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2017-01-18T13:04:00.002-05:00

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American-Israeli Politics: Where Bullying is Called Self-Defense

2014-07-23T15:10:00.006-04:00

“And I stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel as it defends itself against this shocking violence.” Senator Cory Booker

“Israel is entitled to take the steps necessary to protect itself from destructive rocket attacks from Hamas that are aimed at all Israeli civilians, regardless of their religion,” said Senator Charles Schumer

"We support Israel's right to self-defense.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

It was General William Tecumseh Sherman, whom after conducting his devastating campaign against Georgia’s civilian population and burning the city of Atlanta, who said, “War is Hell.” This statement is likely the most concise and appropriate description of war recorded in modern history since the publication of Carl von Clausewitz's great military-theoretical classic On War published in the 1873. I despise war and the carnage it results in regardless of the factions involved. But what is next in line that I personally find as upsetting, is the cosmetic over simplification used by many, often the oppressor in these exercise, to sanitize what is barbaric brutality in its purest form.

The recent re-start of the incessant military engagement between Israel and Gaza (one that has been going on since 1949), has reared its ugly head again. And as usual, the result is the same, the mass slaughter of mostly innocent civilians, mainly women and children, which outside of newspeak, resembles ethnic cleansing more than a military engagement. However, as noted in the opening quotes, it is the retro chic position of the moment to describe Israel’s actions as SELF-DEFENSE. This misappropriation of the term SELF-DEFENSE defeats reason, logic and any operational definition used in the past to define this action.

By definition, a noun, self-defense refers to the use of reasonable force to protect oneself or members of the family from bodily harm from the attack of an aggressor, if the defender has reason to believe they are in danger. Consequently, the force used in self-defense may be sufficient for protection from said perceived harm such to stop any danger from attack, but cannot be an excuse to continue the attack or the use of excessive force. Thus self-defense cannot include killing or great bodily harm to defend property or collective forms of punishment.

The present actions of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) do not meet any of the aforementioned operational definitions. Even under the purview of “Just War Theory”, which asserts military personnel must take careful aim at his military target and away from nonmilitary targets, and one cannot kill civilians simply because he finds them between himself and his enemies. Simply not to intend the deaths of civilians is not the pragmatic objective in this sense, but rather paramount is to save civilian lives even if it means risking soldiers’ lives.

What is obviated from the discussion is that self-defense means that if the people of a nation are suffering aggression, oppression, or genocide, and are themselves capable of stopping it, they are morally entitled to respond militarily. Unfortunately Israel cannot claim this position, given that aggression from another nation can only be described in self-defense if it is a last resort, which historically we hasn’t been the case (2012, 2008, etc.). In addition, the self-defense notion under the assumption of military action being a last resort cannot be met also because every other conceivable avenue outside of using military force has not been tried. Moreover, the kidnaping and murder of three innocent individuals, usually a police action cannot be perceived as a last resort or the impetus to start aggressive military action. But when these standards are not met, the result is Gaza: an innocent populous is the victim of a catastrophic attack

Another point of contention is that self-defense is virtuous and practical. What Israel is practicing is more like a George Zimmerman style of self-defense. Instead of self-defense, the actions of Israel are more akin to bullying. Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Bullies intend to harm their targets and usually are continuous and sustained. This means that they (bullies) target their victims multiple times, frequently with the same act over and over. More importantly is that the bully intends to harm the target.

I say this because the assertion of self-defense avoids the historical reality of colonial occupation of Gaza by Israel which prevents effort on behalf of the Palestinians living in what has been described as an open air prison, the ability and human right to establish a proper, free society. If Israel was trying to avoid civilian deaths, they would and could, but this is not their desire. They are possessed with an evil dogma of annihilation similar to that we saw in South Africa during apartheid. Their objective is to destroy and kill all who are in the way of their imperialistic desire to control and occupy all of Gaza, inclusive of it rich natural gas and oil reserves. For example, it is a well-known fact that The IDF calculates the number of calories Gaza's civilian population needs to just survive on a daily basis and transports foods into Gaza accordingly. This is not self-defense, it is bullying with the objective to occupy territory accordingly break up the will and lands of the Palestinian people. Ironically, it closely the plan of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of ethnic cleansing, for Hitler. And anyone that cannot accept this, I’m cool, but facts are facts: Soweto 1976 is no different than Gaza 2014.

Since the 1990s, Israel has repeatedly failed to meet and even broke all of the conditions outlined in documented agreements with both parties. They continue to play this shell game that gives them the privilege to ignore the natural human rights that Palestinians have like all other peoples in the world. There is an aggression of the worse kind: one that indicates they will always be against a two-state solution, while knowing this is what the majority of Palestinians have agreed with and desire. They should just admit they desire to ethnic cleanse Gaza, and take thier oil and natural gas.

Average Jewish Response to Deaths of 4 Kids in Gaza

2014-07-19T15:42:00.000-04:00

The False Gaza Narrative and the Dwight Coward Story

2014-07-14T10:23:00.001-04:00

Used to be a time that African American athletes had character, integrity and stood on what was right more than how much they were paid. This was also the period of intrepid investigative journalism. Now, both have gone the way of extinction as it was with the dinosaurs at the close of the Mesozoic Era. Men such as Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, Tommie Smith and John Carlos are rare indeed today, as too are men like Dan Rather, Edward Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

As it stands, honesty and integrity, with the exception a few in the media and sports is dead and gone. Now instead of reporting on the facts, we are often given scripted news reports, funneled from the top of some main office often word for word as dictated by the political powers that exist. As such, today, with the exception of a Glen Greenwald, we would never have stories reported honestly in the manner in which Seymour Hersh reported on the My Lai Massacre in 1968. Seems as if with the exception of donating to charity, helping their neighborhoods few if any modern African American athletes have the courage to address controversial political issues, regardless of political affiliation. There are a few bright spots, like former NFL wide receiver Donte’ Stallworth, who frequently speaks out publicly about political issues, the economy and even the use of drones, but these individuals are few and far between in their respective fields.

Now why am I saying this? Well it seems as if the mainstream U.S. media is presenting a false narrative on the situation in Gaza. No matter where you look the focus is on Israel, their right to self-defense and Hamas targeting the man-made nation state with hundreds of rockets. Never is there a mention of the disproportionate number of air attacks the Israeli defense forces (IDF) rain incessantly upon innocent civilians, rarely are their pictures of the horrendous deaths on the mostly female and children civilians being ripped apart and rarely, is there any narrative to place the entire situation in perspective.

They never mention that Palestine, or the people in Gaza do not have an Army, Navy or Air force, or that from 2009 to 2018, the United States has committed to GIVE Israel 30 billion in military aid. To be more exact over the past 60 years it is estimated that the U.S. has given Israel more than a quarter trillion in military aid. In 2013 alone the Obama administration sent Israel $3.1 billion in military aid. Israel has used white phosphorus on Palestinians before, and now it’s being reported by many officials that banned DIME weapons are being used against civilians in Gaza, a controversial weapon that emits super heated micro-shrapnel.

Outside of not providing any perspective, many media outlets even create the narrative against all evidence and fact. Fox news wrote a story called “Gaza rockets aimed at Israel: What would you do with just 15 seconds?” They also, fabricated a television byline using bombed building in Gaza destroyed by Israeli missiles with the caption: "Militants fire rockets on Israel." And it just isn’t Fox; Diane Sawyer of ABC News told its viewers that scenes of destruction in Gaza were in Israel. Ironically a segment in which the news anchor starts by saying “We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel today as Israel tried to shoot them out of the sky.” Next to her is video footage not of Israel or even Israelis, but rather of the destruction caused by IDF airstrikes on Gaza.

Now what does this have to do with sports and professional athletes? Well, on July 12, 2014, Dwight Howard, an NBA all-star who makes more than $21 million annually tweeted #FREEPALESTINE. However, within minutes, it is clearly the powers that be mad him reverse course for which I posted another tweet that read: “I apologize if I offended anyone with my previous tweet, it was a mistake.....previous tweet was a mistake. I have never commented on international politics and never will.” Why would this be so problematic for the star?

The great writer Voltaire wrote, "If you want to know who rules over you just ask yourself who cannot be criticized." Maybe it was NBA Commissioner Adam Silver or Leslie Lee Alexander, the owner of the Houston Rockets who made that telephone call, after all both are Jewish. In a similar vein, we know that Robert Allen Iger the current chairman and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company (owns ABC) is also Jewish. Which gives substantial support to the premise of William C. Rhoden’s book, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete: meaning the easiest answer is that is all about the money. Athletes or the owners, teams or leagues for which they play, do not want to lose it.

Clearly Dwight Howard had someone whisper in his ear, enough so to make him ask for forgiveness and beg for redemption in the manner in which slaves often were made to do so by their masters in the Antebellum south. For a single moment, Howard was a man, and said what he realized was what was humane in his heart. But it only lasted long enough for master to crack that whip and return him to the coward he actually is.

I.O.U.: Iraq, Obama and Ukraine

2014-07-10T10:09:00.000-04:00

President Obama’s team of national security advisers have a few bad poker hands they are in the process of playing. The first regards all the trillions they have spent on National Security and the NSA yet not foreseeing the collapse and routing of the U.S.trained Iraq Army forces by Sunni jihadists, and second, the blind eye turned toward the Ukraine by supporting Neo-Nazis whom just so happen to be conducting ethnic cleansing among the Russian speaking populous of the East. Although Obama has openly stated that his administration and national security staff has been working continuously on options for dealing with ISIS, and that he has proposed additional sanctions upon Russia, nothing has been done and nothing has been effective.

First looking at Iraq, albeit our problem began with President George W. Bush, Obama has done little to reduce the blood shed that has been occurring in Iraq for the past two years and like the mainstream news media, he and his administration have ignored all of the chaos in the nation and placed it on the back burner, as if it was a done deal and the war was over. This is one reason that the President was caught slipping and leaves the question, was it that they did not see this as a possibility of occurring, given how unstable the country has been since the U.S. appointed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki took over? Or was it that the US intelligence community didn’t see the threat coming from ISIS? Either way, regardless of who is in the executive office, both are unacceptable. Moreover, things were made worse when last year, President Obama openly and falsely claimed and took credit for saying the war in Iraq was over, just as it was when Bush made the claim a few months after he started the war and again in2008.

Based on this alone, one should ask how can the U.S. administration install a friendly government in Iraq and but cannot even get them to accept to extend an agreement or form an inclusive government when you giving said nation billions annually? I know, defeats reason. The Obama administration explicitly detailed that he wanted such but in the same breath asserted they would scale back support involve if the Sadrists were a significant player in any Iraqi government: all in congruence with his desire to use both Iraq and forces on Syria at the forefront of his desire to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Maybe we would be better off asking why any sensible person in leadership would commit more U.S. blood for a lost cause that was previously lost. To do such in any form or fashion is an embarrassment and exhibits that the administration’s policy was really no policy at all, but instead one without specific and tangible aims or outcomes. Let’s be clear, in a few days, the gains that America and coalition forces made over a decade of occupation, resulting in nearly 5,000 American lives and $3 trillion, are gone and we didn’t see it coming. Thus far, it is clear that the administration was moving the Iraqis faster than they should have seeing it is clear the military can’t function as a military.

But what is more troubling, is trying to figure out why Washington selected Nouri al-Maliki, after all he is one of the few Iraqi political leader who doesn’t have any clout, I mean, he doesn’t have a militia like other Iraqi leaders, does he? The fact is that Maliki is dependent on Iran for his power and Iran is backing Syria, both of which in many respects have been keeping him in power, I am sure Obama knew this, yet he appointed him against all the desires his Syrian and Iranian foreign policy wish to accomplish. The record shows that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with leaders of Arab countries in Saudi Arabia a few months backs in which all party’s agreed that ISIS in Syria and Iraq was a real threat, but no plan were developed on how to address these events.

And just like in Iran where Obama’s foreign policy is out of sync with the realities in the region, the same consistency is evident in the Ukraine. The entire world knows that Yanukovich’s democratically elected government was removed by military force instigated by right wing neo-Nazi and Neo fascist via U.S. and E.U urging. Yet, just like his administration was supposedly caught by surprise at the rate in which the well-armed and highly trained ISIS fighters took over Mosul, they said the same in February, when it failed to foresee the events in Crimea. Likewise as we observed in Iraq and Syria, where the rise of ISIS negate Obama’s claims of a happy ending to the war in Iraq, the recent moves of Russia has proffered the same, moreover, it makes one query how effective will his success be in Afghanistan since he will employ a carbon-copy the of the same strategy for withdrawal there by 2016.

In the Ukraine, like Maliki at first, President Obama considers Billionaire Petro Poroshenko’s victory a good thing. Consequently, he immediately began bombing the Russia speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk to deal with the so-called “terrorist” with the approval of our Nobel Peace prize winning president. Even more peculiar is that through this support, Obama has placed his administration in violation of the U.S. law he has mentioned several times over the past six years that prohibits financially aiding any coup installed government such as the case in Ukraine. Think about it, the Obama administration didn’t see what happened in Egypt as a coup, so the military aid to Egypt kept flowing to the tune of $1 billion plus\.

As it stands, the Obama administration is in the midst of an extremely tenuous situation. The most significant is ISIS: especially not knowing the group’s true strength and how to respond. Particularly, the fact that the U.S. currently has NO intelligence on Abu Bakral Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who was once held by the US in Camp Bucca Iraq (the Obama administration shut down the Bucca prison camp and released its prisoners, including Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in 2009).

Now in Iran, