinton administration that the practice was begun. I refer you all to several articles in "Mother Jones" that lay out the ugly genesis and development of this heinous practice. First, there is "Disappearing Act: Rendition by the Numbers", by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann. Now, prior to the ascendancy of the Bush cabal, there were an even dozen such "extraordinary renditions". This means that the "liberal" Clinton administration violated "…the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits delivering someone to a country where there are "substantial grounds" to assume that he might be tortured." And, according to Michael Scheuer, the original "extraordinary rendition" program was not even to collect information.

"The extraordinary rendition program was not primarily intended to yield information, according to Michael Scheuer, the cia official whom the Clinton White House tasked with implementing it. "It came from an improvisation to dismantle these terrorist cells overseas. We wanted to get suspects off the streets and grab their papers," Scheuer explains. "The interrogation part wasn't important." - "I Was Kidnapped by the CIA", by Peter Bergen

Yes, I know, it’s not "liberally correct" to speak ill of a former Democratic reign. The problem is, it is true and it needs to be addressed for, without knowing where we have been we cannot hope to know where we are nor just how we got here. Granted, with the coming to power of the Bush cabal, and especially after 9/11, the "extraordinary rendition" process has been thrown into high gear but, we must remember it was Bubba Clinton and his administration that started it.

Further, those that decry Bush’s Iraq attack (even if they hold that the equally illegal assault on Afghanistan had some legitimacy), let’s all remember what was wrong with it.

The "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" (AUMF) is NOT a declaration of war and, even though we’ve been rather lackadaisical in declaring war since WWII, that is the sole Constitutional means by which the U.S. can actually go to war;
Both the Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures were launched without UN Security Council imprimatur. Barring an imminent attack, the ONLY internationally sanctioned way to go to war is to be sanctioned to do so by the UNSC; and
The U.S. has engaged in myriad blatant war crimes in these instances (use of disproportionate force, use of illegal weapons, intentional targeting of civilian populations, intentional and needless destruction of civilian infrastructure, etc. ad nauseam).

Oddly enough, the three charges above are exactly the same as those that can be leveled against the Clinton administration and its ‘use of force’ against the Serbs in Bosnia in 1995 and against Yugoslavia in 1999.

Clinton and his cabal did not secure a declaration of war from the Congress.
They also, just as Bush II did after them, did NOT secure a UN Security Council Resolution permitting the U.S. (or NATO as we insist) to attack the Bosnian Serbs or Yugoslavia.
Further, the U.S. committed myriad war crimes during the 78 day and night bombing of Yugoslavia. They used illegal weapons (Depleted Uranium), intentionally targeted civilian populations, intentionally and needlessly destroyed civilian infrastructure to cause needless suffering to the civilian population.

Any of us with even ½ a grain of intelligence know that Bush’s fabled maxim of "They hate us for our freedom" as the "explanation" for 9/11 is garbage, pure and simple. However, those that dared suggest that it could possibly be blowback were derided as "Hate America Firsters". Oddly enough, the real explanation, or at least part of it, was made public in 1998. In an interview with "Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski made some rather revealing comments:

"Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries."

That question, Mr. Brzezinski, should be asked of the people of New York City, the Pentagon, the friends and families of those on those hijacked planes. Think that, maybe, "some stirred-up Moslems" could be a bit of a problem?

2008-03-06T14:55:00.003-06:00

Ain’t it amazing?

Here is a quick dissection of a portion of a news article from “Civil Georgia”, entitled “U.S Rules Out Recognising S.Ossetia”.

“…A journalist asked the U.S. secretary of state whether she thought the appeal was "a provocation" from Moscow, “or do you think it’s something inevitable?”

Rice responded: “I don’t want to try to judge the motives, but we’ve been very clear that Kosovo is sui generis and that that is because of the special circumstances out of which the breakup of Yugoslavia came. The special circumstances of the aggression of the Milosevic forces against Kosovars, particularly Albanian Kosovars, and it’s a special circumstance.””

“…but we’ve been very clear that Kosovo is sui generis and that that is because of the special circumstances out of which the breakup of Yugoslavia came.”

Hmmmm, “…we’ve been very clear that Kosovo is sui generis…”. OK, Ms. Rice, you’ve made clear that you (U.S.) consider the Kosovo situation to be sui generis, that’s fine. However, it is much like the quote by Abraham Lincoln,

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.” - Abraham Lincoln

Just as Madeline Albright before her, Condoleezza Rice calls many a tail a leg, which is their option, of course. However, the problem lies in the fact that they (and we, U.S.) then proceed to act as though by simply calling a tail a leg has made it so.

The Clinton cabal in the 90s resorted to this tactic early and often. A little known fact is that the Clinton’s were in contact with the Saudis and other radical Muslim regimes even before coming to power and floating the idea of supporting the then illegal Muslim breakaway province of Bosnia as a means of garnering Muslim support. Very early in the Bosnian phase of the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution, even though there was a standing arms embargo against all parties, the Clinton cabal was deeply enmeshed and involved in illegally and clandestinely providing arms to the Bosniak(sic) Muslim government of Alija Izetbegović (and the Croatian and Croatian Bosnian forces). Additionally, it was with the active cooperation (or, at the very least, tacit approval and knowledge) of the Clinton cabal that mujahideen, veterans of the Afghanistan and Chechnya campaigns (many former acolytes and colleagues of Usama bin Laden), were filtered into Bosnia also to aid the Izetbegović regime. Interestingly enough, during this entire period the U.S. and its compliant, subservient mainline media (and even large portions of the ‘liberal’ media) were 4-square behind the continual bashing of the Serbs, Serbia and Milošević for, purportedly, supplying the Bosnian Serbs with arms to defend themselves against Izetbegović’s forces, including the foreign mujahideen. I say ‘purportedly’ because there is little if any evidence that this was so. Certainly, undeniably, there were Serb paramilitary groups fighting in Bosnia on the side of the Bosnian Serbs. However, these paramilitary formations did not answer either to Milošević or the Yugoslav government. This is quite different from the situation of many Croatian paramilitary as well as official Croatian military formations fighting in Bosnia on behalf of Croatian Bosnians. This is not even to mention, again, the foreign mujahideen fighters. It would be good to note here that David Hicks, the Australian kangaroo skinner who was imprisoned in Guantánamo until his conditional release to Australia, was a veteran from Afghanistan who was imported into Bosnia and was photographed with the severed heads of Bosnian Serb civilians he had murdered. So, foreign (Muslim) “freedom fighters” and literally hundreds of tons of military equipment, weapons and munitions being covertly supplied by the U.S. and their willing minions, in violation of an international embargo, is totally OK; the participation of volunteer Serb paramilitary formations, without any government imprimatur are bad and evidence of Milošević’s and/or Serbian “illegal involvement” in the conflict in Bosnia. Tail meet leg.

With regard to Rice and her proclamation that:

“…that is because of the special circumstances out of which the breakup of Yugoslavia came. The special circumstances of the aggression of the Milosevic forces against Kosovars, particularly Albanian Kosovars, and it’s a special circumstance.”

“…the special circumstances out of which the breakup of Yugoslavia came.” Gee, could she possibly mean the “special circumstances” evinced at the 1991 Maastericht meeting at which the EC morphed into the EU? That same meeting where, in blatant violation of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act and even the entire premise of the Westphalian order since 1648, Germany blackmailed the U.S. and the rest of Europe into unilaterally dismembering a founding member of the UN? Could those “special circumstances” refer to US policy since Reagan to dissolve Socialist Yugoslavia into its constituent components…and beyond? Or could it be the “special circumstances” that permitted all the “indiscretions” cited above, as well as the planning, provisioning, and aiding of the Croatian “Operation Storm” which led to the largest “ethnic cleansing” in Europe since WWII? Or, perhaps it refers to the “special circumstances” which led U.S. envoy to perceive a “massacre” at Racak…even before any forensic personnel had even arrived at the scene? Well, one cannot say that William Walker was unfamiliar with massacres, after all it was this same William Walker who ‘happened’ to be present at many a massacre in Central America during the Reagan Administration. It was William Walker who pronounced the rightist El Salvador government blameless in the massacre of 6 Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her 15 year old daughter. Yes, William Walker has a long record of ‘exemplary service’ to the empire, regardless of the party in power.

“…The special circumstances of the aggression of the Milosevic forces against Kosovars, particularly Albanian Kosovars, and it’s a special circumstance.”

Hmmmm, oddly enough, the “special circumstances” of “aggression” seem to be especially selective in the case of the U.S. When Suharto supplanted Sukarno in Indonesia and liquidated upwards of ½ a million Indonesians (on lists provided Suharto by the U.S.) labeled “Communists” or “Leftists” or “liberals”, we said he was doing an exemplary job. When Indonesia invaded and decimated East Timor in 1975, “U.S. political and military support for Indonesia was vital to its ability to invade East Timor in December 1975 and to sustain a brutal 24-year occupation that cost the lives of at least 100,000 people, parts of a Timorese inquiry made public Tuesday show.” (U.S. Arms Helped Indonesia Attack East Timor, By Colum Lynch, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, January 25, 2006; Page A15). So, one must assume that that aggression was also Washington approved. Contemporaneous with the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution, when the Turks set about razing villages, murdering 10s of 1,000s of Turkish Kurds “…seldom is heard a discouraging word…”. This even though the magnitude of death and destruction visited upon the Turkish Kurds never qualified as “special circumstances” that forever severed Turkey’s right to its Kurdish provinces. On the contrary, as we have seen in recent days, Turkey is allowed to engage in what would normally be considered ‘acts of war’ by striking at Kurdish settlements and villages deep inside Iraq. But, of course, since Turkey is an important NATO ally and we (U.S.) de facto control Iraq (all talk of any Iraqi sovereignty is just that, talk), this certainly doesn’t qualify as a “special circumstance”.

And, in terms of “aggression” against a people and ethnic cleansing, the displacement of the Native American population doesn’t even merit a passing mention! So much for calling a tail a leg and having it be one!

2008-02-26T14:40:00.002-06:00

Back to the bloody Balkans…again

Well, as predicted, on February 17, 2008 (another day that will live in infamy in the Serbian heart and mind) the illegal puppet Kosovar(sic) Albanian regime in Priština declared it’s “independence” (considering that the Serbian province of Kosovo has been governed the last 9 years by UNMIK with no connection to Serbia, it is unclear just what independence and from whom this declaration was made).

Again, as in 1999, various ‘pundits’ are banging on about how “Belgrade lost any right over Kosovo due to their brutal treatment of the Albanian majority.” Odd. Virtually contemporaneous with NATO’s gang rape of Yugoslavia, Turkey was deeply involved in bloodily putting down their own insurgency by the Kurds. In brutality, bloodiness and numbers of innocent civilian casualties, the Turkish suppression of the Kurds was orders of magnitude worse than the Serbian operations against the KLA in Kosovo in 1998-1999. Yet, somehow, it was not even suggested that the Kurdish region of Turkey be forcibly separated from Turkey nor that, due to the heavy handedness of the Turks, that Turkey had lost any right over the predominantly Kurdish populated section of Turkey.

I well recall how in the period immediately subsequent to NATO’s gang rape of Serbia (June 1999 onwards) there were myriad attacks by members of the KLA and Kosovar Albanians on non-Albanian Kosovars (primarily Serbs but also Kosovar Jews, Roma, Gorani, etc.). In less than a year following the cessation of the NATO bombings, over 1,000 Serbs had been brutally murdered while another more than 1,000 Serbs had been ’disappeared’ and presumed dead. ALL these attacks were ’justified’ by the ’pundits’ and reporters as ’revenge’ attacks. This on the basis of the insanely inflated casualty numbers bruited about by the Western press (“100,000 Kosovar Albanians missing and probably dead”, “mass killings of Kosovar Albanians, at least 50,000”, “mass graves containing the remains of 10,000 murdered Albanians”), all these claims were proven to be endless recitations of Clinton administration propaganda and totally and completely baseless. After NATO forces occupied the province and searched it with a fine tooth comb, less than 3,000 bodies could be turned up, Albanian and Serb, who had been primarily killed in the NATO bombing itself or in armed conflict with Serbian forces.

Now we are enduring the spectacle of Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, waxing apoplectic about "They had an obligation to protect diplomatic missions, and, from what we can tell, the police presence was either inadequate or unresponsive at the time.", while the U.S. (and its major toadies and ‘allies’) continence the explicit abrogation of UNSC Resolution 1244, the Helsinki Final Act and the entire Westphalian order! What cheek! What effrontery! What chutzpah! What Ms. Rice fails to address is the fact that the police have found serious evidence that the firing of the U.S. Embassy was, in all likelihood, the work of agent provocateurs, very likely in the pay and under the control of foreign (dare we say, “Western”?) intelligence agencies! What better way to distract attention from peaceful demonstrations in Belgrade of over ½ million Serbs than to have a small handful of ’drunk soccer hooligans’ setting the U.S. Embassy alight and provide an arguable casus belli for the U.S. and its miserable minions to once again assail the Serbs and their government?

