LiberalPro

Chomsky on RT

2013-05-22T22:38:00.001-05:00

Interview With Chris Hedges "Why Are We Not Calling This Fascism?"

2013-05-22T22:21:00.002-05:00

Gerald Celente "Leading Into Disaster" - (5/14/13)

2013-05-21T20:43:00.003-05:00

America's Greatest Challenge

2013-05-21T00:20:00.003-05:00

I've been reading a few articles on the “alternative” media which really have me thinking. One, by Chris Hedges entitled “Rise Up or Die” made me think about just how bad things really are nowadays here in the USA. The other article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, “You are The Hope” was also a particularly dark piece.

It’s not that I don't agree with what the two have said…I do; still, I don’t think they quite accurately reflect the growing disconnect between what many Americans and the mainstream media, along with the Powers That Be would have us believe.

At this moment in time (I reserve the right to change my mind at a moment’s notice), from talking to people I have been meeting in my travels, there really isn't much support for the President or the Congress. People don’t seem to be buying what they are selling on the corporate media. I heard today (mostly from the Democrat megaphone on MSNBC) that the President’s approval rating is actually up this week. I'm starting to wonder who exactly was really polled.

Contrary to what the MSM tells us, most people are not idiots. I think that most Americans can look at their lives and pretty much come to this conclusion; they are not living as well as their parents did. There are many Americans who really don't believe that the new American “normal” of working two part-time jobs with no health benefits isn't a “be all, end all” situation. Young people graduating from colleges and universities, saddled with huge student debt, aren't exactly bowled over with their job prospects.

There are also very real problems that have yet to make their mark on our much-touted American society. The treatment the government has given our Veterans is a blemish on our nation. Our government, fighting this over-hyped “War on Terror”, has demanded that not only active duty soldiers been required to fight multiple combat deployments, but National Guard and Reserve soldiers too. Suicides, PTSD, broken marriages, sexual trauma (in the case of rape) and backlogs for disability claims have been the other “new normal”. The phrase “Thank you for your service” does not make up for the abysmal treatment they are getting from the government that has used and abused them. The truth is…millions of disgruntled veterans have made life difficult, not only in this nation, but other nations, throughout history.

There is something going on in this country, and it is not good. Everyone in government, Wall Street and in the corporate boardrooms think they have a handle on the economy. The truth is, they have over-looked the most important part of the equation, once they have raped the American Middle Class and have lined their pockets with the assets they have stolen from us, who is going to buy their products?

Ask yourself some questions: How many people do you know have lost their once good credit ratings? How many people are paying a mortgage that is higher than the home is worth? Who do you know that has recently moved back in with Mom and Dad or vice-versa? When was the last time anyone you know took a two-week vacation? When was the last time you heard someone bragging about their “portfolio”? I could go on, but I bet you get my drift.

The simple truth is that this great nation of ours can’t keep spending over 50% of our discretionary budget on the military, while spending only 6% on education and another 6% on social programs! The simple truth is that we get no return on our buck for spending on the military! All we get in return are more enemies that wish the worst for us. Still, they keep selling us this “Superpower” rhetoric. What’s the good of being a superpower when 22% of Americans are living under the poverty level?

We have the power to change this country for the better.

The first thing Americans need to do is to get off this label kick that the PTB want us on. It should be apparent to most Americans that there is very little difference between the two corporately controlled political parties. In reading this article I would like people to understand one thing; they want us to fight amongst ourselves. The more we fight with each other, the more divided we are, the more power they have over us.

This is the game that the Republicans and Democrats are playing. The more we focus on differences they foster, the less we focus on how we are being screwed. We all know who controls the GOP, but where were the Democrats when they cut food stamps? Where were the Democrats when they smashed Occupy? Where were the Democrats when they passed and signed the NDAA? Where were the Democrats when they sent whistleblowers to prison? Again, I can go on and on. The point is, stop supporting these two political parties. As George Carlin once said; “It’s a big club, and you ain't in it. It’s the same club they hit you over the head with.”

We need to talk to our friend and relatives’. We need to sit down and write articles and call in to talk shows. Those that can need to start their own radio show on the internet or small community radio or host a show on public access TV. We all need to share articles on Facebook and Twitter. If we all could just spend one hour of our day doing these things we could make profound changes.

"Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand." --Thomas Jefferson

It is our duty as citizen’s to educate those who are currently ignorant in the present situation. There is no free lunch when it comes to this. Either we will rise to the occasion or give away our freedom and prosperity to those who will take it from us. This is the challenge we as Americans face.

Tim Gatto and Ben Shaw

2013-05-20T21:36:00.003-05:00

Listen to internet radio with Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut on BlogTalkRadio

You Are The Hope

2013-05-20T13:09:00.002-05:00

By Paul Craig Roberts

If there is hope, dear readers, you are it.

You are motivated to find truth.

You can think outside the box. You can see through propaganda.

You are the remnant with the common sense that once was a common American virtue. You come to this site, because you get explanations that are not agenda-driven, that are not BS, that are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. You get explanations based on my lifetime of unique education and experience. Some of you are young enough to be equipped with the energy and courage to organize whatever resistance there may be to the Gestapo State that is descending on the United States of America.

Until the George W. Bush Regime, I never thought that it could happen here. I could not imagine law professors and Department of Justice (sic) officials writing legal memos justifying, in the name of a hyped “war on terror,” the termination of civil rights for United States Citizens. We were the land of the free. The Constitution was our bedrock. Yet, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were easily taken away from the inattentive American people.

The Constitution did not protect native inhabitants and slaves who were not considered part of the American population, but the universal suppression in the US of non-whites’ rights produced in the end the civil rights movement that brought moral awareness of the wrongs and successfully hitched its cause to the founding documents of the country.

Where today is moral awareness as Washington bombs civilian populations around the globe? Where is the moral conscience of the civil rights movement as the First Black President, the first member of the oppressed class to sit in the Oval Office, validates the Bush Regime’s assertion of the right of the unaccountable executive to ignore habeas corpus and due process? Not satisfied with this crime, Obama asserted the right of the executive branch to murder any citizen suspected, without proof being offered to a court, of undefined “support of terrorism.” Today all Americans have fewer rights than blacks had prior to the Civil Rights Act.

Anything, including a column critical of war and the police state, can be declared to be “in support of terrorism.” As the tyrant Bush put it: “You are with us, or you are against us.”

The print and TV media and many Internet sites got the message: Serve Washington’s agenda, and will you will prosper. Advertisers and the CIA will pump money into your coffers. Challenge us and you will be demonized and could face a military tribunal, indefinite detention, or assassination. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are being persecuted for telling the truth.

So far, Washington has convinced the public that Washington’s terror is mainly limited to Muslims, who are obligingly demonized by print, TV, and much of the Internet media. However, if Muslim American citizens lack civil liberty, so do all other American citizens. Those who are safe are those who ally with the tyrant and remain subservient.

To ally with the tyrant, a United States citizen must have no moral conscience, no sense of justice, no compassion for the innocent and dispossessed. These are the worst kind of Americans; yet, they are the only ones who can succeed in the present environment.

Every time I write a column that is the truth or the truth as I am able to discover it, instead of hawking the propaganda line, I move up on the list of those who are persona non grata in the Empire.

A writer can find himself demonized and declared a kook simply by reporting findings from distinguished scientists, high-rise architects, structural engineers, first responders, and an international collection of high government officials. Not too long ago a writer or reporter for the Huffington Post discovered to his surprise that Pat Buchanan and I disagreed with all the wars that had been launched to protect us from terrorism. He asked me for an interview, and I agreed.

An hour or so after the interview was posted on the Huffington Post, I received an emergency call or email. He had been criticized for interviewing me, “for giving you a forum when you are a 9/11 sceptic.” He was unsure that it was possible for a Reagan presidential appointee to be a 9/11 sceptic and asked if I was.

I replied that I had reported the findings of scientists, architects, engineers, and the public testimony of first responders, because I thought these were qualified people whose opinions at least ranked equally with the politicians on the 9/11 Commission and the talking heads on Fox “News” and CNN, none of whom could pass a high school test in the laws of physics, much less high-rise architecture and structural engineering.

The Huffington Post writer panicked. Instead of taking down the interview, he felt impelled to assure readers and his boss that he had been deceived. He wrote at the beginning and ending of the interview that he did not know he was interviewing someone about the Iraq War who had given ink to those conspiracy theorists who raised questions about the truthfulness of the US government. He wrote that my views on the wars should be disregarded, because I wrote that scientists, architects, engineers, and first responders provided evidence contrary to the government’s claims.

And there you have it.

The Huffington Post has far more readers than I do, and far more money. There is no limit on the ability of the Huffington Post to tell and sell the lies of the Agenda.

I can remember when I was a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, a Business Week columnist, a Scripps Howard News Service columnist and appeared regularly in the major mainstream print media and even from time to time on TV talking head programs. Today, the editor or producer who gave me a forum would be fired instantly, and they all know it.

It is discouraging that after so many transparent lies and orchestrations–weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes–the majority of Americans still believe the government. Americans are even buying into the line that Syria is ruled by a brutal dictator whose overthrow justifies Washington’s alliance with its 9/11 enemy, al-Qaeda, in order to overthrow a secular ruler who constrains al-Qaeda.

Washington has come full circle. Its enemy is now its ally. Washington wasted trillions of dollars and countless lives in eleven years of war and constructed a domestic police state all in order to combat al Qaeda with whom Washington is now allied against the Syrian government.

The public’s response to the Boston Marathon Bombing is even more discouraging. Not even King George and his Redcoats could achieve what Homeland Security just pulled off–locking down 100 square miles of Boston and its suburbs with heavily armed troops tramping through citizens’ homes barking harsh orders, all justified by a hunt for one 19-year old suspect. It was the Third Reich’s Gestapo in operation right here in “freedom and democracy” America. Ron Paul is correct that the suspension of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing. Note the government’s euphemism for martial law–”shelter-in-place.”

Two brothers have been convicted in the media and by the Obama Regime, including the president’s own words, of a bombing without the public ever being presented with any evidence except anonymous unattributed reports and a film of the alleged brothers walking with backpacks, which were ubiquitous.

I am old enough to remember when it was impermissible for government and media to convict a person prior to the jury’s verdict. Americans once lived in a free country governed by the rule of law in which a person was innocent until proven guilty.

What was the reason or evidence for naming the brothers suspects? Was any reason given, or was the film of the two walking with backpacks simply shown over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with the media reporting that these are the suspects. In other words, was it beat into your brain that they were suspects because there they are in the film? If not, why was the same film shown repeatedly? Fox “News” was still showing the film on April 26, eleven days after the bombing and might still be showing it. Did you experience: “Here are the suspects. See them. They have backpacks. See. We know that they are suspects, because, see, there they are.”

When is the last time the media investigated anything? A good candidate for investigation is the post-bombing rampage the brothers allegedly went on, robbing a 7/11 store (later contradicted by local police), killing a campus policeman, shooting a transit cop, high-jacking a SUV and releasing the owner.

Why would terrorists seeking to escape in order to strike again call attention to themselves in such outlandish ways and release a car-jacked owner to alert the police of the tag number? If the brothers were willing to kill police with gunfire and innocents with bombs, why release the guy whose vehicle they stole so he could inform the police of the license plate and make the brothers’ capture easier? What is the evidence, other than “reports from authorities,” that these events occurred or had any more connection to the brothers than the falsely reported 7/11 robbery that local police disavowed? Why does the US media simply accept whatever government authorities say?

Where is the evidence of a first shoot-out and a second shoot-out? The second shoot- out consisted of the authorities bombarding a motionless youth bleeding from wounds in a boat with multiple volleys of stun grenades and then multiple gunshots. The unconscious 19 year old was unarmed and unable to respond to the boat owner who discovered him. As he lies there, he is shot many times, including through the throat, and is on life support. But the very next day, according to the presstitute media, he is providing hand-written confessions.

Was the purpose of the reports of a murderous rampage to create fear among the population so that they would accept martial law and home invasions by armed troops ordering American citizens out of their homes with hands over their heads on the pretext that they might be harboring the Boston Marathon Bomber?

The videos of the street celebration in which Bostonians thank the police and of the two Boston families, if not scripted by actors, shows Americans who far from opposing the police state welcome it. A father says that he with his daughter in his arms was forced out of his home by troops pointing automatic rifles at their heads, but that he was thankful for the safety the police provided him by violating every civil right that the Constitution gave him. A woman says it was scary but that “the police are just doing their jobs.” Are Americans now so brainwashed that they attribute their safety to the presence of a Gestapo Police State?

Why have detention facilities been built? Why did Homeland Security purchase a billion or more rounds of ammunition? Why does Homeland Security have 2,700 tanks and a para-military force? Why aren’t these questions being investigated?

The US Constitution is the product of 900 years of human efforts to restrain brutal government and to make government subject to law. It only took Bush and Obama eleven years to get rid of it.

Paul Craig Roberts

Rise Up or Die

2013-05-20T12:46:00.004-05:00

Rise Up or Die

By Chris Hedges

May 20, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"TruthDig" - Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of government and corporate power.

Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.

The government’s fierce persecution of the press—an attack pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy Hammond—dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was once illegal—the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.

In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United States’ second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is 48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation’s agricultural workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.

Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It means saying no. To remain safe, to remain “innocent” in the eyes of the law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil. In his poem of resistance, “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our souls. McKay wrote:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”

Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years

Journalists or Propaganda?

2013-05-16T11:38:00.001-05:00

Interview with Stephen Lendman

2013-05-16T11:16:00.000-05:00

Listen to internet radio with Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut on BlogTalkRadio

Ben Shaw with Tim

2013-05-15T18:08:00.001-05:00

Listen to internet radio with Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut on BlogTalkRadio

Wrong is Wrong

2013-05-15T17:23:00.002-05:00

The last few days have seen abuses of the worst kind emerge from the Obama Administration. I have seen all sorts of people rise to the defense of the administration, mostly claiming that the Bush regime did far worse during their terms in power. The truth is this, just because the GOP pulled this kind of behavior in the past, it doesn't justify what the present administration has done.

This kind of behavior is just plain wrong. What really bothers me is what the PTB did to the Occupy movement. If there are so-called “Progressives” that wish to defend Obama and his cronies, they might just wish to take a minute to reflect on how they crushed the most promising populist movement in the 21st Century.

Wire-tapping the phone lines of reporters and reading their emails is just about the worst violation of the 1st Amendment that I can think of. The scandal involving the AP warrants a special investigator. It is my opinion that all who were involved should be heavily censured and I wouldn't discourage criminal proceedings against these people.

The IRS scandal involving the Tea-Party groups also warrants a special prosecutor. The point I’m making is this; either we have a free society or we don’t. We can't have wrongdoers investigating wrongdoers. I could have understood it if the IRS was investigating all of the groups that claimed not to be political organizations but “social welfare” organizations. Yet no “Progressive” PAC’s were looked at.

As far as Benghazi goes, we should have been prepared. It was foolish of us to believe that the people there would forgive us for interfering in their internal affairs by bombing the country back to the middle ages. This is the definition of hubris.

Watching the government trying to squirm out of the trap it has dug for itself amuses me. I have no illusions when it comes to the Democrats. I remember LBJ and the Southern Democrats. I also remember all of the grand promises Obama made when he first ran for office.

This is a good time to take the power of the Federal government down a notch. People like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should take the lead and introduce legislation to stop the “witch hunts” that the Federal government unleashes. Instead of defending the Democrats, the people that desire a just system of government should join in with those calling for investigations. We might just find out that if we call out injustice when we see it, no matter which party does it, those in power might just think twice before doing it again.

The American "Helplessness Syndrome" and How We Can Defeat It

2013-05-10T22:07:00.000-05:00

The hard-liners in the Republican Party say that it isn't the government's job to coddle people that can't make it in today's society. They have nurtured and reinforced the meme that everyone in America has an equal chance at grabbing that big brass ring, and if they can't, then it is their own fault, any other reason that is given is just an excuse.

The sad part about this is that a majority of Americans have bought into this notion. It's easy to understand why. The media portrays most of our heroes as having come up through poverty or adverse situations to triumph over their enemies and their environment. But that is what makes up a successful story, book or movie. If it were the norm, it wouldn't interest people. It's the fact that it very rarely happens" that's what fascinates people! Still, some Republicans and Democrats would have you believe that everyone who tries will eventually make it into the upper echelons of the economic class. The worst thing about this is that many Americans believe it! View Article om OpEdNews Here

Sanford and Change in South Carolina

2013-05-08T00:33:00.000-05:00

It seems that the people in the 1st Congressional District of South Carolina have very short memories. It could also be that many of these people remember when Mark Sanford was their Congressman and they want him back. It could also be that many good Christians forgive his sins because he isn't a perfect man.

I don’t forgive him. I personally believe that he’s a low-life scumbag, but that’s just me. I’m not in the 1st District and therefore I have no say in the matter. They have the right to choose whom they want. That’s what America is all about, Right?

This brings me to the subject of Republicans and Democrats. Why is it that we only have two major political parties when we have thousands of different opinions? Where in the Constitution does it say that we must elect these corporately-controlled people from these two parties?

How many times will we be stabbed in the back before we realize that they just don't care about us? A good example is Mark Sanford. Why must he suck off the government teat for another two years? Who told him to be a professional politician? Can't he get a real job? These people drive me crazy. They show distain for the people that elect them and the people turn around and reelect them. This is called slave mentality.

When are the American people going to break the chains that bind them? Look, wages of the 10% have risen 370% in the last 20 years while the wages of the Middle Class during that time have remained stagnant. Wake up and smell the coffee folks! These Democrats and Republicans are not your friends. You are told over and over by the mainstream media about who is running for office on the GOP and Democratic tickets. They fail to mention that there are other political parties out there
.
The reason that this is so is because the people don't demand anything more. The mainstream media didn't mention the fact that Green Party Candidate Eugene Platt was also running. I say shame on the Green Party for not raising hell. The Green Party seems to take this treatment.

I'm making a bid for the Senate seat that Jim DeMint once had that Tim Scott has now. I might take a spot on the Socialist Party ticket or accept a Justice Party nomination. I do know one thing, if I run; the people of South Carolina will hear me. That’s the kind of guy I am.

I talk to people all the time here in South Carolina. They are sick and tired of the way things are, the wars, the spending on the military, the cuts in budgets, the failing infrastructure, our infant mortality rate, the health care system, government wiretapping phones and reading e-mails, people are fed up.

Change is in the air. I can feel it, right here in South Carolina. What people don't realize is that South Carolinians are a very independent people. They don't like government intrusion. Most people here support background checks for firearms. They are not crazy. They do know when they are being screwed however; it seems the people in the 1st Congressional District kind of like it that way.

Well, if this gets around, I probably won't carry the 1st Congressional District. Still, change is in the air. Can you feel it?

What's Going On Podcast

2013-05-07T02:03:00.002-05:00

Listen to internet radio with Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut on BlogTalkRadio

Aw,Snap!

2013-05-06T14:14:00.003-05:00

Aw Snap! I knew it! It was the rebels in Syria that used Sarin Gas, according to the UN. Now what will Lindsay Graham and John McCain say? I mean how stupid does that make them look?

Of course they will say we can't believe the United Nations reports. We should trust them. I recently talked to some South Carolinians at my local gun dealer and the people down there were laughing out loud. Can you imagine that? They were telling this New York Liberal that Lindsay and John were crazy to want to arm the rebels!

That is the word on the street. This is coming from the reddest area of the country. Most people down here think the rebels are all affiliated with Al Qaida. Somehow, the message that the right is trying to put out, that we should get involved in Syria is just not getting out down here. Most people that I talk to believe that the United States should just stay out of this terrible mess.

We could provide assistance to the refugees that are suffering in this crisis, the way that the Syrians provided aid to the Iraqis who fled to Syria when the U.S. invaded Iraq. This is the least that America could do. Syria opened its arms to the suffering people of Iraq, regardless of their sects; Sunni Shiites and Kurds were welcomed with opened arms. We should aid the Syrian people now.

Providing arms to the rebels will only prolong this war. The only aim our government has is to bring down the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad because he allies himself with Iran. This is the crux of the problem if you want to call a spade a spade. The government of Syria is not the problem. The Gulf Cooperation Council and Turkey, France and Israel are the problems. This is a proxy war between them, and on the other side is Russia, Syria and Iran.

This war is spilling over into Lebanon and could and probably is, involving Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel is coming into the fray. If the right is allowed to get its way, the United States will blunder in with all its military might and get its face bloodied in a never-ending conflict that could last forever. I'm sure that McCain and Graham would be happy. It would make their military industrial handlers richer than ever.

All of this is a joke. Everyone knows it. The sad part of this joke is that people are dying. These sociopaths in power don't care about those in Syria dying over their diabolical plans. We all know how this will end. More people will die. Eventually we will use military force. Once that happens, it will become a quagmire. This could become Obama's legacy. It could become World War III.

We can stop this. We can demand that our nation stays out of the fray. We can write to our elected officials. We can demonstrate. We can resist. We can revolt. We have the right to control our government. If we don't want to become involved in a foreign war that doesn't interfere in our national interests then we have the right to stop that involvement.

It's time to get off of our asses and get out into the streets. While we do that by physically marching or sending letters or by phoning the White House it doesn't matter. We all need to make our voices heard. The time to do it is now.

We can't wait until we have twenty thousand troops in Syria taking casualties while we spend billions every day to maintain their presence. This is how it starts. We need to understand how and when to resort with military force. This is not the time.

America: Running Out of Time

2013-04-17T23:51:00.003-05:00

America: Running Out of Time
By Timothy V. Gatto
I’m going to ask you to read this with an open mind. The hardest thing to do is to take our preconceived notions and ignore them. The fact is that every one of us is steeped in preconceived notions and faulty belief systems. Writing for a progressive audience doesn’t mean that the average reader is “open-minded”. In fact, there are just as many progressives and liberals that tend to have as many rigidly held beliefs as our more conservative cousins.

I have a few concerns that seem to dominate my thoughts more than others. I’m going to keep these to a minimum as I could probably fill volumes if I let myself have free reign. Since I’m not writing a book here, I’ll just bring out those things that I see as the most important stumbling blocks to the success of our American culture.

I’ve written scores of articles about our imaginary democracy and how we are manipulated into believing that we as a people have some kind of choice in what direction we should be going. The truth is that in its present structure, we the people, have very little choice in what kind of laws are introduced, at least on the Federal level. This doesn’t mean that the American people are powerless; it only means that we shouldn’t expect any type of quick changes that conform to the will of the majority anytime soon.

The first thing I would like to discuss is the lack of any real transparency in government. Most Americans are realizing that they are only getting a fraction of the truth from the major media outlets. This is nothing new; this situation is as old as mankind itself. Everyone has heard the old axiom “The winners write the history”. This has never been truer than it is right now. Compounding this problem is this so-called “information age” that we have entered into. There is so much information hitting us from every conceivable source that it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell what is important and what is not.

One way to filter out some of the more extraneous information that we receive, is to look at trends, instead of just facts. I’ve heard it said that a healthy, functioning brain is incapable of making a mistake as long as it has sufficient information. I don’t know if that is completely true, but consider how well we can judge what has happened in the world as compared to what we think will happen. They say hindsight is 20-20.

The media likes to believe that it reports the truth. In reality, they don’t have the time or the resources to report the truth. We like to believe that at an earlier period in our history the media was more honest and forthcoming when in reality, it never was. The assassination of JFK is a good example. Most people were told that one man was behind the assassination. It wasn’t until years later that alternative versions of the same event came out. The same can be said about the Vietnam War. In the beginning it was a very simplistic: “America fights Communism” scenario played out in the media. It wasn’t until the late 60’s when vets started speaking out and the support for the war faltered among Americans that the narrative then changed.

Yet, things have not changed. The Iraq War is a good example of American “Collective Amnesia”. The pretext in the run-up to war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had, and was ready to use, “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. These WMD’s were never found, and not only that, The Downing Street Memo’s and other documents were uncovered showed that beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt, the U.S. and the United Kingdom planned for that war long before those governments started beating the war drums. Still, in America today, no charges have been brought before the courts indicting anyone for war crimes. This is one of the more important issues we still must address. The people that caused the war are still alive and they are still influencing decisions being made today. As long as we remain silent about this important miscarriage of justice, we will continue to make similar decisions in the future. It’s time that Bush, Cheney and company came to terms with what they did in our name.

Today, the Senate failed to pass a bill that would have made it mandatory to conduct background checks for individuals purchasing guns from the internet and at gun shows. If the legislation had passed, and gone through the House and been signed by the President, would that have made this nation a safer place? Well, if you have a civic minded criminal that would have allowed a merchant to submit the paperwork to the ATF instead of paying cash for his weapon from the trunk of a car or a back alley, I guess it would have. Actually, there are so many weapons floating around this nation that the impact of background checks would have been minimal.
Why the hue and cry for background checks? As much as I hate to say this, I personally don’t support gun control legislation that has been proposed. It’s too little, too late. I believe a much smarter approach such as the stop and frisk law on the books in NYC with mandatory jail time for the possession of an illegal firearm would be a much better move. I think that anyone buying a buying a firearm should go through a check, but I also realize that it probably wouldn’t help much.

Why is the NRA in such opposition? Why do proponents of the bill think it is so valuable? This is just an exercise in the appearance of “democracy”. This is just another meaningless debate to bring people around to the opinion that what they believe matters. If they really wanted to kick this debate up a notch and make a real difference in crimes committed with a firearm, they would release 1st-time offenders for non-violent crimes and start locking people up that use firearms in the commission of crimes.

Of course they won’t do that. It would be much too controversial. Of course most Americans wouldn’t think twice about seeing a gang-banger get locked up for a decade if someone were hurt in a robbery, but the bill wouldn’t have a chance. The reason being is that this type of legislation would actually put a bite into gun sales. In fact, almost any legislation that hurts special interest groups is ignored. There is a long list of side issues that are proposed from time to time to make Americans believe that they have a choice in how this nation is run. Usually these issues come up when the government has spent too much money, either bailing out special interest groups or spending too much on war and the so-called “defense” budget, or when the administration is in trouble for doing something illegal or unconstitutional.

I don’t want to offend anyone with the list I’m going to write about. I know that some of these issues are near and dear to some people’s hearts. Still, they are issues that could be decided at the State or local level, or they matter to a very small minority. Yet, these issues are brought up time and time again.

Abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, sex-education, creationism, evolution, and homosexual Boy (and Girl) Scouts along with gun control and taxes, these are hot-button issues that never get resolved and take the focus away from what the real major problems are.

Some of the real problems we should be grappling with:

Military Spending (We spend almost as much as all nations combined).
Climate Change
Erosion of our Civil Liberties
Our plummeting healthcare statistic compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
Pollution of our planet
World population
War
Genocide

At any given moment, you can turn on your television set and tune into Fox News and get more than you ever wanted to know about abortion, same-sex marriage and the assault on our second amendment rights from the likes of Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. If their particularly biased opinions don’t suit you, you can tune into MSNBC and get the opposite side of the fray from world renowned intellectuals such as Chris Matthews or that Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow. Either way, they’ll be talking about inane side issues that have no real ramifications on the average American citizen unless you happen to be gay and want to be included under your partners healthcare insurance or have a 15 year old daughter that has no idea of what sex is all about yet and is attending a secular school in Kansas and they want to tell her before you get around to giving her “the talk”.
The truth is, there are two issues out there that the neither the government nor “The-Powers-that-Be” (TPTB) want you asking questions about. These two issues lurk in the background and color every narrative, and yet, they are not openly talked about. They are the driving force behind our political and economic system. These two issues determine the difference between a real dissident and one who has been duped into the false flag rhetoric both of the major political have woven into a tangled web.

The two prime issues that every American should care deeply about is the disparity of Wealth in America and The Two-Party System, both are interconnected and usurp democracy in any form. As long as money influences government and the people that are elected to run that government, democracy is impossible. It isn’t moral obligations or personal beliefs that fuel the debates in Washington, it is the markets. Everything has a price.

This is the prime motivation for the lightning speed in which the different law enforcement and intelligence agencies shut down the Occupy Movement. Occupy was asking the questions that TPTB didn’t want answered. The Presidential election that pitted Twiddle-Dee-Dum against Twiddle-De-De couldn’t have happened the way it did if there was a strong Occupy presence in the American electorate.

The miracle of modern day Socialism that emerged in Venezuela under the personage of Hugo Chavez could not have happened here in America. In America we are told that we have a choice of whom we vote for. That choice is an illusion. Here in America we have two corporately controlled political puppets for the military industrial complex and they are called Democrats and Republicans. We have other political parties here in America, but they are largely silenced by the laws and practices put in place by the two major political parties.

We are led to believe that the voices of 350 million Americans can be heard through the narrative of only two men corruptively nominated by these two political parties. We are led to believe that more than two views will make us a weaker and more divided people, that we are not capable of understanding more than two concepts of political thought. We are instilled with the belief that within the ranks of the Democrats and Republicans, the best of these will rise like cream on milk to the top and that American will wisely vote for the one that has the best qualities.

Meanwhile, many Americans openly voiced their discontent with the status quo by refusing to vote for either candidate. The major media outlets tried the best they could to substantiate the last election by pretending that there was a difference in the two candidates, but that difference was revealed to be side-show hysterics that portrayed Obama as the lessor threat to the rapidly disappearing middle-class of America.

All Americans are becoming acutely aware that a full-time job with benefits is not the “new-normal”. Many citizens of the greatest economy on Earth (according to every economist) are working two part-time jobs with no benefits. Most Americans are barely paying their bills and have significantly “downsized” their lifestyles. In the meantime, the salaries of the CEO’s have risen more than 370% in the last two decades.

Americans are told that Social Security is on the brink of collapse. This lie is perpetrated even though economists tell us that the system is fully solvent through 2054. Social Security payouts are labeled as “entitlements” even though Americans have been paying into the Social security fund all their working lives. Calling Social Security payments “entitlements” makes it seem as if the system is some kind of government run welfare system. This is a deliberate ploy to get the American people to believe that because of the “kindness” of the government and its “entitlement system” to those unfortunate enough to depend on that system is undermining the financial structure of the nation and somehow adding to the “deficit problem”. The more they repeat this line of thought, this faulty reasoning, the more real it becomes in the minds of Americans.

This is of course the fundamental theory of “The Big Lie”. Sociologists and propagandists agree that if a lie is told over and over (especially a big lie), it eventually gets accepted by the people as the truth. After all, even the truth is just another perception of reality. Everyone’s truth is different; this is what TPTB are banking on.

The real reason the government is coming for our Social Security fund is because they have nowhere else to turn to get the funding that they need to keep this whole corrupt military industrial travesty alive. They have set the stage for further military growth by replacing the Soviet Union with Muslims and they are setting the stage for conflicts that will be never-ending in Asia. The time is ripe for Americans to ask the age-old question: Cui Bono? (Who benefits?) The simple answers to that question are the military defense contractors, the bankers that finance them and the politicians that do their bidding. Indirectly, the American people also benefit slightly because of the jobs that are produced, but the amount of employment due to procurement of military hardware has decreased dramatically with the use of automated assembly lines that have replaced workers.

The last few decades have seen a steady erosion of worker’s rights here in America. The global workforce has largely replaced the American worker. Workers overseas cost less and expect little in the way of benefits. This situation has largely decimated the power of labor unions in the United States. There are many politicians that have championed this state of affairs and celebrated the dismantlement of worker representation. The Democrats, once the staunch supporters of trade unions, have been active participants in their dismantlement. This is a portrait of the “democracy” that our soldiers are defending from the 800 plus military installations we have globally.

Why is it that America is constantly under attack from forces outside of our borders? The “new normal” here in America is that when one meets a serviceman or vet is we say “Thank you for your service”. What I wish to know is just what they are “protecting” us from? The answer I get from the media is that we are fighting a “War on Terror”. This is very disturbing. If the world is chock full of terrorists that seek to destroy us, what is it that causes them to feel this way?

Could the reason possibly be that our military, along with our intelligence agencies, have continually interfered in other nation’s internal affairs? The United States has overthrown more than 50 different governments around the globe since 1945. Many Americans know this, many do not. What I would like to know is where in our Constitutions does it say that we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations? We helped destroy Libya and we are presently involved in military operations in Afghanistan, Yemen, Chad, Rwanda, Mali, Syria and god know where else. Meanwhile the government cries poverty and tells us that we must face austerity because our government is operating under a deficit.

The reason for this article is to expose the ridiculousness of this entire charade. It is readily apparent to anyone that has a modicum of intelligence and looks at the facts before them, that our government is hell-bent on some form of world domination. Unfortunately, the people that must bear the brunt of this, the American people, are not privy to this information. Even though the evidence is there for all to see, the American people seem to be blind to what is really going on.
We spend 39% of the planet’s budget for the military. Our basic military budget is 682 Billion Dollars (That’s what we admit to spending without adding additional allocations for different military expeditions like Afghanistan or funding for the 12 military defense agencies). We currently have 10 Nimitz-Class nuclear Aircraft Carriers that cost between 4.5 Billion Dollars and 6.5 Billion Dollars. Each aircraft carrier comes with a carrier group. A typical Strike Group may include, in addition to an aircraft carrier: up to six surface combatants, including frigates, guided missile cruisers and guided missile destroyers (used primarily for anti-aircraft warfare and anti-submarine warfare); one or two attack submarines (for seeking out and destroying hostile surface ships and submarines); and an ammunition, oiler, and supply ship of Military Sealift Command to provide logistical support.
I could go on, but I believe that I have provided a snapshot of what the real problem is. I will go on to say this; this nation has been on a constant war footing since the beginning of the Second World War and this state of affairs continues to this day. War is now America’s largest business. The President is better known as The Commander in Chief, not the Chief Executive. The two political parties in the United States are owned, lock, stock and barrel by the people that control the military industrial complex. Our elections are not free and fair, they are won by the highest bidder. We have no democracy in the real sense of the word. The sad truth is that most Americans know this and accept this sad state of affairs.

We have the capability to change the direction of this nation. We have the knowledge of what went wrong since the end of World War II and we have the capability to compete with the other nations of the World by other means than war. We have an infrastructure that can be developed to manufacture goods that will add to the global economy instead of manufacturing weapons that can destroy it. We have proven that the United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. It’s time to get over it.

This preoccupation with ruling the World is something that being done on the backs of the average American citizen. We are seeing the gradual destruction of the American Middle Class. We are rapidly approaching the point when there will be but two classes of people in America, the rich and the poor. Somehow, and in some way, there exits in our constitution a way to take special interest money out of the American electoral process, it’s called a Constitutional Amendment. This is a drastic measure, but these are drastic times. The American people have a choice, they can see the Middle-Class completely destroyed while the nation continues to find excuses to maintain a war economy that benefits the wealthiest amongst us, or it can use the power of the people to lawfully change the direction in which we are heading.

The choice is ours to make, but time is rapidly running out.

The Madness of NYT’s Tom Friedman

2013-04-12T18:27:00.002-05:00

By Robert Parry (From ICH)

April 11, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Consortiumnews" - When ranking which multi-millionaire American pundit is the most overrated, there are, without doubt, many worthy contenders, but one near the top of any list must be the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman – with his long record of disastrous policy pronouncements including his enthusiasm for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Friedman, of course, has paid no career price for his misguided judgments and simplistic nostrums. Like many other star pundits who inhabit the Op-Ed pages of the Times and the Washington Post, Friedman has ascended to a place where the normal powers of gravity don’t apply, where the cumulative weight of his errors only lifts him up.

Indeed, there is something profoundly nonsensical about Friedman’s Olympian standing, inhabiting a plane of existence governed by the crazy rules of Washington’s conventional wisdom, where – when looking down on the rest of us – Friedman feels free to cast aspersions on other people’s sanity, like the Mad Hatter calling the Church Mouse nuts.

Friedman describes every foreign adversary who reacts against U.S. dictates as suffering from various stages of insanity. He accepts no possibility that these “designated enemies” are acting out of their own sense of self-interest and even fear of what the United States might be designing.

In last Sunday’s column, for instance, Friedman airily dismissed the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, China and Russia as all operating with screws loose, either totally crazy or fecklessly reckless. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un was a “boy king … who seems totally off the grid.” In Friedman’s view, China is enabling North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship and “could end the freak show there anytime it wants.”

Russia is aiding and abetting both the violence in Syria and the supposed nuclear ambitions of Iran. Friedman asks: “Do the Russians really believe that indulging Iran’s covert nuclear program, to spite us, won’t come back to haunt them with a nuclear-armed Iran, an Islamist regime on its border?”

To Friedman, Bashar al-Assad is simply “Syria’s mad leader,” not a secular autocrat representing Alawites and other terrified minorities fearing a Sunni uprising that includes armed militants associated with al-Qaeda terrorists and promoting Islamic fundamentalism.

You see, according to Friedman and his neoconservative allies, everyone that they don’t like is simply crazy or absorbed with mindless self-interest – and it makes no sense to reason with these insane folks or to propose power-sharing compromises. Only “regime change” will do.

Who’s Detached from Reality?

But the argument could be made that Friedman and the neocons are the people most disconnected from reality – and that the New York Times editors are behaving irresponsibly in continuing to grant Friedman some of the most prestigious space in American journalism to spout his nonsensical ravings.

Looking back at Friedman’s history of recommending violence as the only remedy to a whole host of problems, including in places like Serbia and Iraq, you could reasonably conclude that he’s the real nut case. He’s the one who routinely urges the U.S. government to ignore international law in pursuit of half-baked goals that have spread misery over large swaths of the planet.

In 1999, during the U.S. bombing of Serbia, Friedman showed off his glib warmongering style: “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”

Before George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, Friedman offered the witty observation that it was time to “give war a chance,” a flippant play on John Lennon’s lyrics to the song, “Give Peace a Chance.”

Yet, even amid his enthusiasm to invade Iraq, Friedman was disappointed by Bush’s clunky rhetoric. So, he hailed the smoother speechifying of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and dubbed himself “a Tony Blair Democrat.” Today, it might seem that anyone foolish enough to take that title – after Blair has gone down in history as “Bush’s poodle” and is now despised even by his own Labour Party – should slink away into obscurity or claim some sort of mental incapacity.

But that isn’t how U.S. punditry works. Once you’ve risen into the firmament of stars like Tommy Friedman, you are beyond the reach of earthly judgments and surely beyond human accountability.

When the Iraq War didn’t go as swimmingly as the neocons expected, Friedman became famous for his repetitious, ever-receding “six month” timeline for detecting progress. Finally, in August 2006, he concluded that the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, that “it is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are babysitting a civil war.” [NYT, Aug. 4, 2006]

At that point, you might have expected the New York Times to drop Friedman from its roster of columnists. After all, the Iraq War’s costs in lives, money and respect for the United States had become staggering. You might even have thought that some accountability would be in order. After all, advocacy of aggressive war is a war crime as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II.

Yet, 12 days after his admission of Iraq War failure, Friedman actually demeaned Americans who had opposed the Iraq War early on as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.” [NYT, Aug. 16, 2006] In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq were still airheads who couldn’t grasp the bigger picture that had been so obvious to himself, his fellow pundits and pro-war politicians who had tagged along with Bush and Blair.

As I noted in an article at the time, “it’s as if Official Washington has become a sinister version of Alice in Wonderland. Under the bizarre rules of Washington’s pundit society, the foreign policy ‘experts,’ who acted like Cheshire Cats pointing the United States in wrong directions, get rewarded for their judgment and Americans who opposed going down the rabbit hole in the first place earn only derision.”

Instead of a well-deserved dismissal from the Times and journalistic disgrace, Friedman has continued to rake in big bucks from his articles, his books and his speeches. Meanwhile, his record for accuracy (or even sophisticated insights) hasn’t improved. Regarding foreign policy, he still gets pretty much everything wrong.

‘Crazy’ Enemies

As for the supposed madness of America’s “designated enemies,” Friedman refuses to recognize that they might see defensive belligerence as the only rational response to U.S. hostility. After all, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi both accepted U.S. demands for disarmament and both were subsequently attacked by U.S. military force, overthrown and murdered.

So, who in their right mind would accept assurances about the protections of international law when Official Washington and Tommy Friedman see nothing wrong with invading other countries and overthrowing their governments? In view of this recent history, one could argue that the leaders of Iran, Syria and even North Korea are acting rationally within their perceptions of national sovereignty – and concern for their own necks.

Similarly, Russia and China have searched for ways to resolve some of these conflicts, rather than whipping up new confrontations. On the Iranian nuclear dispute, for instance, Russia has worked behind the scenes to broker a realistic agreement that would offer Iran meaningful relief from economic sanctions in exchange for more safeguards on its nuclear program.

It has been the United States that has vacillated between an interest in a negotiated settlement with Iran and the temptation to seek “regime change.” Recently, the Obama administration spurned a Russian push for genuine negotiations with Iran, instead favoring more sanctions and demanding Iranian capitulation.

It should be noted, too, that the Iranian government has renounced any desire to build a nuclear weapon and that the U.S. intelligence community has concluded, since 2007, that Iran ceased work on a nuclear weapon in 2003, a decade ago. Friedman could be called irrational – or at least irresponsible – for not mentioning that fact. And you might wonder why his Times’ editors didn’t demand greater accuracy in his column. Is there no fact-checking of Friedman?

Seeking ‘Regime Change’

Of course, the Times and Friedman have a long pattern of bias on Iran, much as they had on Iraq. For instance, the newspaper and its star columnist heaped ridicule on Turkey and Brazil three years ago when those two U.S. allies achieved a breakthrough in which Iran agreed to ship about half of its low-enriched uranium out of the country in exchange for some medical isotopes. To Friedman, this deal was “as ugly as it gets,” the title of his column.

He wrote: “I confess that when I first saw the May 17 [2010] picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms — after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think of was: Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?

“No, that’s about as ugly as it gets.”

Though Friedman did not call Lula da Silva and Erdogan crazy, he did insult them and impugned their motives. He accused them of seeking this important step toward a peaceful resolution of an international dispute “just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table.”

In the column, Friedman also made clear that he wasn’t really interested in Iranian nuclear safeguards; instead, he wanted the United States to do whatever it could to help Iran’s internal opposition overthrow President Ahmadinejad and Iran’s Islamic Republic.

“In my view, the ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran is the most important, self-generated, democracy movement to appear in the Middle East in decades,” Friedman wrote. “It has been suppressed, but it is not going away, and, ultimately, its success — not any nuclear deal with the Iranian clerics — is the only sustainable source of security and stability. We have spent far too little time and energy nurturing that democratic trend and far too much chasing a nuclear deal.”

Just three years later, however, it’s clear how wrongheaded Friedman was. The Green Movement, which was never the mass popular movement that the U.S. media claimed, has largely disappeared.

Analyses of Iran’s 2009 election also revealed that Ahmadinejad did win a substantial majority of the vote. Ahmadinejad, with strong support from the poor especially in more conservative rural areas, defeated the “Green Revolution” candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi by roughly the 2-to-1 margin cited in the official results.

For instance, an analysis by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes concluded that most Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad and viewed his reelection as legitimate, contrary to claims made by much of the U.S. news media. Not a single Iranian poll analyzed by PIPA – whether before or after the election, whether conducted inside or outside Iran – showed Ahmadinejad with less than majority support. None showed Mousavi, a former prime minister, ahead or even close.

“These findings do not prove that there were no irregularities in the election process,” said Steven Kull, director of PIPA. “But they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It!”]

Bias Over Journalism

During the Green Movement’s demonstrations, a few protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police (scenes carried on CNN but quickly forgotten by the U.S. news media) and security forces overreacted with repression and violence. But to pretend that an angry minority – disappointed by election results – is proof of a fraudulent election is simply an example of bias, not journalism.

One can sympathize with those who yearn for a secular democracy in Iran – as you may in other religiously structured states including Israel – but a journalist is not supposed to make up his or her own facts, which was what the Times and Friedman did in 2009 on Iran.

Friedman’s contempt for the Turkey-Brazil deal in 2010 also looks pretty stupid in retrospect. At the time, Iran only had low-enriched uranium suitable for energy production but not for building a nuclear weapon. If Iran had shipped nearly half that amount out of the country in exchange for the medical isotopes, Iran might never have upgraded its reactors to refine the uranium to about 20 percent, what was needed for the isotopes and which is much closer to the level of purity needed for a bomb.

There are other relevant facts that a serious analyst would include in the kind of column that Friedman penned last Sunday, including the fact that the United States possesses a military force unrivaled in world history and enough nuclear bombs to kill all life on the planet many times over.

Also relevant to the Iran issue, Israel possesses a rogue nuclear arsenal that is considered one of the world’s most advanced, but Israel has refused to accept any international oversight by rejecting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed and insists it is living by.

An objective – or a rational – observer would consider the unbelievable destructiveness of the U.S. and Israeli nuclear stockpiles as a relevant factor in evaluating the sanity of the supposedly “crazy” leaders of Syria, Iran and North Korea – and their alleged accomplices in Russia and China.

But Friedman operates on a plane of impunity that the rest of us mortals can only dream about. Apparently once you have achieved his punditry status, you never have to say you’re sorry or acknowledge countervailing facts. All you have to do is say that everybody else is crazy.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Who do the "Regulators" Work For?

2013-04-12T12:04:00.001-05:00

Senator Elizabeth Warren tore into Federal Banking regulators on the issue of transparency. She asks pointed questions on why the information about which banks illegally foreclosed on how many homeowners and if they were ever going to make these findings public. The video speaks for itself. I would like to ask a simple question: Just who are these people working for anyway?

why-did-the-media-keep-the-recent-peaceful-icelandic-revolution-quiet? from Waking Times

2013-04-11T00:37:00.000-05:00

Did you know about the peaceful Icelandic revolution that took place over the last 5 years? If you didn’t, it is likely because it was never televised or talked about very much at all on mainstream news. One would have to be part of the right websites or Facebook pages to even find out that this has been going on. Why is this the case? Why keep something so monumental hidden from the public?
Joe Martino, Collective-Evolution
Waking Times

First let’s discuss what took place with this revolution, then it will become much more clear as to why this was never televised.

It was during a time of a lot of financial turmoil around the world and stories were popping up all over the news of how banks around the world had been crushing or minimizing rebellions by receiving massive bailouts to keep them alive. The Iceland story is different because there was no crushing or ending the rebellion, instead, the people rose up. This is why this was not seen on TV anywhere. If the rest of the world knew that the people won, it may give them some ideas.

During the financial turmoil of 2008 and 2009, the people of Iceland forced their government and banks to resign. How did they do this? Peacefully. The following is a summation of what steps they took over a process of several years, and it all began with each one of them realizing this couldn’t continue.

2008 – The main bank of Iceland is nationalized. The Krona, the currency of Iceland devaluates and the stock market halts. The country is in bankruptcy.

2008 – Citizens rise up at Parliament and succeed in forcing the resignation of both the prime minister and the effective government. New elections are held. Yet, the country remains in a bad economic situation. A Parliament act is passed to pay back 3,500 million Euros to Great Britain and Holland by the people of Iceland monthly during the next 15 years, with 5.5% interest.

2010 – The people of Iceland again take to the streets to demand a referendum. In January of 2010, the President of Iceland denies approval, instead announcing a popular vote on the matter by the people.

In March, a referendum and denial of payment is approved by popular vote of 93%. Meanwhile, government officials initiate an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis. Many high level executives and bankers are arrested. Interpol dictates an order to force all implicated parties to leave Iceland.

An assembly is elected to write a new constitution (based on that of Denmark) to avoid entrapments of debt based currency foreign loans. 25 citizens are chosen — with no political affiliation — out of the 522 candidates. The only qualifications for candidacy are adulthood and the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly started in February of 2011. It continues to present ‘carta magna’ from recommendations provided by various assemblies throughout the country. Ultimately, it must be approved by both the current Parliament and the one created through the next legislative election.

It’s quite a story isn’t it? You can most definitely see at this point why this was not covered in newspapers, on radio networks and on television. Imagine seeing this story on TV several times each day wherever you live in the world; do you think the people would start to get ideas? Maybe try the same thing? Most definitely. There is always a constant push of fear, murders, anger, government success, health fallacies and false information, but never do we hear of stories that could be a threat to the system.

Another key factor of this revolution that we have to look at is that it did not come from a place of violence, bloodshed or anger. No guns or fighting! It was simply people getting together peacefully and working things out. This is something this entire world is capable of but believes is impossible. Humanity has been so programmed to give itself little credit in this department. We always hear about how we need to be governed, there are too many crazy people out there, we need a big brother keeping control. The truth is, without the confines and certain rules the system employs, we would be a much more peaceful people mainly because we are no longer acting in survival mode. Now I am not here to say that the system is the only issue because it isn’t, our programming is also very strong in what we have been taught and believe about ourselves. I am simply here to say, this programming can be broken and our consciousness can and is changing.

I also thought it was a big step to see Iceland employ a new means of choosing its leaders. Someone who is an adult and has 30 people supporting them can run. This is great as the only reason why we have educated politicians today is because the elite needs to know that these people are programmed to repeat this system. Generally they also have to have corporate affiliations as well so they know they can be controlled by money.

Now Iceland is proceeding to actually prosecute some of their formerly most powerful bankers and the Icelandic special prosecutor has stated that it very well may indict some 90 people. Meanwhile, over 200 people, including the former chief executives of Iceland’s three biggest banks, face criminal charges for their activities. While I don’t agree with the judgment factor being used here, I understand that this is the step they feel right in taking.

Hopefully more countries around the world begin to follow suit!

Watch the video:
How to Start a Revolution – Learn From Iceland!

What's Really Going On in Korea

2013-04-09T20:04:00.000-05:00

The current situation regarding North Korea is playing right into what could be a bonanza for American interests in the Far East. The rhetoric coming from North Korea is laying right into American hands. If North Korea ratchets up the rhetoric, or if a missile test goes awry and heads towards Japan or South Korea, the missile will be destroyed.

We are not intimidated by North Korea by any means. In fact, American military leaders are wringing their hands in anticipation of a ground war on the Korean peninsula. This would entail an artillery barrage of Seoul by the North Koreans that would cause terrible destruction and loss of life. Millions could die if the city in enveloped in a firestorm. This is the scenario of a North Korean attack. It’s not their nuclear weapons, but their conventional weapons that South Koreans fear. They have had decades of preparation. The mountains overlooking Seoul are peppered with howitzers.
I have seen them with my own eyes. When I was stationed in Korea we used to use a gun emplacement in the mountains to aim our radars for the Nike-Hercules battery I was stationed at. (That system was the for-runner for Patriot Pac3 system used today). It’s no joke and a very serious situation.

Don’t think that our government is in any way dreading an attack from North Korea. The fact is… this would play right into the hands of the American Empire. While the United States is not publically supporting any provocations against the North Korean regime right now, they did send nuclear-capable B2 Bombers from the US to fly over the Korean Peninsula. This provocation really started the ball rolling. War games with the South Koreans that are still going on do not particularly sooth the North’s nerves.

We know that North Korea is a nation that is in a precarious situation. The nation is on the brink of mass starvation in part due to UN sanctions over its last nuclear test. This is precisely why the North has ratcheted up its rhetoric. This is a way to control its people by preparing them for some kind of “patriotic war” against the US and the South Koreans. Unfortunately, while it may take the focus off of the peoples starving bellies, they can’t keep the hype and patriotism going indefinitely. Sooner than later, if there isn’t a war, the people will again look to their situation and the threat of instability will again take precedence in the people’s minds.

To understand the situation, John Kerry, Secretary of State, is heading to Beijing to discuss the situation with the People’s Republic of China. Not only is Kerry heading there, but the Chairman of The Joint Chief of Staff of the armed forces is going there too. This is a way to get the Chinese to stay out of any future conflict. Of course this is the right way to manage a situation like this. I’m just glad that it’s Kerry and not Hilary Clinton who will talk to the Chinese.

The sad fact in this situation is that this kind of rhetoric only heats up the military preparedness of the United States armed forces. The kind of situation we see now will add billions, if not trillions into the Military -Industrial complex of the US. Even if the situation in Korea cools down, military spending will rise here in the US. This situation just gives credence for a hegemonic military that can destroy any adversary, anywhere in the world. This dictator in North Korea, while he may not realize it, is laying right into America’s hands. He has probably done more for the defense industry in the United States than any publicity they could have imagined.

This is a very sad situation for all the people on the entire planet. North Korea has most certainly jump-started another buildup of American military might in Asia, just as the administration said it would a few months ago. The US government actually stated that it was shifting its focus from the Middle-East to Asia. Now we can thank Kim Jung Un for helping the US to realize that objective.
This is a time that all Americans have to be cautious in accepting any rhetoric or war-mongering from the right wing zealots in this country. Calls to bomb North Korea back to the stone-age will probably be heard from the right. This approach is not only contrary to what this nation stands for, it is also morally wrong.

North Korea is in crisis. This crisis was engineered by the very same people that are facing the threat of a military move by that nation. We are not blameless, nor are Russia or China that also voted for sanctions against North Korea. If there is a war on the Korean Peninsula, it should be a UN action and joined by all the nations that sanctioned the regime for its nuclear policies. This effort should be joined by the Russians and the Chinese and not just lead by the US Alliance in Asia. If war becomes the result of a miscalculation by any player in this drama, it should not just be a US/South Korean effort.

It would be in China’s and Russia’s best interests to join in a UN Alliance. If they stay neutral and stay out of the fay, the result will be a broadening of US Power in Asia and set the stage for hegemonic military power in Asia for the US. This will result in more military bases in Asia and a widening of the American Empire.
The United States is saying it’s not offering any provocation against the North Koreans and of course, this is a wise thing to do. Still, the military people in the US Government are licking their chops in anticipation. Understand that and you can understand human nature.

Are We All Idiot Dolts?

2013-03-15T23:41:00.004-05:00

I just read the most blatant and insidious transformation of this “Progressive” President since he signed the NDAA. Not only does this man claim the right to execute Americans overseas and right here in the United States (under exceptional circumstances), now he’s agreeing with the GOP that this country needs to start cutting “entitlement” programs like Medicare.
According to Carrie Dann and Mike Viqueira, NBC News:

“I think we all felt that it was a very good meeting,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who told reporters after the luncheon that the group had a “great” discussion largely focused on reforming entitlement programs.

And

“He certainly understands that you can’t fix the country without adjusting entitlements to fit the demographics of our country,” he said. “We’ll see where we go from here but it was a great meeting.”
So..Medicare is indeed an “entitlement” program, according to Big O. I thought we paid into this program. From what I know, Medicare has nothing to do with the reversal of Federal revenue. Maybe Medicare is in jeopardy because the Obama Administration has taken Medicare funding to support “Obamacare”. According to The Heritage Network in an article written by Alyene Senger;
A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report updated the amount of money Obamacare robs out of Medicare from $500 billion to a whopping $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.
According to the CBO, the payment cuts in Medicare include:

A $260 billion payment cut for hospital services.
A $39 billion payment cut for skilled nursing services.
A $17 billion payment cut for hospice services.
A $66 billion payment cut for home health services.
A $33 billion payment cut for all other services.
A $156 billion cut in payment rates in Medicare Advantage (MA); $156 billion is before considering interactions with other provisions.

The House Ways and Means Committee was able to include interactions with other provisions, estimating the cuts to MA to be even higher, coming in at $308 billion.

$56 billion in cuts for disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments.* DSH payments go to hospitals that serve a large number of low-income patients.
$114 billion in other provisions pertaining to Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP* (does not include coverage-related provisions).
*Subtract $25 billion total between DSH payments and other provisions for spending that was cut from Medicaid and CHIP.

In total, Obamacare raids Medicare by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022. Despite Medicare facing a 75-year unfunded obligation of $37 trillion, Obamacare uses the savings from the cuts to pay for other provisions in Obamacare, not to help shore up Medicare’s finances.

Gee, that’s a lot of money. That’s money that could have been provided to the government by making some of the largest corporations pay something in taxes. According to Pat Garafolo from Think Progress;

Last year, Citizens for Tax Justice found that 30 major corporations had made billions of dollars in profits while paying no federal income tax between 2008 and 2010. Today, CTJ updated that report to reflect the 2011 tax bill of those 30 companies, and 26 of them have still managed to pay absolutely nothing over that four year period.
So maybe I’m just a whiner. Gee, corporations give people jobs and allow Americans to live decent lives with salaries that keep up with profits, right?
Wrong. From CNN:

Incomes for 90% of Americans have been stuck in neutral, and it's not just because of the Great Recession. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for at least a generation, while the wealthiest tier has surged ahead at lightning speed.
I’ve written about this before but I’ll mention it again;
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). http://ww2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

So now I want to ask the question: are we just idiotic dolts in this country? For the entire period from 2008 to 2010, 30 major corporations paid no taxes! Meanwhile CEO salaries have risen over 300%
It's even more revealing to compare the actual rates of increase of the salaries of CEOs and ordinary workers; from 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300% (adjusted for inflation), while production workers gained a scant 4.3%. http://ww2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (Same article)

The President and Congress are calling Medicare and Social Security “Entitlements”, meanwhile Americans have been paying into these things all their working lives. So now that the American government is broke because last year the basic military budget was 711 Billion dollars (without more appropriations for the 12 “Defense Intelligence Agencies” and not including additional appropriations for Wars in Afghanistan, Sudan and other places we don’t belong, the working underclass of the American people now have to foot the bill for the overspending on the military and the Trillions of dollars from all the bank bail-outs that the banking CEO’s got fabulously wealthy on!

The government’s broke. Believe that and I’ve got some stock tips I’ll sell you. This is just a scam to get every last dollar out of every working class stiff, while the rich are enjoying the highest wages ever! The corporations are recording record profits! Who are the idiotic dolts in this country? Well, I guess they’re you and me. We don’t seem to do anything about it.
This might sound like a rant, but I’ve offered up some really revealing pieces of information here. It’s not just me saying this. Check the links. Everything I’ve said is verified. It’s sad that we are idiot dolts. Now we can go back to what Snookie was wearing today.

The Real News on Prime Minister Harper

2013-03-12T08:37:00.002-05:00

More at The Real News

Ashamed to Be An American?

2013-03-12T03:41:00.003-05:00

What in the world is going on in the west? I’m talking about Europe and America and all the players in the Middle East and Africa. The entire scenario smells like rotten fish (more like decaying bodies). I’m tired of holding my tongue and reading the drivel and watching the charade on television. The truth is that everything you are hearing is a lie and lies of the greatest magnitude.
First of all this “War on Terror” is completely fabricated to keep the American war machine going. The bluster about this “sequester” is designed to keep pumping your tax dollars into the American war machine. We spend 711 Billion dollars on the basic defense budget. That’s $711,000,000,000.00. Could you imagine what we could do with just half that amount being put back into this nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing base, maybe a few billion for building schools and a few billion for cancer research? Forget it. The powers that be don’t want that. They want that money to go to the defense industries in their States. That’s the whole story.

This entire government is totally corrupt and deceitful. This money isn’t for “Defense”. It’s being used for military conquest and to get other nations to give us their resources. This is “Gun Barrel Diplomacy”. Obama isn’t a liberal, peace loving man; he’s a tool of the system. This is the system that they make us vote for every few years. It’s corrupt and completely fraudulent.
We destroyed Libya, we are in the process of destroying Syria, and we are waving missiles and air strikes at Iran. Everyone wonders why North Korea started building and testing nukes. Look, if I were the President or leader of a nation on the wrong side of the USA and NATO, I’d be looking at building a few too. America has no respect for the sovereignty of other nations. That’s no joke; they have proved over and over again that they do whatever they believe is necessary
.
Then they tell the American public that it’s in response to “protecting our national security”. The talking heads on TV repeat the government’s position verbatim. The very worst is CBS’s Scott Pelley. He calls Syria’s Bashir al Assad “The Dictator” every time he’s mentioned. Meanwhile reporters on his own station reporting from Syria are telling him that most of the time they don’t knows who blew something up or killed a bunch of civilians. Pelley just goes on and on about how “The Dictator” is killing his own people.
What’s so bad about that is that millions of Americans that spend most of their day working for a living get their news from the major networks. CBS has a long history of exposing the truth about world events and has embarrassed many Administrations. Not anymore. They are now the mouthpieces for the government, no more, no less. They lie with straight faces when most of them know what they are saying is false. They should be investigated.

Who will investigate them? The FCC? They work for this corrupt lying government too. This is quite a quandary, isn’t it? We have no independent news anymore. We might as well be Russians in the 70’s reading Pravda.

Besides all of the lies they tell you in the media, most of the people in this country think we are going broke. We have the largest economy in the entire world and most Americans think we are going broke. It’s no wonder half this country is on anti-depressants. The powers that be want it this way; they want a docile, drugged-up population that believes everything they tell them.
Forget about the fact that we invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens based on a lie. The entire world turned their heads when we committed that act of aggression that was definitely against everything in the Geneva Convention. They should just scrap the Geneva Convention. When NATO obliterated Libya that was unlawful and against all International law. Meanwhile, the tool of the powers that be, President Obama, said he did it on “Humanitarian Grounds”. There was no consent from our inept Congress; he just did what he wanted to do. The cackling Hillary Clinton laughed when she heard that Gadhafi had a machete shoved up his ass.

Meanwhile the American people are catching on. I see it every day. People are starting to finally get it. Most people I talk to are happy that the “defense” (really the offense) budget was cut. I think it should be cut by 50%. We spend more on defense than all of the countries on Earth combined if you count the appropriations for different combat expeditions like Afghanistan and the Middle-East and Africa, along with the funding for the Defense Intelligence Agencies.

The US has between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.

The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases) reveal that the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.

That my friends are why our nation is pleading poverty, we are the richest nation on Earth. We spend most of our money on the military. We’ve been doing it since 1940. Nobody seems to care. Nobody says much about it. Meanwhile, it’s killing us.

I’m not a big fan of Rand Paul, but I support him when he protested the fact that the Defense Department wouldn’t rule out using drone strikes to kill Americans right here in America. That information made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. WTF? This is something people should be taking to the streets about. (Maybe they are afraid the drones will come and shoot Hellfire missiles at them). This is outlandish. Talk about total control, they are getting closer to it day by day.

I believe that the Occupy Movement should re-emerge. This country is no longer ours. It’s being run by people that could well be sociopaths. I’m ashamed to be an American. I have my passport and I’m ready to bolt. Things are getting out of hand here in America and I feel that I should add my voice of dissent. More than anything I want to be proud to be an American again. I spent over twenty years in the Army of this country. I want to see some change. If the American people can’t rise up and correct this sad situation we find ourselves in than I don’t want to stay here. I’ll do anything to help bring about change here in America, but if it gets any worse, I’m leaving. I’ll stick around for a while, but if people don’t demand that things change, I really don’t want to be a part of this anymore.

I've written about this for years. I've done everything I possibly can do to inform people about this corrupt system we live under. Hundreds of articles, speeches at rally’s, marching with Occupy and I seem to be getting nowhere. I really feel like I know how the Germans felt when the Nazi's took power. I'm not exaggerating. This nation needs to wake the hell up.

Viva Chavez!

2013-03-11T23:57:00.001-05:00

I just read that Hugo Chavez passed away. I was surprised that the New York Times had anything good to say about him. The story was perhaps the best reporting that they have done about the man since he took office. It seems a shame that someone like Chavez had to die in order that a U.S. publication could finally say something good about him.

Chavez was a great American leader (yes folks, we aren't the only Americans on Earth). He was a leader that actually did the things he promised his people that he would do. Literacy in Venezuela was 100% and the poor actually became better off under Chavez than any other leader in their history. He made sure that the people in the barrios received deeds for their property. He had portions of their Constitution printed on the packages of consumer goods. He ran elections that were fair and balanced. He was a Socialist to be sure, but he was also on the side of Democracy, something that our leaders can't seem to manage.

Chavez will leave a void that will surely be missed. We can only hope that the United States stays out of the politics in that nation and allows the Venezuelan people to decide their own future without our county's interference. I can only hope that we learned our lesson in the coup that removed Chavez from power before the people rose up and had him reinstated.

I am in awe of the life of Hugo Chavez and I make no apologies for respecting that life. Instead of vilifying him, Americans should be aware that it was Chavez and the people of Venezuela that first offered aid after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and it was Chavez that offered heating oil to the poor of the American Northeast.

Obama could learn what leadership really could be by studying the life of Chavez. In fact, we could all learn from his life and try to understand why he made such a deep connection with the people of his nation. The only thing I can say about him is Viva Chavez!

A Federal Dictatorship?

2013-02-12T10:42:00.002-05:00

This nation seems to be in a state of flux. The old constitutional protections guaranteed by the Constitution under The Bill of Rights have been replaced by Executive Orders and various bills approved by the House and Senate and signed into law by various Presidents. It is not one political party, nor one President that is responsible for disposing with the troubling Bill of Rights that impedes the Federal and State governments handling of “dissidents”. It is an economic class, the richest people in the land.
The reason I maintain this is because either it is the wealthiest people that hold office, according to The Center for Responsive Politics Open Secrets’ website;
“About 47 percent of Congress, or 249 current members are millionaires. … In 2010, the estimated median net worth of a current U.S. senator stood at an average of $2.56 million,” according to the Center’s research.
“Despite the global economic meltdown in 2008 and the sluggish recovery that followed, that’s up about 7.6 percent from an estimated median net worth of $2.38 million in 2009 … and up 13 percent from a median net worth of $2.27 million in 2008. … Fully 36 Senate Democrats, and 30 Senate Republicans reported an average net worth in excess of $1 million in 2010. The same was true for 110 House Republicans and 73 House Democrats.” (ABC News)

The reason for this is because our election process in this nation is fundamentally flawed. There has been no effective Campaign Finance Reform since 2002, and the Citizen’s United ruling from the Supreme Court has devastated the election process. Money controls our government, the people be damned. When the only viable candidates are from the two parties that rule this nation, voting becomes little more than an afterthought.
Americans are now witnessing the aftershock from failing to address this situation. We as a people must ask this one overriding question that has plagued us since the beginning of time; Cui bono? (who benefits?). Let me answer that question, it sure isn’t us.
Witness the passage of the NDAA and the subsequent court battles of those principled individuals that are trying to stop it. The NDAA is an infringement on our liberties yet only a handful of Americans realize how important it is to overturn this terribly offensive and liberty-robbing provision. We hear of no challengers to this provision in the U.S. House of Representatives or in the U.S. Senate. While the vote in the Senate was 67 for and 29 against, and the vote in the House was 283 to 136, only Rand Paul stood up against the Act and tried to put in a provision excluding US citizens. He said this about the provision;

"When you're accused of a crime in our country you get a trial, you get a trial by a jury of your peers, no matter how heinous your crime is, no matter how awful you are, we give you a trial.”
Apparently, Congress doesn’t think so, as his amendment was ignored. We hear almost nothing from the Congressmen and Senators that voted against this provision slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2012.
How does this affect ordinary Americans? Well, when the government grabs the authority to have the military pick you up and hold you without trial or legal representation if you support al Qaeda or (vaguely) “associated forces” until this charade called “The War on Terror” is over, it can cause one to take pause. I for one, curtailed most of what I wanted to write until my wife and I got our passports. I imagine that many people in this nation also thought twice about the increase of governmental power.
At this time in our history we are witnessing another governmental creep toward total control. The use of drone strikes against American citizens without due process is being debated, not in Congress, but on the internet, on left wing and right wing sites alike. This situation, along with the President’s authority to blast anyone he deems to be an “enemy” to kingdom come, is against everything this nation has stood for it its history. The order to execute an American, without due process, is a travesty of justice. The sad fact is that this has already been done!
The extra-judicial killing of On September 30, 2011 a drone strike in Yemen killed American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both individuals resided in Yemen at the time of their deaths. The executive order approving al-Awlaki's death was issued by the Obama administration in 2010 and challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights in that year. The U.S. President issued an order, approved by the National Security Council that al-Awlaki's normal legal rights as a civilian should be suspended and his death should be imposed, as he was a threat to the United States. The reasons provided to the public for approval of the order was Al-Awlaki's links to the 2009 Fort Hood Massacre and the 2009 Christmas Day bomb plot, the attempted destruction of a Detroit-bound passenger-plane. Telegraph UK

While it can be argued that Anwar al-Awlaki was a “terrorist” and a traitor, his sixteen-year old son (Abdulrahman al-Awlaki), who was blown to pieces by an American drone a week later, could not be justified. In fact both killings (the father and the son) can’t be justified! Killing Americans (no matter what the government claims they have done) is not only against the Constitution, but against everything this nation was founded on!
Yes, Obama should be impeached, but he won’t be. Those individuals that make up our legislature have been bought and paid for by the special moneyed interests that also control the mainstream media. Most Americans, thanks to the media, are largely unaware of what really happens. This is Press Secretary Robert Gibbs talking about the American drone strike on 16 year –old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki;
"I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children," Gibbs said, suggesting the son somehow deserved his death because of the sins of the father. "I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."
Remember, al-Awlaki nor his son was on the government’s kill-list, nor were there any formal charges against them. If al-Awlaki was a terrorist, charges should have been brought before a court. The killing of his son however was wrong on every conceivable level.
Now the American people are engrossed in the capture of a “rogue” former LAPD policeman who was also a navy officer. A manifesto was released, ostensibly from him, about why he is murdering law enforcement officers. All of this is very strange. This “manifesto” is very coherent and makes some very damning charges against the LAPD. The mainstream media says little about these charges that Christopher Dorner has leveled against the LAPD. Some have claimed that this manifesto wasn’t written by the same person throughout. Regardless, the man-hunt has brought sensationalism to this drama. Now that drones are being used domestically, will Dorner, hyped by the press as an armed killer, be brought down by an armed drone?
Surveillance drones are already being used in this man-hunt. The question that I would like to pose here is that if they have a shot, will an armed drone be used to take this individual down? If this happens, will they give him a chance to give himself up, or will this just be another indiscriminate murder by another governmental agency seeking to destroy its enemies without judicial process? How will the American people react to something like this?
Unless people in the entertainment industry speak out against lethal drone strikes in the United States without proper judicial process, don’t expect many in the United States to even be aware that an historic precedent has even happened. Once it is ruled that the drone killing of this man was “legal”, expect drone strikes against perceived “criminals” to become commonplace across the country.
The media will not speak out against it if it should happen. They will blindly go along with whatever policies were put in place. They will not only go along with executing someone by remote control, they will even champion it! Whatever happens in this case, the media as it exists in this nation will not argue the questions that a scenario like this will bring.
Between the Federal Government being controlled by millionaires and those that are supported by corporate funding and special interests, expect nothing from the Federal Government. They are not there to support the working people that live here, they support the status quo. If they are told that a Federal, State or Local government can kill suspects with impunity, they will blindly obey. Expect nothing from the mainstream media, as they are in the same hands as the government.
In short, we are witnessing the destruction of due judicial process in the United States. As some have suggested, we are entering into a Federal dictatorship that is being supported by the States and the media. The right to kill without a trial is being debated and without the people’s voice in the debate, many people will be subject to execution without a trial right here in the United States. The federal Government has never had a power that it hasn’t used. I just hope it won’t be used on you or me.
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