2007-11-13T16:03:00.001-06:00

“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” - Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

I find it absolutely unbelievable how so many commentators, even ‘liberal, open minded’ commentators, buy into the CW (Common Wisdom). Perhaps it is because it is repeated so very often by the MSM (Main Stream Media), without any question. After all, all the ‘Village elders’ keep telling us, “I heard it in the media so that makes it so.” Let me delve into this with a few concrete examples.

Lately I’ve had several e-mail exchanges with a couple of ‘liberal’ commentators regarding the malfeasance of the Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations in the context of Yugoslavia and the intentional malicious pillorying of the Serbian people. Immediately I was attacked, knee jerk fashion, having all manner of specious, vacuous propaganda talking points that had been manufactured by the MSM and the various administrations to ‘justify’ their positions thrown at me. Yet, every time I have provided numerous links to articles and information that totally debunk these talking points (much as the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ argument has been dismantled in Iraq), without exception, the e-mail exchanges ceased abruptly. This even though the sources I linked to were hardly partisan Serb sources (such as Diana Johnstone, Edward Herman, David Peterson, etc.). I’m fairly certain that none of these e-mailers who assailed me have troubled themselves to even follow the links provided, much less do any real research on their own. C’est la vie!

Then, there is a rather well read, well rounded liberal commentator on the radio/internet. I must admit, he and I do truly agree on many topics and I find him to be rather thoughtful. However, one of his several blind spots is that he loves to bang on about the ‘wonderful’ color revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He endlessly lauds the ‘Bulldozer revolution’ in Serbia in 2000, the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia in 2003, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004, the ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 as well as the failed ‘Denim Revolution’ in Belarus in 2005.

Gee, I wonder what this self same commentator would have to say if some foreign country, let’s say China, were to provide 100s of millions of dollars to some dissident groups in the U.S. (like the Black Panthers of the 1960s and early 1970s), provided millions of dollars more in equipment, facilities and services, provided cadre and training for how to destabilize the government? I vividly recall the apoplexy that was suffered by the reich wing nuts on the imaginary political contributions by the Chinese to the Democrats. Just how much more agitated do you think any sane commentator, right or left, were the initial scenario to be played out? Yet, that is exactly what has happened in ALL the various ‘color revolutions’ cited above. Most of the personnel, materials and training were provided by NED (National Endowment for Democracy, “…a U.S. non-profit organization that was founded in 1983, to promote democracy by providing cash grants funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress.” In addition to the NED there is also the IRI (International Republican Institute) "...an organization, funded by United States government, that conducts international political programs, sometimes labeled 'democratization programs'." Wikipedia Yet, by gosh, with about as much truthfulness and sincerity as the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, this particular (and other commentators) regurgitate this schlock and the mind numbed proles lap it up like a baby bird swallowing it’s parents’ regurgitata. Sigh!

2007-10-16T11:07:00.000-05:00

Blame America First…or Blame America NEVER?

I am weary on to death of constantly hearing from reichwing nutters, every time anyone levels any criticism at U.S. policies. One corollary of this inane argument is the accusation that any criticism of Israeli policies somehow automatically makes one an ‘anti-Semite’. Let’s deconstruct these two arguments simultaneously but separately.

To suggest that criticism of U.S. policy somehow makes one “anti-American” is ludicrous. A policy, any policy, is not the country, much like a flag is a symbol and not the embodiment of the country by any stretch of the imagination. To suggest otherwise is to insist that, for example, an actor is his role By this inane standard, Sir Anthony Hopkins should be incarcerated and restrained like this:

1. Because he played Dr. Hannibal Lechter! If you think about it for even a moment, you can see how ludicrous this is. Of course, if we actually take to heart that the U.S. is actually a “...government of the people, by the people, for the people...”, then we truly must take responsibility for those policies, which necessitates that we criticize policies of the government with which we disagree. If we don’t, then we are responsible for such policies and all the attendant consequences and blowback.

2. In the case of Israel, simply due to the fact that one may take issue with any particular, or even all, policies of the Israeli state cannot in any way realistically be said to be, per se, evidence of anti-Semitism. As is, unfortunately, the case in the U.S., the policies of the state of Israel are not necessarily congruent with the population of Israel. For example, the entirety of the population of Israel do not agree with the settlement project, just as the entirety of the U.S. polity does not agree with the present occupation of Iraq.

3. The main thrust of both groups, the “Blame America First!” reichwing nutters and the “Oppose Israeli policies = anti-Semite”, is to equate disagreement, criticism or even questioning as equivalent to absolute antithesis. The “Blame America First!” crowd, in particular, takes the position that every policy of the U.S., past, present and future, is always right, never to be questioned. However, when one brings up such unsettling questions as the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, the chattel slavery of African Americans, the brutal treatment of various immigrant groups (“No Irish need apply”, “No Dogs or Irishmen Allowed”, etc., etc., etc.,), these self same chest thumping uber-patriots dismiss all such behaviors, repeated time and time and time again in our history as ‘aberrations’. Aberrant, as defined by Merriam-Webster is a: “straying from the right or normal way”. However, if a behavior is repeated over and over and over it is no longer a “straying from the right or normal way”; it is the normal way.

In conclusion, it is of utmost importance that, on every occasion when confronted by those who try to denigrate any opinion contrary to the reichwing CW and their own, that we try to educate them to their own ignorance (i.e., “the state or fact of being ignorant : lack of knowledge, education, or awareness”). Please be gentle in your instruction; most of these nutters simply don’t understand the depths of their own ignorance and the shock of having to deal with reality could push these poor delusional dingbats right over the edge.

2007-10-02T11:51:00.000-05:00

Lack of Logic and Civility in Discourse…on the ‘Liberal’ Left?

An e-mail discourse with an acquaintance who is a ‘liberal’ Democrat, which started cordially enough, was abruptly terminated once I started challenging some of his internalized memes. Sadly, it is not just this particular acquaintance but many, many other ‘liberal’ Democrats who fall back on the memes generated by the Clinton Administration.

In the second of his e-mails, he points to a State Department Report on Kosovo from 1999 and says:

“According to the State Department, at least 90%(!) of the entire 1998 Kosovar Albanian population were forcibly expelled from their home

Perhaps you dispute this, but this strikes me as justifying NATO's war.”

I find his statement that “…this strikes me as justifying NATO's war.” disquieting on a variety of levels. Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t the then head of the National Security Council and now Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, make the rounds of the Sunday talk shows prior to this Administration’s attack on Iraq, bruiting the meme of “…we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." And yet, after our attack upon Iraq and a most thorough search for that ‘smoking gun’, no such weapons were found. But, according to the ‘reasoning’ of my acquaintance, that statement of Ms. Rice ‘justified’ the Bush Administration attack on Iraq.

Further, this acquaintance is an attorney by trade. Therefore, the idea of there being any ‘justification’ for a war other than a UNSC resolution or serious threat of an imminent attack is totally farcical! This is akin to the nonsensical notion, arrived at by the British parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee, that:

"The NATO military intervention was illegal but legitimate. It was illegal because it did not receive prior approval from the United Nations Security Council...."

The internal illogic of the first sentence is simply stunning! The first definition in the dictionary of the word ‘legitimate’ is: “Being in compliance with the law; lawful: a legitimate business.” So, the ‘great minds’ of the cruise missile Left have had to come up with a sentence that is totally and completely self-contradictory! How can something, anything, be both ‘illegal’ and yet ‘legitimate’?

Yet, this ‘liberal’ Democratic acquaintance would be, and to my knowledge has been at the forefront of decrying Bush’s illegal attack on Iraq because he, too, never bothered to get the imprimatur of the UNSC.

Also, many ‘liberals’ laud such as Gen. Wesley Clark as being ‘honorable men’ while decrying such as Gen. Petreaus as being a ‘war criminal’ and a ‘political general’. And yet one of Gen. Clark’s direct subordinates, Lt. Gen. Michael Short, NATO’s air war commander said:

“Lt-Gen Short told the New York Times Yugoslav civilians had to be made to suffer. “I think no power to your refrigerator, no gas to your stove, you can't get to work because the bridge is down -- the bridge on which you held your rock concerts and you all stood with targets on your heads. That needs to disappear at three o'clock in the morning.” As for targets in Kosovo, Lt-Gen Short said he wanted to “take the monkey off the (bomber's) back.”

Yet, far too many ‘liberals’ laud NATO’s air war on Yugoslavia as a ‘humanitarian’ war. Odd, agitating explicitly for the commission of heinous war crimes hardly seems to fit the definition of ‘humanitarian’! And, it should be noted here that, even excepting NATO’s attack on the Chinese Embassy (an act of war, by any definition), there were far, far too many attacks on obviously civilian structures (hospitals, water purification systems, power systems, schools, private residences) to be classed as ‘collateral damage’. By the way, the definition of ‘collateral’ is: Of a secondary nature; subordinate.

As far as Gen. Wesley Clark himself was concerned, he presided over the massive use of Depleted Uranium weapons during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. As to his being a ‘political’ general, he was “…in charge of NATO's "spin" in the Yugoslavia bombardment. Clark called the destruction of a Yugoslav train filled with civilians by a NATO missile "an uncanny accident." He said the same each time that NATO bombed civilian targets, which happened frequently.” ~ “Gen. Wesley Clark: War Criminal” By MITCHEL COHEN And yet, to this day, he is reverently deferred to as some kind of ‘honorable’ man whose opinions and judgments should be taken seriously.

Again, it needs to be pointed out, simply because Clinton and his administration are, in comparison to the Bush administration, better, that is hardly something to be proud of. A band of syphilitic chimps would show themselves superior to this administration.

2007-08-19T20:01:00.000-05:00

“And isn't it ironic... don't you think?”

“An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
And isn't it ironic... don't you think?”
“Ironic” ~ Alanis Morrissette

Hmmm, yes, isn’t it ironic? To hear so-called ‘conservatives’ braying to high heaven that the federal government spend endlessly on endless wars and occupations? Isn’t it ironic to hear a Republican Congressman (Tom Davis, R-VA) defending a woman (Lurita Doan, GSA Administrator under G.W. Bush) from attacks by Democrats purportedly on the basis of her race? Photo of Lurita Doan

There were myriad references as to Ms. Doan’s race, primarily by the Republicans. The Republicans were chiding the Democrats for their ‘attacks’ on Ms. Doan, criticizing the Democrats for the ‘racial insensitivity’. Allow me to dredge up reference up from the naphthalene. In 1961 a book was released entitled ‘Black Like Me’. It was written by a white man (John Howard Griffin) who temporarily had his skin chemically blackened and then toured the South to experience life in the Deep South as experienced by a black man. It was a sobering experience. The reason why I linked a picture of Ms. Doan above is simple. At the time that that book came out, Ms. Doan could, and probably would, have ‘passed’. ‘Passing’ was used by many light colored blacks in the days of segregation to enable them to access what were normal amenities to white people of the time yet denied to blacks. I saw the Congressional hearings where Ms. Doan was being questioned. First, I had a hard time understanding what the Republicans, i.e., Rep. Tom Davis, were talking about when he kept bringing up Lurita Doan’s ‘race’. Obviously, it was of some import to Rep. Davis albeit I certainly didn’t see or hear any racially based attacks on Ms. Doan from Rep. Conyers or other Democratic African American representatives. Isn‘t it ironic?

Isn’t it ironic how ‘conservative’ Republicans insist on propounding their so-called ‘family values’ upon the rest of society, even in light of the most glaring lack of such among their own number? Isn’t it ironic how these self-appointed arbiters of public morals, ‘Christianity’, ‘decent’ behavior and conduct show, time and time and time again, that they themselves are most lacking in any of these?

As some have suggested, I do believe that 911 may well have torn a hole in the space time continuum; since that day in 2001, wrong has now become right, honesty and fair dealing have become deceit and treachery, morality has become the rankest of immorality. Isn’t it ironic?

Update: Well hush my mouth! Smell the utter hypocrisy! When I heard news on August 17, 2007 that Jenna Bush was engaged to be married, I was mildly amused. However, when I heard all the news commentators asking if there would be a White House wedding I was mildly surprised. After all, engagements quite frequently last a good while. Seems there may be a reason as to why all the commentators were speculating about the rather rapid marriage of Ms. Jenna. Click on this link and look carefully at Jenna (she's on the left). Seems that the daughter of "President Abstinence-Only-Sex-Education" may well be pregnant and so the need for a shotgun wedding. Will it be Uncle Darth Cheney bringing up the rear with the shotgun?

2007-07-29T14:43:00.001-05:00

Slouching toward Gomorrah…or Fascism?

In 1996 former Supreme Court nominee, Robert H. Bork, authored his dystopian vision of modern Western society, “Slouching toward Gomorrah”. A thumbnail sketch of that book’s thesis, according to Wikipedia:

“Bork's thesis in the book is that American and more generally Western culture is in a state of decline and that the cause of this decline is modern liberalism and the rise of the New Left. Specifically, he attacks modern liberalism for what he describes as its dual emphases on radical egalitarianism and radical individualism.”

It is indisputable that Bork and his like-minded cohort, virtually all of the hard reich wing and neocons, detest the very idea of egalitarianism for this, of necessity, diminishes their perception of their own imagined superiority. Individualism is perceived as being fine for the exalted class (of course, Bork and his fellow travelers belong to this class) while it is anathema for the unwashed masses. This goes almost without saying.

For Bork and his reich wing cohort, egalitarianism is fine among those in the ‘lower classes’, however, it should never even be suggested that there is any equality whatsoever between the lumpenproletariat and the ‘masters of the universe’ class to which the reich wing belong.

Just as the concept of egalitarianism is all well and good (as long as it is confined strictly and solely to the lumpenproletariat), the concept of individualism is to be kept as the strict domain of the uber class. Yes, it is all well and good to be ‘quirky’, ‘peculiar’, ‘idiosyncratic’ or ‘unpredictable’ if one is a member of the anointed ‘elite’, however, to even try to imagine oneself as a unique and valuable entity for one of the despised lumpenproletariat is heresy of the highest order. If members of the lumpenproletariat began to see and value themselves as individuals deserving of value and respect, why chaos would ensue! It would become ever so much more difficult for the ‘elite’ managerial class to sell whatever predigested pablum to the masses that was in the ‘elite’s’ interest.

Rather than ‘slouching toward Gomorrah’, as Bork suggests, it seems far more evident that we are, as a nation and a society, ‘slouching toward fascism’. As was pointed out by the father of modern fascism, Benito Mussolini:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

In the minds of the über class, every combination of corporate power is to be applauded, nay, even aided by the State at each and every turn. Massive state sponsored corporate welfare, relaxation of any and all regulations, even the selection of ‘corporate leaders’ to head governmental regulatory agencies and boards is to be celebrated. However, the very thought of allowing, permitting or enabling members of the lumpen to in any way combine to better their lot, be it through unions, collective bargaining or any other conceivable means of self organization is simply beyond the pale.

As is obvious to any who have eyes to see and a mind to cogitate, at least since the time of Reagan, the American society has been going ‘back to the future’. Hard won workers’ rights have been eviscerated, anti-monopoly statutes have either been repealed or simply remain totally unenforced. The Supreme Court, at least since the Burger court, has been drifting reichward. Since the ascension of Rehnquist, followed now by Roberts and with the addition of Alito, that reichward drift has become a very sharp turn to starboard indeed. Individual rights, workers’ rights, minority rights have all suffered severely. Under Rehnquist and Roberts, the rights of property, capital and the State have far outpaced and displaced the rights of workers’, minorities and the common man.

So, the cogent question is, are we ‘slouching toward Gomorrah’ or have we been ‘slouching toward fascism’? To this writer, that ‘slouching toward fascism’ has turned into an all out sprint.

2007-07-03T14:12:00.000-05:00

Scooter and Martha and Paris, Oh My!
An examination of ‘justice’ for the rich and especially the powerful

Unless one were in a coma over the last 3 months it would be impossible to miss the myriad stories on Paris Hilton, especially the manufactured furor over her release from jail after a total of one day. Many of the loudest haranguers were from the retributive punitive conservatives, oddly enough, the very same group who howled the loudest over Scooter Libby’s conviction and applauded the loudest at the commutation of his sentence.

What is often missed in all the fulminating over the ‘light’ treatment of Paris Hilton is the following:

The ‘crime’ for which Paris was convicted was a misdemeanor; literally, “An offense less serious than a felony.”;
Paris was jailed for ‘operating a vehicle on a suspended license’; not DWI, not for an accident involving property damage or personal injury;
With the immense and intense degree of jail overcrowding, it is illogical to jail someone who poses virtually no danger of flight.
A sentence of ‘home detention’ would have been more than sufficient a punishment, especially for a notorious ‘party girl’ who would have been put ‘out of the loop’ for the time of her detention.

In the case of Martha Stewart the ‘common knowledge’ is that she was convicted and imprisoned for violating SEC rules. Of course, like the large percent of the American public who still believe that Saddam Hussein was guilty of either planning or funding the 911 terrorists, this ‘common knowledge’ is wrong. What Martha Stewart was actually convicted of was of lying to the FBI. This was not lying to a grand jury. This was not perjury on the stand. In both those cases, the offense is lying while under oath! In Martha’s case, the misstatements or lies were made to the FBI during an interview; not in a deposition, not a court action, but an interview with the FBI. As opposed to depositions and court actions, Martha did not have a chance to review her records and could, very plausibly, have made a mistake in recollection, a defense far less plausible in a deposition, grand jury appearance or a trial.

In the case of the infamous Scooter Libby, he was actually convicted of multiple instances of perjury and obstruction of justice. The reichwing echo chamber’s spurious claim that ‘there was no underlying crime’ is simply fallacious and fanciful. By that self same standard, the perjury which formed the basis for the impeachment of Bill Clinton was indeed perjury which did not rest on any ‘underlying crime’. The lie in deposition of Bill Clinton was of a personal nature and involved a consensual sexual encounter and there was no crime or possible crime that this lie was made to obscure. Scooter Libby, by contrast, lied under oath to a grand jury so as to obstruct a criminal investigation and so committed repeated acts of perjury which are felonies.

Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby is a continuation of Scooter’s obstruction of justice. Now that Scooter has been freed of the possibility of becoming 350 lb. Bubba’s girlfriend in prison, he has absolutely no motivation to reveal the identities of those above him in the chain of command who were involved in or perhaps even initiated the release of top secret information the release of which seriously compromised national security.

In summation what we see is that simply being rich and notorious, like Paris Hilton and Martha Stewart, is not sufficient to have relatively innocuous charges treated appropriately. In fact, the notoriety of the two women may well have led to their cases being treated disproportionately harshly. In Paris’s case we have a bubble headed bleached blonde being treated like a hardened criminal. In Martha’s case we have a high visibility, powerful woman who, interestingly enough, was a Democrat, being treated much more harshly than Republican ‘white collar’ criminals whose crimes were far more egregious and resulted in far wider damage to the public at large. In the case of I. Scooter Libby, convicted of multiple serious felonies, the underlying crimes that he was perjuring himself to cover seriously damaging the intelligence community and national security, he will get to go scot-free; not even serving as much jail time as Paris did even at the time of her first, premature, release.

So, the motto must be: “Being rich is wonderful. Being famous is nice. Knowing where the bodies are buried…priceless!”

2007-06-19T12:43:00.000-05:00

In the Footsteps of Whom?

After watching a number of "Star Wars" commemorations, it dawned on me. We, as a human society, have gone from this:

to this:

and now to this:

and this:

In the eyes of the world, at the very least since America's Iraq Attack (and, arguably, longer) we are now treading in the footsteps of storm troopers of yore.

Though the vast majority of the media, even some 'liberal' media, continue to blither and blather about 'our brave troops, protecting our way of life', the simple fact is that Bush, unwittingly (how else!) actually spoke the truth on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 when he stated that "combat operations in Iraq had ended." The simple truth is, the 'War in Iraq' had ended. From that point onward, it was no longer a 'war'; it was an occupation, pure and simple.

Why won't we call it an 'occupation'? There are a multitude of reasons. For one, in an occupation the occupier has many obligations under international law, none of which have we adhered to. Another is it is very much a different thing to tell the grieving relatives "Your beloved died fighting for this country." than "Your beloved died in an illegal occupation of a sovereign foreign country."

Please remember, the German people were also told that their relatives in the Wehrmacht were fighting to protect them, all the while the Wehrmacht were occupying foreign lands, killing foreign civilians, and destroying foreign infrastructure. Are we, in any material way, different from Wehrmacht troops in the Soviet Union, France, or Poland? We should think about it seriously.

2007-05-26T16:08:00.000-05:00

Media Blindness

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

Today, in light of the blatantly obvious failure of the MSM* over at least the last 6 years and, arguably, since the inception of the Reagan administration, it is more than necessary to reflect on the above quote by Upton Sinclair.

It is obvious to any but the most Kool Aid saturated conservative/neocon camp followers that the MSM has fallen flat on its face during virtually the entirety of the GW Bush administration. We have the blatant examples of Judy Miller’s “reporting” leading up to the Iraq invasion. However, just as obviously we have the outright ‘cheerleading’ of those ‘liberal’ pillars of the MSM, the New York Times and the Washington Post, preceding the invasion and continuing mostly to this day of the Iraq occupation (let us not mince words here). What’s even more horrifying is the current war whooping of the self same ‘liberal’ pillars (and, obviously, most of the rest of the MSM) pushing for ‘firm action’ against Iran, up to and including the ‘limited’ use of nuclear weapons!

Why is this so? Especially in light of the MSM’s glaringly obvious errors with regard to the entire Iraq debacle; the ready acceptance of the existence of Iraqi ‘WMD’, the unquestioned reliance on questionable statements issued by the Administration, the conjured ‘ties’ to Al-Qaeda, the acceptance of fairy tales of Iraqi involvement of 9/11? Again, Sinclair’s quote gives us the answer. The Establishment media has degenerated into little more than a mouthpiece and megaphone for the Establishment itself. The incestuous relationship between the ‘media elite’ and their primary sources, the ‘political elite’ virtually precludes any serious adverse questioning of the ‘political elite’. Ditto for any serious questioning of any current ‘common knowledge’. If the ‘accepted’ political/media meme is that “Iraq has and continues to develop WMD.”, then the MSM (and especially the pillars of the Establishment media, be it print or electronic) firmly slams the door marked ‘Case Closed’ on any dissonant opinion which runs contrary to that meme.

Now, lest the ‘liberals’ out there in the audience start clapping and shouting, “Yeah, that’s right!”, let us recall that that ‘liberal’ darling, Slick Willy Clinton, though harassed and harangued by the MSM for his personal failings (and they indeed were myriad), was given as much a free pass as GW Bush has been in undermining the Constitution (let’s not forget that many of the provisions that were included in the Patriot Act were elucidated during the Clinton Administration), the beginning of the destruction of civil liberties in the US (starting with the raid on the compound at Waco and proceeding thru the "The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996" and thence to the extraordinarily harsh "Immigration and Nationality Act" of 1996). Though harassed, harangued and harried about truly inconsequential private indiscretions, the MSM was in the main either mute or approving of all the above mentioned acts that were so very deleterious of civil liberties in this country and, in point of fact, laid many a foundation for the further destruction of civil liberties that are so egregious a mark of the present administration.

But, perhaps the single most obvious example of Establishment and Establishment Media (MSM) perfidy and disingenuousness was the entire frame and reporting on the situation in the now late Yugoslavia. Granted, the first explicit bricks in this wall of perfidy were laid by the Bush I administration in December of 1991 when the U.S. followed Germany’s lead in illegally recognizing the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia during the Maastricht Treaty negotiations. Illegal due to the fact that such recognition was in blatant violation of the Helsinki Final Act to which all, the U.S., the European Union countries and Yugoslavia were all signatory. The Helsinki Final Act in pertinent part states:

“III. Inviolability of frontiers
The participating States regard as inviolable all one another's frontiers as well as the frontiers of all States in Europe and therefore they will refrain now and in the future from assaulting these frontiers.

Accordingly, they will also refrain from any demand for, or act of, seizure and usurpation of part or all of the territory of any
participating State.

IV. Territorial integrity of States
The participating States will respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating States.

Accordingly, they will refrain from any action inconsistent with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations against the territorial integrity, political independence or the unity of any participating State, and in particular from any such action constituting a threat or use of force.

The participating States will likewise refrain from making each other's territory the object of military occupation or other direct or indirect measures of force in contravention of international law, or
the object of acquisition by means of such measures or the threat of them. No such occupation or acquisition will be recognized as legal.”

However, the unilateral ‘recognition’ by ”the West” of the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia was, quite obviously, a violation of both the ‘Inviolability of frontiers’ and the ‘Territorial integrity of States’ cited above. For those wishing to get a better understanding of this complex question, please read the entirety of the Helsinki Final Act here.

Perhaps most egregious was the full court press of the media, from the very outset, for ‘advocacy journalism’ and totally eschewing traditional even handed, fact based journalism. Perhaps ‘first among equals’ in the advocacy journalism field was Christiane Amanpour. The matchless Ms. Amanpour started from her own personal bias as both an Iranian elite and a Muslim. From the outset every claim of Alija Izetbegovic’s Muslim ‘government’, no matter how outlandish, no matter how inflammatory, no matter on the absence of evidence, was transmitted by Amanpour and her myriad imitators as absolute and proved truth. Much if not most Western, especially U.S. ‘reporting’ done during the Bosnian War was done from the environs of Sarajevo, capital of the Izetbegovic government. This is akin to the ‘reporting’ coming to us from the Green Zone in Baghdad today. When infrequent excursions were outside of Sarajevo the media was always supplied with Muslim interpreters (since, as in Iraq, no one spoke the local language nor knew much if anything of the local history and culture). It was primarily on the basis of such egregiously biased reporting that the Clinton administration (not unlike the early days of happy news coming from Iraq) made much of its Balkan policy.

It should be noted here that GW Bush simply built on Bill Clinton’s horrendous example of illegal war (Clinton, like GW Bush, received NO Security Council imprimatur to launch his illegal war on Yugoslavia). Granted and admitted, GW bush’s illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been larger disasters than Clinton’s 78 day bombardment of Serbia in 1999.

It also begs to be noted here that in the entire mess in Yugoslavia, the MSM cleaved to the Clinton (Amanpour, CNN) line every bit as closely as it did to GW Bush’s line, particularly in the run up to war and the early days of the occupation.

In conclusion we should note, the ownership of the MSM (which, thanks to Bill Clinton’s “Telecommunications Act of 1996”) has shrunken to a very few corporate hands. With the media consolidating into fewer and fewer hands (virtually all of whom have business before the FCC) the ‘news’ will continue to be heavily massaged and will continue, inexorably, to follow the stinking winds emanating from the cesspool that is Washington, D.C. and the corporatists that are our true masters.

*MSM - Main Stream Media

Welcome to Pottersville: The Batmobile Lost a Wheel…#links

2007-04-30T01:20:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Pottersville: The Batmobile Lost a Wheel…#links

Gravel Won’t Be Buried

2007-04-28T04:39:00.001-05:00

Mike Gravel, anti-war ex-Senator from Alaska, was the big surprise at the 4/26/2007 Democratic Presidential Candidates debate.

read more | digg story

2007-02-04T04:40:00.001-06:00

AmeriKKKa as Mr. Magoo

Just for a bit of context for those who are not acquainted with or don’t remember Mr. Magoo:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mr. Quincy Magoo is a cartoon character created by John Hubley in 1949, for UPA. Hubley based the character on his former professor Francis Peabody Magoun, who bore some physical resemblance to the character. Voiced by Jim Backus (also famed in popular culture for his role as Thurston Howell III in the 1960s sitcom "Gilligan's Island"), Quincy Magoo is a wealthy, short-statured retiree who gets into a series of sticky situations as a result of his nearsightedness, compounded by his stubborn refusal to admit the problem, in which the affected people (or animals) think that he is a lunatic, rather than just being near-sighted.

Additionally, though not noted in the Wikipedia reference, at the end of each miraculous episode where, through sheer dumb luck or fortuitous happenstance Magoo emerges unscathed (though often causing immense havoc in his wake) he would wryly comment to himself, “Magoo! You’ve done it again!”

I recently saw a Mr. Magoo cartoon again when, at the end of the cartoon Magoo is congratulating himself, that it struck me: AmeriKKKa IS Mr. Magoo!

At the very least since the post WWII period, as AmerKKKa has bestrode the world stage as one of the pre-eminent world powers (and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as THE single world hyper power), she has been evincing the same near totally blind, blundering mien of Mr. Magoo, less his much more benign character. What do I mean? Let us count merely a few of the ways.

Iran - 1953 Because Mohammad Mossadegh, the legally and legitimately elected Prime Minister of Iran was determined to claim a more reasonable percentage of the oil revenues for Iran (and because he had enforced the Parliament’s nationalization decree against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later to become British Petroleum, BP) the British determined that Mossadegh must go and a more pliant ruler (who in this case was Shah Reza Pahlavi) must be installed. So Operation Ajax was born. Through a variety of clandestine operations and maneuvers (led by Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson), a coup was fomented and the Shah was installed. And, it worked. For 26 years. At which time the Shah was forced to flee Iran and was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeni. At which time the American Embassy was attacked by a mob of enraged (due to US involvement in overthrow of Mossadegh and our unquestioning support of the Shah) Iranian students and the embassy staff was taken hostage and kept so for 444 days. In 1953 like Magoo we wryly commented to ourselves, “Magoo! You’ve done it! (This being the first CIA overthrow) So, just like Mr. Magoo, we blithered and blundered into the internal affairs of Iran and so created a monstrous situation that has plagued us ever since.

2. Guatemala - 1954 Following our glowing ‘success’ in Iran in 1953, the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit, went back to its bag of tricks seeking to overthrow the legal President, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. This they managed to do and, again in the words of Wikipedia, “…was ousted in a coup d'état organized by the US Central Intelligence Agency, known as Operation PBSUCCESS, and was replaced by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, plunging the country into chaos and long-lasting political turbulence. [emphasis added]

Time skip; numerous other ill advised interventions yielding, at best, temporary benefits but long term damage. Now that I’ve whet your appetites, I commend you to do a little solo research, don’t want you to think I’m picking and choosing here.

3. Iraq - 1990 The manufactured crisis that became ‘Desert Storm’ (the Gulf War) and began the murderous chain of events that has led to the incomparable disaster that is Iraq today.

Prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein (who had been a long term CIA asset and who had been heavily aided by the U.S. during the 8 year long bloodletting that was the Iran-Iraq War) had consulted with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to clarify the U.S. position on Iraq’s ‘occupation’ of Kuwait. Kuwait had been slant-drilling into Iraq’s oil reservoirs and was being extremely unwilling to even negotiate with Iraq on these matters and certainly weren’t about to stop stealing Iraq’s oil (primarily because they had been encouraged by G.H.W. Bush to stand firm; America would ‘protect’ them). Ambassador Glaspie was instructed to state that: "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."(Wikipedia)

Upon receiving the above apparent ‘blessing’ of the United States, Saddam ‘invaded’ Kuwait to terminate their slant drilling practices (and to extract some payback for the oil that had been stolen in the period prior. It was this invasion of Kuwait that provided G.H.W. Bush his causus belli for the initiation of ‘Desert Storm’.

4. Yugoslavia - 1991-1999 Even though Yugoslavia’s internal affairs had been meddled with at least since the Reagan Administration, part of the Reagan Administration’s worldwide war with the ‘Evil Empire’, the real disaster began during the G.H.W. Bush Administration. The Bush I administration cut off all aid for Yugoslavia unless each republic essentially voted to renounce their federation which formed the country of Yugoslavia. This was brought to a head in December 1991 when the newly reunited Germany firmly and insistently backed the secession and recognition of its Nazi era allies, Slovenia and Croatia. Blackmailing the Europeans by holding hostage the negotiations in Maastricht to form the European Union and pressuring the Bush I administration, the European Community jointly and severally violated international law in the form of the Helsinki Final Act which guaranteed the “inviolability of national borders and respect for territorial integrity”. (Wikipedia) All of the members of the EC (future EU), Yugoslavia and the United States were all signatories of the Helsinki Final Act and were bound by this treaty.

This pattern was continued with the 1992 recognition of Bosnia as a sovereign nation, again in violation of the Helsinki Final Act.

A detailed description of the continued and repeated violations of international laws would require a paper in and of itself. Suffice it to say that the period 1991-1999 in Yugoslavia was a study in blunder, bombast, and simple unadulterated lunacy on the part of Albright, Blair, Clinton and the West. Without any understanding of the recent history, language, culture of the peoples that made up Yugoslavia, the West and particularly the U.S. were blinded by domestic political concerns as well as a heretofore unseen campaign of biased propaganda and PR.

In the final analysis, due to the continual blundering intervention of the West (i.e., U.S.), 2 Muslim dominated states were established in the heart of Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo) and provided a haven and a training area for several of the 9/11 hijackers. Blowback is a bitch.

5. Iraq - 2003 We have come almost full circle. Again, as was the case in Bosnia and Kosovo (see above) on the basis of manufactured casus belli, manufactured ‘intelligence’ and just plain lies, G.W. Bush (Bush II) invaded Iraq. Though combat operations were concluded by May, 2003, Mr. Magoo’s AmeriKKKA has deluded itself into believing that a war is still being fought (true, 650,000 Iraqis have expired as well as 3,000 Americans) but, this is and has been an occupation, not a war.

So, just in the extremely short exposition above (note, I have not even touched on such matters as the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the endless and constant ‘interventions’ by whatever name in Central America) that we have a rather prolific record of blundering, murderous interventions that, even granting the best of all possible intentions, simply do not yield the ‘golden fruit’ the American people are constantly told they will. We are like a blinded bull in a china shop, very adept at wrecking the place and of little or no utility in cleaning up the mess and putting the pieces back together.

Worse yet, because of this record of truly disastrous intervention, we have lost virtually all the ‘good will’ and kind feelings of people around the world that we had had as late as 1945 (even excepting such ‘minor’ matters as nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki). As each day comes upon us, we are being more and more generally perceived not unlike Nazi Germany in 1939. Not unlike Imperial Japan in 1937 when they committed the Rape of Nanking.

And, unlike the likable Mr. Magoo, we can no longer say ‘Ah Magoo! You’ve done it again!’ 9/11 has shown us and the world just how much venom we have created worldwide with our hubristic attitude and actions. Care to guess what awaits us?

2007-01-07T13:32:00.000-06:00

“Why Do They Hate Us?”
(Could it be because they see us as Ferengi?)

Etymology: The name "Ferengi" is an Arabic name for European traders, or for Westerners in general. Both the Arabic word and the name are similarly pronounced feringhee. The name is likely derived from the Arabic word faranj or ifranj = "Franks" or possibly the Persian word farangi, meaning "foreigner" or (most likely) the Hindi/Urdu word ferengi, which is a dialectic varietion on the Persian word. In Ethiopia, ferenj or ferenji has the same meaning. The Greeks used Farang or farangi to refer to western Europeans, especially from Catalonia. The Star Trek usage was taken from the above usage.[1] - Wikipedia

Any who have followed the Star Trek series, will instantly recognize the Ferengi as “They and their culture are characterized by a mercantile obsession with profit and trade, and their constant efforts to swindle people into bad deals.” (Wikipedia) Hmmm, any of you out there feeling the ‘shock of recognition’?

After the events of 9/11 perhaps the most asked question by most Americans was a plaintive “Why do they hate us?” Through all the various organs of our culture, educational, mass media, entertainment, we (Americans) are always shown our own visage in the very most complementary aspect possible. Our every action is, according to all of our various media, always and forever motivated from the highest of altruistic motives. Forget the fact that quite often many of our humanitarian ‘contributions’ following disasters have a rather high component of outdated medicines, stale or surplus foodstuffs that would otherwise be written off.

And, unfortunately, this is not a new aspect of our culture, it has been a consistent pattern since our very inception. It has only grown more pronounced with time.

The concept of America as a ‘City upon a hill’ originated with John Winthrop in 1630. Of course, to see ourselves as that ‘city upon a hill’ we Americans have had to constantly and continually gloss over our own history as ethnic cleansers and land thieves par excellence and genocidists that put the Nazi Germans to shame. And yet, even with our undeniable history of persecution and racism we see ourselves as, somehow, a ‘chosen people’ of unparalleled charity and goodness.

Almost from our earliest days, starting at least with the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ of 1823, we have arrogated to ourselves a ‘special relationship’ with the other countries in our hemisphere. It has been interpreted, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, to ‘empower’ the U.S. to act as a hemispheric ‘policeman’. This policing has usually involved invasion and garrisoning of our chosen target, usually to extract raw materials from the countries at first and then to shape the internal economies and cultures of those countries and societies, always to U.S. or corporate benefit.

We have systematically overthrown regimes not to our liking and replaced them with tractable puppets/dictators who we allowed to monstrously oppress their own populations as long as they danced to the tune played in Washington or various corporate boardrooms. By installing/supporting such Washington lackeys who oppressed their own people, we have created a large and growing tsunami of hatred and disgust among the populations of the world (Papa Doc’s, Shahs, Mobutus, etc., too numerous to mention are not the people; they are the bought and paid for lackeys) .

“Why do they hate us?” Rather than plaintively wail such nonsense, it might do us well to wipe the fog of self-adoration from the mirror and take a long, hard look.

2006-12-03T14:49:00.000-06:00

Are we REALLY free?

free•dom n. 1. The condition of being free of restraints. 2. Liberty of the person from slavery, detention, or oppression. 3.a. Political independence. b. Possession of civil rights; immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority. 4. Exemption from an unpleasant or onerous condition: freedom from want. 5. The capacity to exercise choice; free will: We have the freedom to do as we please all afternoon. 6. Ease or facility of movement: loose sports clothing, giving the wearer freedom. 7. Frankness or boldness; lack of modesty or reserve: the new freedom in movies and novels. 8.a. The right to unrestricted use; full access: was given the freedom of their research facilities. b. The right of enjoying all of the privileges of membership or citizenship: the freedom of the city.

Every day, in the mass media, in popular culture, in movies and television, we are told (and/or exposed to) more and more repetitive bruiting of the phrase “We are free!” While, at the same time, day by day, every day, our constitutional rights are being increasingly limited, truncated or simply stripped from the people. Look at the definition above. Of ALL the possible definitions above, the ONLY one that arguably still remains (and that in a limited degree) is 3.a. ‘political independence’.

As far as the premier definition, “The condition of being free of restraints”, can we really claim to be free from restraints? When we can’t even board an aircraft without being wanded, probed, x-rayed, and, as we now know, even having our entire background (credit rating, criminal/arrest record, even our library files) examined in minute detail, are we “free of restraints”? Do we have “ease or facility of movement”? When the TSA maintains its highly secretive database (the infamous “No Fly List”) which determines, on undisclosed criteria that, whether a particular person will be allowed to board a particular flight, even if they have been allowed to purchase a ticket for that flight! This certainly strikes me as a violation of definitions 1., 2., 3.b., 4., 5., 6. 8.a. & b. above. So, where is our ‘freedom’?

Does anyone truly believe that our present condition of ‘freedom’ in any way comports with the vision of our Founding Fathers? Is this the reason they suffered, fought and died from 1776 to 1783? Is this UCLA Student Gets Tazered an example of our ‘free’ society? We fought a revolution, at least in part, in revulsion of the quartering of the King’s troops in private homes. So, this situation, 88-year old Kathryn Johnson killed in a no-knock drug raid gone bad, any better?

Perhaps we should stop saying how free we are and, instead, ASSERT our freedom and return the state, in all its facets, to the status of civil servant rather than allow them to be civil masters.

2006-11-26T20:16:00.000-06:00

The Militarization of America

"...overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty."

--George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796 (H.T. timbermonkey)

Although for most of us, certainly those of us in the Baby Boom Generation, it seems that America has ALWAYS been a militarized society, this certainly is not the case.

Until after WWII, the US military was primarily a truly voluntary occupation. Except in times of war, the US military was a rather small organization, composed primarily of a core of trained officers and volunteers. Many, if not most of the volunteer troops, looked upon the military as an occupation of last resort. In the period following the Civil War, the majority of the troops in active use in the military were either African-American or former civilians who, much like U.S. Grant prior to the Civil War, had simply not been able to make a go of it in civilian life.

With the conversion of the "War Department" into the "Defense Department", via the instigation and self generation of the Cold War, our country and culture has become quite militarized. As opposed to the practice in wake of prior wars, at the cessation of WWII and the instigation of the Cold War, the military draft was not ended. The draft was only ended in the wake of the social and cultural upheavals occasioned by it during the Vietnam War, when it became amply obvious that the country simply would not sanction an ever more costly (in lives and treasure) undeclared war. As middle class exemptions were beginning to vaporize and the children of the great middle class were coming more and more into the line of fire, the draft was found not to be a workable idea.

During the period after the Civil War, being a soldier was NOT considered a particularly appealing occupation. In general, the run of the mill soldiery (the troops, not officers) were considered a ruffian rabble (with the exception of the Western settlers whose lives were often dependent on the U.S. Cavalry).

In the wake of the Cold War and McCarthy witch-hunts, American society has become ever more militarized. After the conclusion of the Vietnam War and as the military was transitioned over to an "all volunteer" army, with the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the local police departments started to ramp up their degree of militarization. Within a relatively short period of time local police departments, with the monetary aid and encouragement of the "Justice Department", began to militarize themselves. Even small towns and rural sheriff's departments suddenly realized that they "needed" SWAT teams. In many jurisdictions, mostly under the cloak of the "War on Drugs", local police departments began to organize "strike forces" and liberally construe their "right" to confiscate money, jewelry and other possessions (even in cases where drugs were not present nor even indicated). Many a "drug raid" would fail to find drugs or even paraphernalia. But the officers would "confiscate" valuables as being the "product" of "drug money" even where the drugs could not be found. In short order simple possession of amounts of cash that the police found "disproportionate" would be seized as prima facie evidence of "drug activity". In other words, simply having more money than the police (regardless of the premise) thought appropriate, would be evidence in and of itself of some kind of wrong-doing!

Now, after our bout of virtually perpetual "humanitarian" interventions through out the world, even preceding the fall of the Soviet Union (Operation Just Cause - 1989) and following: Somalia, Operation Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo, Gulf War II, we have our politicians and corporate media in general loudly cheering "our boys" and proclaiming loudly and long the beneficence of any and all of their actions, no matter how contrary to actual American tradition they may be. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious example is that of our present involvement in the destruction and occupation of Iraq. Our occupying troops have been involved in every possible heinous act of war crimes and atrocities which, in a saner age, were tried as "war crimes" and their Nazi and Japanese perpetrators executed by the Allied Powers.

There is nothing wrong with supporting our troops, assuming that their mission is the defense of kith, kin and country. There is everything wrong with supporting our troops when that means supporting war crimes and atrocities. If we support them in these actions, how, exactly, do we differentiate ourselves from the populace of Nazi Germany whom we so severely condemned and decried after the crimes of the Nazi regime came to light?

2006-11-10T19:45:00.001-06:00

Listen to them whine....

In recent days the US news media has been bemoaning the fact that Americans are less and less likely to listen to network news and even less likely to believe the news with which they are presented. No less a light than Sam Donaldson, formerly of ABC News, has said:

"Former ABC News reporter/anchor Sam Donaldson is ready to say the last rites for network news because it will soon lose its dominant position as Americans' primary source of news. "I think it's dead. Sorry," he said during a breakfast panel Tuesday at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas. "The monster anchors are through."" Donaldson: Network News Dead

In addition to Donaldson, many other members of the 'media fraternity' have been squalling that "people aren't listening to us anymore!" However, when one honestly examines the developments in US mass media in the recent past, is it any question that the general public (gullible and naïve but not as stupid as the mass media believe) have ceased believing the tripe which passes for news? One considers the following:

The dramatic way in which the "mainstream media" have degenerated into nothing more nor less than a splendid echo chamber and spin machine for those in power, regardless of whether right or left, Republican or Democrat.
The practically unfailing acquiescence of the mainstream US media in the run up to ANY US military action to bolster any and all pseudo justifications for military action, no matter how strained, tortured and distorted.
The constant repetition of 'factoids' (def.: "a wholly spurious "fact" invented to create or prolong public exposure" Wikipedia 'Factoid'), totally extracted from and lacking any semblance of context.
The rise and mainstreaming of 'advocacy journalism' (without it being labeled as an opinion or POV piece). Opinion and advocacy pieces have always been with us. However, in a more honest time, these items were labeled as 'opinion' and one usually knew that the piece was from the perspective of one who 'has a dog in the fight'.
The mass media's unquestioning acceptance of any cover story, no matter how prima facia questionable, generated by the State, its organs or minions.
The 'inexplicable' editorial choices made by virtually ALL the media, whether mainstream, liberal, conservative or even radical as to what stories rate 24/7, round-the-clock coverage and, more importantly, what is NOT covered. The recent examples of the 'Runaway Bride' and 'American Idol' sagas displacing any mention of the leaked British intelligence memo, the continuing 'soft revolutions' in the 'Stans, etc. ad nauseam, are but the tip of the iceberg.

OK, having touched on general statements, let's 'go to the tape' to see how this has actually worked in several recent instances.

Gulf War I (1990-1991)

It is pointless to describe ALL the various lies, deceptions and half-truths that were involved in Bush I's script for the invasion of Iraq. Any who are interested in Gulf War I are ALREADY well informed as to the April Glaspie episode. Ditto the testimony of the 'mysterious' Nayirah before the disgustingly disingenuous Rep. Tom Lantos about the 'incubator babies scandal'. Then (1990-1991), Saddam Hussein desperately tried to open negotiations with the US but, just as his son a decade later, Bush I would have none of it. Unconditional surrender or nothing. The extreme, even senseless bloodletting and the virtually total destruction of Iraq's infrastructure (waterworks, electricity, roads, bridges, etc.) were planned in such a manner as to maximize civilian casualties (a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions). The establishment of the (non-UN sanctioned) no-fly zones over Iraq and the repeated UNJUSTIFIED bombings in these areas (1991-2003) as well as the UN mandated Iraq sanctions regime were designed to create the greatest distress to the civilian population.

Obliteration of Yugoslavia (Stage I)

During the Maastricht negotiations in1991, where the EC morphed into the EU, Germany held the negotiations hostage to push special consideration of its Nazi era allies (Slovenia and Croatia) in their civil war with Yugoslavia. In total and complete contravention to the Helsinki Final Act (essentially the founding document of the OSCE). The Bush(41) administration backed Germany's move and, on a whim, authorized the illegal dismantling of a sovereign state (BTW, for the factually impaired, at that time Stejpan Mesic (a Croatian) was President of Yugoslavia soooo the EXCUSE of 'Madman' Milosevic simply did not exist and could NOT have been a basis for such a rash action, contrary to ALL the mass media's spin, both contemporaneously and subsequently). However, interestingly enough, this essential, pivotal fact is hardly ever addressed by the mainstream media and yet this is the initial major misstep in terms of the situation in Yugoslavia which has led inexorably to each ensuing misstep.

"Humanitarian Intervention and Nation Building" take 1 (Somalia)

With the excuse of 'civil war and starvation', Bush41 dispatched troops sufficient to protect humanitarian food deliveries which were deemed necessary to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Clinton determined that it was necessary to choose a side and begin to intervene militarily to the benefit of their chosen and the detriment of the damned. The mainstream media of course backed the official story to the hilt. Aidid was to be dispatched and his clan (the largest and most powerful in Somalia) disarmed. Somalia was to be recast as a nation to our liking. Aidid was the bete noire of the tale (according to the Clinton Administration) and so it was in the mainstream media. Almost totally missing (or, contrawise, severely downplayed) were the stories of American troops arbitrarily shooting Somalis, the air attacks on gatherings of Aidid's clan, including the air attack on a peace conference between Aidid's and the other clans, decapitating many of the clans and spiking any possible peace, killing dozens and similar atrocities. For most Americans, Somalia was making but tiny ripples until Blackhawk Down.

Obliteration of Yugoslavia (Stage II) - Bosnia Phase

Even before the EU/US recognition of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, forces in the U.S. (such as Bob Dole, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ustasha/Muslim alliance) were hard at work to rend Yugoslavia to pieces. However, with Croatia's (illegal) recognition, events moved into high gear. Early on in the coverage of the Bosnian phase of the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution, the Western (primarily American) public was assailed with the pernicious charges of 'Serbian rape camps'. As could be expected, without bothering to verify the facts, U.S. 'feminists' began a campaign to urge U.S. involvement in the Bosnian situation. The stories were truly horrendous, however, there was hardly a kernel of truth to the allegations. From a contemporaneous article by Jacques Merlino (see: "Rapes: Number in Question"), Merlino states:

"As a special envoy, Jerome Bony was send to inquire in the field traveling to Tuzla, a town mentioned in all the reports. He tells about his astonishment in a France 2 program on February 4th: "When I was at 50 kilometers from Tuzla, I was told: "Go to the gymnasium of Tuzla, there are 4,000 raped women." At 20 kilometers, the number diminished to 400. At 10 kilometers, it was only 40. And in Tuzla, I met only 4 women who wanted to witness.""

This report from France 2 received NO coverage in any of the American MSM! On the contrary, to this day the charges of 'Serbian rape camps' is repeated and was again posited during the NATO gang rape of Yugoslavia.

Additionally, from virtually the beginning of the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution, the Serbian side of the story was systematically frozen out of the media landscape. An absolute embargo was placed on Yugoslavian TV transmissions to the US (while Croatian and Bosnian feeds were boosted). Croatians, Bosnians (and later, 'Kosovars') were permitted access to U.S. PR firms while Yugoslavia was denied. A wonderful example of this is to be glimpsed in a French interview with James Harff, Director of Ruder Finn, Global Public Affairs. A short excerpt of that interview follows.

Harff: For 18 months, we have been working for the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as for the opposition in Kosovo. Throughout this period, we had many successes, giving us a formidable international image. We intend to make advantage of this and develop commercial agreements with these countries. Speed is vital, because items favourable to us must be settled in public opinion. THE FIRST STATEMENT COUNTS. The retractions have no effect.

Question: What are your methods of operation?

Harff: The essential tools in our work are a card file, a computer, and a fax. The card file contains a few hundred names of journalists, politicians, academicians, and representatives of humanitarian organizations. The computer goes through the card files according to correlated subjects, coming up with very effective targets.

The computer is tied into a fax. In this way, we can disseminate information in a few minutes to those we think will react (positively). Our job is to assure that the arguments for our side will be the first to be expressed.

Question: How often do you intervene?

Harff: Quantity is not important. You have to intervene at the right time with the right person... ...

Question: What achievement were you most proud of?

Harff: To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter, as the dossier was dangerous looked from this angle. President Tudjman was very careless in his book "Wastelands of Historical Reality". Reading this writings, one could accuse him of anti-semitism.

In Bosnia, the situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in his book "The Islamic Declaration". Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by a real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our chal[l]enge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeded masterfully.

At the beginning of August 1992, the New York Newsday came out with the affair of (Serb) concentration camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations - B'Nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. We suggested to them to publish an advertisement in the New York Times and to organize demonstrations outside the U.N.

This was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the (Muslim) Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.

Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated. But, by a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys, which would hereafter play itself.

We won by targeting Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content, such as "ethnic cleansing", "concentration camps", etc. which evoked images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The emotional charge was so powerful that nobody could go against it.

Question: But when you did all of this, you had no proof that what you said was true. You only had the article in Newsday!

Harff: Our work is not to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it known that Newsday affirmed it.

Question: Are you aware that you took on a grave responsibility?

Harff: We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. WE ARE NOT PAID TO BE MORAL. (see: We are not paid to be moral.)

After years of covert support of its chosen belligerents (Croatia and Bosnian Muslims) and a series of staged atrocities and 'breadline massacres' in Sarajevo, Clinton and his warmongering Hag of State, Madelaine Albright, first strong-armed NATO into bombing Bosnian Serb positions which 'just happened' to coincide with a major (U.S. funded, supplied and trained by MPRI) Croatian offensive in Krajina. Croatia's 'Operation Storm' led to the largest ethnic cleansing in Europe since WWII and until NATO's bombing campaign in 1999. By this point in time, the mainstream media had already cast the Serbs as being evil incarnate (based on propaganda, biased and 'advocacy' journalism'). Even though 'Operation Storm' had caused the mass ethnic cleansing of people who had been living on the lands from which they had been cleansed for over 600 years, it was totally acceptable because the dispossessed were Serbs.

Obliteration of Yugoslavia (Stage III) - Kosovo Phase

As was the case with the Markale breadline 'massacre', the trigger for the US/UK/NATO 'humanitarian intervention' in Kosovo was based on a blatant lie. Just as unbiased sources debunked the Markale breadline 'massacre' as being a 'Serb' atrocity

"In an investigative report published in the October 2, 1995 edition of The Nation, David Binder penned a most fascinating and thorough summary of the inconsistencies associated with these two mortar attacks. While stating that the UN "sticks by the conclusions of its inquiry" and blames the Serbs - at least in the second incident - the author nevertheless persuasively enumerated the factors which indicated that the BSA was not responsible. [emphasis mine]

Binder also notes support for his arguments from some American and Canadian specialists as well as (Russian) Colonel Andrei Demurenko, the Chief of Staff of the Sector Sarajevo peacekeeping unit. (According to an article in The Sunday Times (London), British and French crater analysis teams supported these same conclusions but were overruled by the UN.) No need exists to rehash all of his convincing arguments here, but primarily, they include suspicions about the firing distance, "anomalies with the (mortar) fuse," fields of observation, and trajectory difficulties." (see: SELLING THE BOSNIAN MYTH TO AMERICA: BUYER BEWARE by Lieutenant Colonel John Sray)

The Racak "massacre" was the Markale "massacre" of Kosovo. The 'definitive' analysis of the Racak 'massacre' was delivered at the scene by William Walker, the American head of the KVM (Kosovo Verification Mission). Well, it can't be said that Walker wasn't familiar with massacres, after all it was on his watch as U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador that the infamous murders of 6 Jesuit priests , their housekeeper and her daughter by the (U.S. supplied and trained) El Salvadoran Army were committed. However, as has become evident in later years, Walker was in the business of covering up the El Salvadoran Army's authorship of the massacre. (see: "William Walker: Man with a Mission") Interestingly enough, since the murderous onslaught of NATO, it has come to light that even the U.S.'s own hand picked forensic pathologist, Dr. Helen Ranta, DISAGREED with the finding of massacre. It was only after the fact that Dr. Ranta disclosed the immense pressure brought to bear upon her to second (very equivocally) Walker's (layman) finding of 'massacre'.

This dismal litany could go on and on and on, ad infinitum, each and every allegation being completely demolished with FACT as opposed to propaganda and spin, but to what end? This is but a minor demonstration of the truly disconsolate state of media; MSM, 'liberal-left', Faux News, what have you. And, remarkably, in view of the established track record of such 'journalists' as Judith Miller, Thomas Friedman, Anthony Lewis, etc. ad nauseam, reporters and 'news' outlets are bemoaning their lack of credibility. As Aesop said in The Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf, "There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth."

2006-11-09T17:19:00.001-06:00

A Dissection of "News"

*My comments are in the body of the article, in red, parenthesis and italics.

May/June 1994

Scouts Without Compasses
An NPR Reporter on the "Disinformation Trap"
in Former Yugoslavia

By Sylvia Poggioli

Covering the disintegration of Yugoslavia has often forced reporters to act as scouts without compasses in a completely unknown terrain. Reporters have had to wade through the complex cultural, historical and political geography of these conflicts. And very few had the necessary instruments. With the end of the Cold War, a whole set of principles of analysis had become useless, and reporters had to confront new problems that most of them had never explored before, such as ethnic self-assertion, tribalism, religious conflicts and the rights and limits to self-determination.

The Cold War had accustomed generations of reporters to analyze world events almost exclusively in terms of the bipolar confrontation, where good and evil were easily defined and identified. (Which tells you just how limited the ‘all knowing’ media is!) This mindset often proved unsuitable in trying to make sense of the disorder created by the collapse of Communism. (Well duh! Perhaps the fact that these ‘journalists’ were so trained to see the world in terms of black and white with no shades of gray could possibly be part of the problem.) And it was an easy prey for the highly sophisticated propaganda machines that have characterized the conflicts in former Yugoslavia.

The wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia have not been played out only in the battlefield. They have also been wars of faxes and computer messages. Starting with the 10-day war in Slovenia in June-July 1991, one of the most difficult tasks for reporters has been to protect themselves from the propaganda offensive. The Slovenes never missed an opportunity to depict the conflict in the bloodiest terms possible in order to win international support for their cause as a "westward-leaning democracy" against the "brutal Communist aggressor." Those labels stuck and were reinforced as the war moved into Croatia. (Which goes to show the immense degree of mental laziness.)

The Croats soon learned from the Slovenes' use of propaganda. The Croatian news agency HINA and Croatian radio and TV unremittingly bombarded the outside world with minute details of the clashes, most of which were impossible to check. The best-known examples of vast exaggeration were reports of the massive damage inflicted on Dubrovnik, the magnificent medieval fortress city on the Adriatic. For months, Croatian media reported that the monuments in the old quarter had been devastated by Yugoslav Army shells and mortars. Western journalists who visited the walled city after the campaign ended reported seeing only superficial damage. (And, to this day, in many condemnatory pieces about the Serbs, especially from jerks like Margolis and Tony Lewis, the ‘destruction of Dubrovnik’ is always mentioned as a proof of Serbian mindless brutality.)

Another striking example of manipulation of facts was the case of a massacre in Gospic, Croatia, in 1991. Film footage showing the mutilated bodies of two young men was aired on Croatian and German TV, which identified the victims as Croats slaughtered by Serbs. The bodies were later recognized by relatives as being those of Serbs. The German network later apologized for the false report. (Perhaps the German network apologized; Christiane Amanpour certainly never has. Quite the contrary, Amanpour’s trademark propaganda pieces almost invariably show pictures of massacred Serbs and she conveniently labels them ‘Muslims’ or ‘Croats’ depending whose money she’s taking that day. A whore remains a whore.)

The Croats went even further than the Slovenes in the information war. Not only did the Croatian government hire the public relations firm Rudder-Finn to get its message out, but Croatia mobilized expatriate communities in the United States, Canada and Australia to put pressure on the media in their home countries. Letter-writing campaigns by members of both Croatian and Serbian communities in the U.S. criticizing news coverage have been a constant of the Yugoslav wars. The aim appeared to be to discredit the correspondent in the field, and many reporters told me they were having more and more difficulty in convincing their editors that what they had seen first hand was the real story, not what was contained in the U.S.-originated faxes. (Again, another NPR/CNN excuse bolthole. The fact that the Croats/ Muslims had drastically outspent [and were allowed to outspend; early on Serbs were frozen out of the media markets], seems to mean nothing.)

These have not been wars where the warring factions organize trips and escort journalists to the front-line, or where journalists can depend on independent pool reports. Press conferences by military leaders, other than by U.N. officials, have been rare. Journalists in the war zones have been on their own. The risks have been enormous (more than 30 journalists have been killed since the conflicts began), all the more so in a political culture where militiamen of all the warring sides are convinced journalists are spying for the enemy. (Another ‘Well duh!’ Could it possibly be that, at least in regards to the Serbs, there was some justification in seeing the ‘journalists’ as agents of the Croat/Muslim axis? Just as it seemed incomprehensible to the media here that during the attack of Serbia media of the powers that were doing the bombing may be persona non grata?)

A Croatian militiaman guarding a prison camp in Southern Bosnia summed up this attitude when he menacingly told an Associated Press reporter who was trying to get into the camp last year, "Reporters are like soldiers--the less they know, the longer they live."

The Serbs' deep-rooted conviction that throughout history they have been the victims of foreign powers has put them at a disadvantage in the propaganda war. (Yeah, these dumb Serbs don’t understand that reality is of little note when media generated virtual reality is sufficient for the ignorant to decide life and death issues. Barbarians!) Little or no effort has been made by the Belgrade government to try to win over the hearts and minds of the West through its media. And the Milosevic-controlled Serbian TV -- the major source of information -- has provided Serbs exclusively with the Serbian nationalist version of the conflicts. (Again, more propaganda masquerading as truth. Why should Belgrade ‘...try to win over the hearts and minds of the West through its media.”? Just exactly what is it that gives America (or the “international community” or “concerned voices” or whoever) the right to demand that its favor be curried?)

This has fomented a profound distrust, bordering on outright hatred, for foreign reporters, who are widely blamed by Serbs for their international isolation. (Gee, I wonder why that would be? Perhaps because it is foreign reporters like Poggioli, like Amanpour, like that Pulitzer prize winning liar, Roy Gutt(less)man, HAVE led to the Serbs’ international isolation through their skewed and corrupt reportages?) And--as in Croatia, where the media is equally under total control of the Tudjman government--distrust of reporters is also rooted in a Communist tradition against freedom of the press.

While there is widespread agreement that the Belgrade government and Serbian fighters have been the major culprits in the conflicts, the Serbs' entrenched attitude toward the outside world may have contributed to their being demonized and perceived by world public opinion as the sole culprits in the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. (Widespread agreement among the same incestuous group of ‘foreign policy specialists’ and ‘foreign reporters’ who poisoned the well of Western opinion from the outset. Yeah, I guess they would all agree for to break ranks would be an admission of error (something journalists and foreign policy wonks never do.))

I went to Sarajevo for the first time in September 1991, six months before the war started, and I was struck by the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of the city. The Writers' Club, an elegant, glass-enclosed restaurant and jazz bar, was filled with intellectuals, film makers and journalists. The skyline of old Sarajevo was famous for the proximity of its Orthodox and Catholic churches, mosques and synagogues. (The only unwritten rule was that no minaret or bell tower could be higher than any of the other houses of worship.) (Just like the old Canon ad with Agassi; “Image is everything.” A perfect description of the Western mind. Reality is upsetting; put up the Potemkin villages and don’t worry, be happy.)

Dealing with Sarajevo's citizens was immediately easy. Nearly everyone I met spoke a foreign language and had traveled widely in Europe. Many were Muslims, because for centuries Muslims lived primarily in the cities, and as representatives of the urban middle class, they naturally became foreign journalists' favorite sources. (Of course, had she bothered to look, there are more people in Beograd who speak foreign languages than Sarajevo. Also, she daintily sidesteps the fact that the “siege” of Sarajevo was always a farce. Again and again and again the media told us that the Serbs ‘surrounded’ Sarajevo or whichever Bosnian town. Let’s see. City dwellers (Muslims) were trapped in cities ‘surrounded’ by Serb farmers. Maybe the Serb farmers should have farmed in the city square? OF COURSE SERBS ‘SURROUNDED’ THE VARIOUS TOWNS AND CITIES. MOST OF THE SERBS WERE FARMERS AND FARMS USUALLY SURROUND TOWNS AND CITIES!)

Months later, traveling through Bosnian villages just before the outbreak of the conflict, I discovered a reality that was perhaps unknown even to many citizens of Sarajevo. The much-touted religious tolerance and intermingling of Serbs, Croats and Muslims symbolic of the Bosnian capital was often rare outside urban areas.

The impression created by secular, multicultural Sarajevo may have helped overshadow some of the main aspects of the war. The conflict has been variously described as a civil war based on ethnic and religious hatred, as an inevitable explosion after decades of Communist suppression of nationalist differences, or as a simple land grab.

But traveling through the countryside another aspect emerged. It is what the former mayor of Belgrade-and Milosevic opponent--Bogdan Bogdanovic describes as a war of the mountain against the city, of rural backwardness against urban co-existence. (Again, of course it is the ‘backward’ Serbs who are to blame. Everyone wants to be the big city, don't they? Maybe the country folk didn’t want to become city folk. Maybe they just wanted to be left alone.) The cornerstone of the Muslim-led government's appeal for a united Bosnia--and the message it has promoted through the media to the outside world--has been shaped by the cosmopolitan reality of Sarajevo and some other cities, but does not always correspond to the pre-war tensions and animosities that had long existed in many other parts of Bosnia. (Another hot, stinking load of bovine by-product. The “...Muslim-led government's appeal for a united Bosnia...” was never anything other than a public relations ploy. The fundamentalist Muslims in charge never had any intention of having a united Bosnia except under Muslim rule.)

If one went to look at the results of the first free elections in Bosnia in the fall of 1990, it was clear that the harmony of Sarajevo was unique: Throughout Bosnia, the ethnic parties prevailed, and voting results mirrored the map of ethnic population distribution.

But, as the major information sources, Muslim intellectuals and their leaders (often providing inflated statistics on mixed marriages) were very successful in exploiting an image of pre-war idyllic co-existence, and the media in turn reduced an extremely complex situation to a war of aggression from the outside. (Again, to ignorant little dummies like her, they neglected to mention their role in WWII as the willing executioners of their Nazi masters. I can understand the perpetrators and their get to be uneasy in acknowledging their heinous deeds but without this little piece of knowledge the picture is distorted. It’s analogous to a rapist telling an interviewer he would have no difficulties living in the same house with his victim. If the interviewer doesn’t realize she is talking to a rapist she wouldn’t understand the adamant refusal of the victim and the victim then seems petty and uncooperative.)

It was the sudden and dramatic siege of Sarajevo, which began on April 6, 1992, that drew the international media to the Bosnian capital. And the focus on the continuous bombing and shelling of the city reinforced misperceptions of the war. For months, very little or no attention was paid to what was happening in other parts of Bosnia. A Bosnian Serb official in Pale, the Bosnian Serb stronghold, told me that the shelling of Sarajevo had often been intensified on purpose, as part of a specific strategy to distract media attention from the Serbs' military campaigns elsewhere.

It was not until August 1992, when the first refugees from northern Bosnia arrived in Croatia, that the world learned of concentration camps and of vicious campaigns of "ethnic cleansing." The refugees told stories of harassment, fighting, atrocities and expulsions by Serbs that had begun many months before. And it was not until the Muslims and Croats - erstwhile allies -- began massacring each other in the spring of 1993 that journalists were forced to deal with the "other war" and discovered that reciprocal "ethnic cleansing" had been going on for months in central and southwestern Bosnia. (Which is, again, what people who understood what was happening on the ground had been saying but had been consistently ignored and marginalized.)

In June 1993, two American reporters who had been covering the region for some time were discussing the disastrous role the international community had played in this tragedy. "But it has been journalism's finest hour," one of the reporters then said.

I beg to differ. There have been innumerable instances where those of us who have covered these conflicts have fallen into the disinformation trap. One of the most insidious was the numbers game--number of dead, number of refugees, and especially number of rape victims.

At the end of 1992, the Muslim-led Bosnian government said that up to 50,000 Muslim women had been raped by Serbs in Bosnia. A report by a special European Community commission, which did not include direct interviews with victims, placed the number at 20,000. On January 21, 1993, Amnesty International issued a report based on interviews with victims conducted over months by the organization itself, by women's and human rights groups working in the region and by journalists in the field.

While it stated that Muslim women had been the chief victims, it said all three warring sides in Bosnia had committed rapes and abuses against women. The report added that the issue of rape has been widely used as a propaganda weapon, with all sides minimizing or denying abuses committed by their own forces and maximizing those of their opponents.

In Geneva, Amnesty International's legal officer, Nick Howen, said in a news conference there was no evidence to back up the figure of 20,000 Muslim rape victims cited by the European Community report. And in Zagreb, American relief workers I spoke to dismissed that same estimate as highly exaggerated. But still today, the number of 50,000 (and higher) has stuck and the prevailing perception is that only Muslim women have been the victims and Serbian fighters the only perpetrators. (Even though Poggioli admits here that the ‘rape camp’ and ‘program of systematic rape’ were all media distortions, to this day they are still used as another brick to hurl against the Serbs. And, unsurprisingly, provide fodder for the ICTY. EVEN THOUGH THE UN ITSELF HAS THOROUGHLY INVESTIGATED THE 'RAPE CAMP' ACCUSATIONS TO BE WITHOUT MERIT!)

What has been almost completely ignored is that the numbers game has a long tradition in the Balkans. Even today, there are no reliable figures indicating exactly how many people died in the civil war during World War II or how many Serbs were killed at the Ustasha concentration camp of Jasenovac in Croatia. (Serbs claim as many as a million, Croats say as few as 100,000.) Nationalist leaders have traditionally manipulated numbers like these as a means to foment ethnic tensions and hatred as well as to cleanse the historical record. (Poggioli neglects to make the Kurt Waldheim connection here; after all, good old Kurt issued the death orders for thousands of Serbs and Jews in Jugoslavia. She also leaves this as ‘a numbers game’ never addressing the issue of the Croats' adherence to Nazi principles and that the Serb dead died as allies of the US and the west.)

As the conflicts have worsened and international organizations have become more and more divided and impotent, I have felt that as journalists covering former Yugoslavia (at times the only outsiders to be present in a particular area), we have found ourselves bearing an enormous responsibility. Policy in Western capitals--or lack of it--has increasingly been based on news reports, and many times the media have been better at pulling emotional strings than at analyzing facts. (I made this point in a ‘letter to the editor’ [unpublished] that I wrote about a year before this article came out. I was laughed at and told that it was insane to suggest policy was being based on media reports.)

The use of good-guy and bad-guy stereotypes often obscured the complex origins of the conflict. And little emphasis was given to some crucial factors, such as the well-documented pre-war agreement between the Croatian and Serbian leaders, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic, to carve up Bosnia between them; Milosevic's long-standing consent to Slovenian independence, and Trudjman's publicly asserted opposition to the creation of a Muslim state in the center of Europe. I cannot help but think that one reason why the media spotlight on former Yugoslavia dimmed in the late spring of 1993 was that the collapse of the so-called Muslim-Croat alliance in Bosnia made it abundantly clear that there were no innocents in this war.

In his book The Rebirth of History, Misha Glenny had predicted that the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War would render obsolete an Old World Order system of analysis. He said it would profoundly change the profession of journalism, which now requires a rediscovery of history, geography and a rethinking of global relationships. Yugoslavia was the first serious test of this need of a new approach. No, I don't think it was journalism's finest hour. But it has taught us the clear lesson that journalists as scouts now need new compasses if they are to be a reliable link between facts on the ground and public opinion.
---------------------------
Sylvia Poggioli is a National Public Radio foreign
correspondent, based in Prague. In 1993, she received
the George Foster Peabody Award for coverage of the
war in Bosnia. This article is reprinted with
permission from the Fall/93 issue of Nieman Reports.
------------------------------------
Editor's Note: Extra! rarely reprints articles from
other sources. But we thought this article, from the
journal of Harvard's Nieman Foundation, contains
valuable insights on coverage of former Yugoslavia by
a reporter on the scene.

2006-11-09T14:47:00.000-06:00

“Which way you goin' Billy?
Can I go too?” - THE POPPY FAMILY

Now that the one-party stranglehold has been broken on the U.S. Congress, now that the more obvious signs of the wreckage of our Constitutional republic become all the more apparent, now that the utter contempt and hypocrisy of our ‘rulers’ becomes all the more manifest, what direction will the new ‘bosses’ take us? Will it be, in the immortal words of “The Who”:

“I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss”

Granted, it is vitally important that the incoming Democrats do not immediately institute comity and the sense of bipartisanship. It is vitally important that the Republicans be treated under the very rules they themselves promulgated and instituted against the minority Democrats, not so much in the spirit of vindictiveness but as an object lesson of why comity and bipartisanship are irreplaceable and necessary facets of proper and fair legislation. It is fit and proper for the Republicans to toil in basement meeting rooms; that they suffer the indignity of having their lights and microphones arbitrarily cut off; that they not be notified of hearings on bills and are forced to search Capitol Hill for the location of the hearings…from which they will be summarily excluded.

However, that being said, even before that object lesson has been adequately impressed upon the former majority, it is more than necessary that the pervasive and corrosive influence of the myriad lobbyists and special interests be immediately and obviously derailed by the new majority Democrats. Lest we forget, it was the corruption (perceived and real) of the long standing majority Democrats that led to the Gingrich “Republican revolution” of 1994. Hopefully, the years of ‘wandering in the wilderness’ as well as the unparalleled corruption exemplified by Delay’s “K Street Project” will have taught the Democrats that, regardless of who is on the receiving end of filthy lucre, it’s influence is corrupt and corrosive. Also, it will be up to those who fomented the electoral tidal wave of 2006 to not sit on their laurels; not remain satisfied that ‘our side won’. WE, the people, in order to have a vaguely functioning government, must insist that ALL those who we award with offices and power REMEMBER that THEY are our representatives; not our masters.

2006-11-08T22:09:00.000-06:00

A Pox on Both Their Houses

Much as I believe it a positive good for portions of the American public (and, even, some branches of the American media) to begin questioning the aftermath of Bush's unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq, I can't help but wonder where was this public and media questioning in the aftermath of Clinton's unprovoked, illegal attack on Yugoslavia in 1999.

Portions of the media (generally the 'liberal' sectors) are repeatedly raising questions about the lies, distortions and media manipulation that formed the purported raison d'être for Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Congress and the media excuse their blatant pre-action warmongering on the Bush Administration's assertions surrounding WMDs(sic) and Saddam's 'threat' to 'world peace' and the US. In the period after 'major hostilities ended' in Iraq, the US has been totally incapable of adducing ANY evidence of usable or substantial stores of chemical or biological weapons, much less ANY evidence of a nuclear capability.

As a fallback position, the Bush Administration (and, virtually everyone else) has contented themselves with the chimera of a 'justifiable humanitarian' intervention. "At least the Iraqi people have been 'saved' from the despicable tyrant Saddam." In all their self satisfied preening at having 'delivered the Iraqi people from a horrible tyrant', the question is never raised whether the thousands of innocents murdered by the US in the process (not counting the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by a decade of draconian US sanctions which prevented medicines, medical devices and even common sanitation supplies from reaching the Iraqi public) would have found the price exacted as commensurate.

The fact that SOME questions are now being raised regarding the Iraq imbroglio is all to the good. However, there are far larger questions to be raised and not only regarding the Bush/neocon junta.

It has become abundantly clear that both 'liberals' and neocons favor the use of US arms abroad. The only difference being the putative 'reasons' for such imperialistic interventions.

The neocons are at least honest in their villainy. They unabashedly favor foreign interventions to increase American power, both economic and geopolitical. The 'liberals', on the other hand, masquerade as favoring such interventions based on specious arguments of 'humanitarianism'. Both neocons and 'liberals' share the pretext of 'spreading democracy and freedom ' in these interventions.

To demonstrate the blatant hypocrisy of the majority (mostly 'liberals') of those now lambasting the Bush Administration for its actions, preceding, during and after the Iraq attack, let's examine these self same critics' behavior in regard to Clinton's equally repugnant attack on Yugoslavia.

The 'liberal' critics of Bush's attack on Iraq criticize Bush, his administration and the all too compliant mainstream media for having hyped, distorted and lied to the American Congress and people to justify said attack. In this the liberals are totally correct because it is undeniable that all the named malefactors DID INDEED hype, lie and distort the truth to form a plausible excuse for the attack. However, it has been amply demonstrated that Clinton, his admin-istration and the media were equally complicit in EXACTLY THE SAME PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR that they now castigate the Bush Administration and the pliant mainstream media for.

Just as the Bush Administration's claims of 'imminent danger' and WMDs have been definitively proven to be illusory, so too were all the claims (unilateral atrocities, genocide and ethnic cleansing) of the Clinton Administration (loudly echoed and hyped by the self same mainstream media that acted as Bush's accomplices in the Iraq crimes). Let's review just a sampling of the lies, distortions and hype that were used in the case of Kosovo, shall we?

Just as Bush now lies when he states that Saddam (actually meaning the Iraqi
people) had "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in.", so too did Clinton and his Machiavellian minions lie when they presented Milosevic (in this case meaning the Serbian people) as being implacably opposed to 'rational negotiations' at Rambouillet. Just as Bush openly lied about not allowing inspectors in (after all, who was Hans Blix?), so too did Clinton openly lie about Milosevic being opposed to negotiations (anyone heard of or remember the infamous 'Appendix B'?).

Just as Bush blatantly lied about the existence of Iraq's WMDs, which lie formed the triggering event for launching the attack in the first place, so too the Clinton administration blatantly lied about the Racak 'massacre', which formed the trigger for its illegal and unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia. The Racak 'massacre' has been just as definitively debunked subsequent to Clinton's attack on Yugoslavia as Bush's lie on Iraq's supposed WMDs.

The parallels and lies are far too numerous to detail in toto. However, the above is ample to prove the point that both 'liberals' and neocons have no compunction whatsoever to raping the truth to support their own illegitimate aims.

The question that needs to be asked, in the final analysis, is why weren't the questions that are now being asked about Bush, the Iraq attack and its aftermath asked in the face of the monumental lies and deceptions of Clinton's attack on Yugoslavia. The question, when asked, answers itself.

2006-11-08T21:54:00.000-06:00

“The Smartest Guys in the Room” (not)!
Or “Why do they hate us?” America’s forgotten history abroad

In the immediate wake of the attacks of 9/11, one of the most prevalent and pervasive questions voiced with bitter bewilderment was “Why do they hate us?” The simple asking of this question in and of itself demonstrates the almost complete amnesia and/or ignorance of the American people. Below is a drastically abridged, illustrative exemplar of some of the reasons “why they hate us.”

1. Iran - 1953 The CIA’s first post WWII instance of ‘regime change’. Though popularly elected in ‘free and fair’ elections by the Iranian people, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, due to his insistence that Iran was entitled to a greater share of and interest in his nation’s oil reserves and revenues, it was determined by Allen Welsh Dulles that he should be removed. Though successful in removing Mossadegh and replacing him with the compliant Shah Reza Pahlavi, this external interference in Iran’s internal affairs and the Shah’s high handed tyranny remained a bitter memory in the collective Iranian mind and was a direct result of the 1979 ouster of the Shah and the related taking of American hostages.

2. Guatemala - 1954 Following in the steps of Gen. Smedley Butler (2 time Congressional Medal of Honor winner who, in his book “War is a Racket” wrote:
"I was a muscle man for big business; I was a muscle man for Wall Street; I was a gangster for Brown Brothers Harriman.") the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit Company, labeled Arbenz a Communist (for his proposal to allocate unused UFC lands to landless peasants) and financed, trained and supplied a force tied to the moneyed interests in Guatemala to overthrow Arbenz. This led to military juntas and a vicious civil war with tremendous civilian casualties.

3. Vietnam - 1945-1975 As early as May, 1945, President Truman supported French colonial desires to re-establish their dominion in Indochina. Even before the definitive defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, America was supplying over 75% of the armaments and 90% of the financing for the French Vietnamese misadventure. The US took over when the French withdrew in 1954 and maintained and increased their presence until their ignominious final withdrawal in 1975.

4. Afghanistan - 1979-1989 As stated in an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser in Le Nouvel Observateur, “Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. [snip] Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists? B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems [emphasis added] or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” Brzezinski It was during this period (1979-1989) that the United States decided it would be a good idea to fund and encourage fanatical Muslims to battle the Soviets and, in so doing, ended up aiding one Osama bin Laden to organize what would one day become al-Qaeda.

5. Yugoslavia - 1991-1999 Though the U.S. had begun to intervene in Yugoslavia’s internal affairs as early as the mid 1980’s, the last nail in Yugoslavia’s coffin was nailed in 1991 when the U.S. backed (at Germany’s insistence) the EEC/EU’s unilateral ‘recognition’ of Slovenia and Croatia (in total and complete contravention of the Helsinki Final Act to which the U.S., Yugoslavia and the EU countries were all signatories). Though too complex to detail here, the U.S. obstructed peace negotiations, covertly violated their own arms embargo to arm the Croats and Muslims, provided extensive media disinformation to benefit their chosen clients (Croats and Muslims), turned a blind eye as the Bosnian Muslims imported foreign Muslim warriors (including Afghan veterans, foreign mercenaries and members of al-Qaeda). In 1995 the U.S. approved of, trained, provisioned and provided advanced air support for Croatia’s ‘Operation Storm’. Though hardly mentioned in the West, ‘Operation Storm’ led to the single largest instance of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Europe since WWII. The primary reason this is hardly known of in the West is that those approximately 250,000 cleansed during the operation were the demonized Serbs.

U.S./NATO’s illegitimate and illegal 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia-Montenegro, just as its previous intervention in Bosnia, was based on a torrent of lies, half-truths and disinformation. The intervention was presented as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ on behalf of the ‘abused’ Kosovo Albanians. At the conclusion of its illegal venture it was proved that all the wildly exaggerated claims of ‘genocide’, ‘mass graves’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ were completely and totally baseless.

6. Iraq - 2003-present The original justification for the intervention in Iraq was tripartite: 1) possession of WMD, 2) links to al-Qaeda and 3) links to the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. Once U.S. troops occupied Iraq and all three of the putative ‘justifications’ were shown to have been totally baseless, the U.S. morphed the Iraq intervention into a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to topple the tyrant Saddam and democratize Iraqi society.

As noted in the title, in our overweening hubris, we have arrogated to ourselves an omniscience believing that we can decide for all and sundry who are the ‘good guys’ and who the ‘bad guys’ and, of course, we always back the ‘good guys’. This explains why we have poisoned (both in Iran and at home) relations with the Iranians. Ditto the Israelis vs. Palestinians. Same with virtually the entirety of South and Central America. By backing our chosen ‘good guys’ in Afghanistan we spawned al-Qaeda who, in gratitude for our support bombed our embassies in Africa and ‘paid us a visit’ on 9/11. Perhaps it would be better for all involved if we were slightly less full of our ‘omniscience’ and refrained from picking ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and simply dealt honestly and above board with others and refrained from believing in our own hubristic superiority.

2006-11-08T20:59:00.000-06:00

So, You Say You Support Our Troops, eh?

How many times have we heard, “I don’t support the (P)resident but I support our troops!”

Ask yourself the following: Question: Did all Germans support Hitler? Answer: No! Question: Were all Germans Nazis? Answer: No! Question: Did the vast majority of Germans ‘support their troops’? Answer: Yes!

I know, I’ve already lost the argument because I have transgressed the Hitler principle; once you bring up Hitler in an analogy, you have lost the argument. However, in this particular case, the Hitler analogy is eerily apropos. Even at the height of his popularity, Hitler was not supported by wide swaths of the German population. However, from the moment Germany’s army was committed to the field, virtually the entirety of the German population ‘supported their troops’ if, for no other reason, it was almost guaranteed that a member of their family was among the number of the ‘troops’

This is not to say that the German people were explicitly in favor of the atrocities that their troops were committing in the field; no more so than the American people were explicitly in favor of the atrocities our troops were carrying out in the field in Vietnam. Granted, most of the German people were neither keenly aware nor upset by those atrocities, after all most of the atrocities were being committed against ‘untermensch’. It has to be admitted that the attitude of the ‘average American’ in the 1960’s was not very much different; they certainly didn’t know the particulars of American atrocities but, even to the extent that they may have had an inkling it wasn’t that important, after all it was happening to “those little brown people over there”.

When Eisenhower’s troops liberated various concentration camps, neither Eisenhower nor the troops in general would believe that the German people living in the towns surrounding the camps could possibly have been ignorant of what was taking place in those camps. This actually is not that difficult to accept, especially in light of the willful blindness the American public has exhibited and continues to exhibit regarding the concentration camps which our government is constructing at this very moment.

Support our troops? I support the individuals as human beings; as soldiers in the field, I simply can’t. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to be a good German err American.

2006-11-08T20:40:00.000-06:00

Behind the Mask of Civility
Are we really that ‘civilized’?

As a child growing up in post-WWII America, the question was often asked “How could the Germans, a cultured, educated and civilized people, have become as uncivilized as to perpetrate the Holocaust and the other atrocities during WWII?”

In the ensuing years, on the basis of psychological experiments such as the “Milgram” and Stanford Prison Experiments, it has been made more than manifest that the layer of civility truly is thin and, at best, a very feeble reed indeed to rely on.

The “Milgram Experiment”, carried out in 1964 and at no less an institution than Yale University, showed that subjects would, in a majority of cases, apply shocks to an unknown person that could very well be lethal. Perhaps even more interesting is the ancillary fact that although there were a number of participants who would not administer the ‘lethal’ shocks of 450 volts, not a single participant refused to cease shocking the ‘test subject’ up to and including shocks of 300 volts. And, even though many of the participants related that they were ‘uncomfortable’ administering the shocks, not a single participant quit the experiment.

The “Stanford Prison Experiment” carried out in 1971 also provided interesting though very depressing results. In that experiment volunteers (university students) were arbitrarily divided into two groups, ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. Even though all the participants were aware that all the other participants, ‘prisoners’ and ‘guards’ alike, were simply volunteer university students, within 2 days from the inception of the experiment the guards were behaving with sufficient brutality to cause a ‘prison riot’. The conditions of the experiment got out of hand so quickly that the experiment had to be terminated early (within 6 days from inception).

The depressing reality is that humans have an all too consistent record of brutality, depravity and debauchery. For confirmation of this one need only to look at the sorry record of history. We (the bearers of Western ‘culture’) like to say: “But, we’ve gotten better!” A quick look at the behavior of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would hardly lead to such a conclusion.

More to the point, especially we of the ‘Western Tradition’ like to style and believe ourselves as being elevated ourselves above the barbarity of such ‘savages’ as the Mongols, Tartars and Ottomans. Any fair reading of Western history would tend to disabuse us of these fables.

Well, at least we Americans have come a long way from our barbarous ancestors and become more ‘civilized’. Again, it is a comforting myth. That is all that it is, a myth. From the very first encounters of ‘Western civilization’ and the ‘New World’, the record demonstrates nothing of the sort. Columbus managed the murder and enslavement of the very “Indians” he first encountered. The predations, murder and mayhem visited upon the native Americans by following Spanish ‘Conquistadors’ are hardly an example of goodness and light.

Even if we allow that the Spanish may have been ‘blinded’ by their zeal to propagate ‘the truth faith’ to the ‘heathens’. How then do we explain the behavior of the ‘superior’ northern Europeans? As Hudson’s first mate, Robert Juet, recounted in his diary entries for July 24-25, 1609:

· 24: Juet wrote: "We kept a good watch for fear of being betrayed by the people, and noticed where they kept their shallops." The crew catch 20 "great cods and a great halibut" in nearby waters.

· 25: Juet took an armed crew of six men to the native village and wrote in his journal "In the morning we manned our scute with four muskets and six men, and took one of their shallops and brought it aboard. Then we manned our boat and scute with twelve men and muskets, and two stone pieces, or murderers, and drave the salvages from their houses, and took the spoil of them, as they would have done us."

· The crew stole a boat that morning, then later in the evening, 12 armed crew went back and drove the Indians away from their encampment, stealing everything they could, on the pretense the natives would have done the same to them. No one was punished for this act.” Henry Hudson’s Third Voyage 1609.

Not particularly ‘enlightened’ behavior. Granted, these were the Dutch. Were the English any better? History certainly doesn’t make the case. The very native Americans who aided the Pilgrims survive their first winter in the New World were unceremoniously murdered in short order by those same Pilgrims. Nor does the history of America read much better. American history reads as a tale of massive genocide and ethnic cleansing; that explains the expansion from a fragile string of 13 colonies on the east coast of the continent to encompass the entire landmass from Atlantic to Pacific between present day Canada and Mexico. When more land was ‘needed’ it was quite simply expropriated from those inhabiting them (be they native Americans or Mexican). If simple expropriation was not considered sufficient, a generated casus belli was manufactured to provide a ‘reason’ for such land theft. When we determined that the continental United States was insufficient for our needs we manufactured a war with a crumbling Spanish Empire all the better to steal those properties we found necessary and/or desirable.

In conclusion, what we found upsetting about the behavior of the Germans in WWII were the self same traits that we found so laudable in other contexts: their industriousness, their meticulousness and their efficiency. The Nazi anti-Semitism which was so decried as they executed the Holocaust was little different from that harbored in most other ‘civilized’ countries. Just recall the saga of the SS St. Louis and the wholehearted participation by citizens in most Nazi occupied countries in rounding up and turning in “their” Jews. More than anything, the Nazis baldly faced the world with the ineluctable end results of racism. In addition to the European Jews: Slavs, gypsies, and others were also eliminated as ‘untermensch’. Perhaps that was the Nazis ultimate crime, that they rubbed our noses in the end result of our own mean spirited humanity in such graphic detail.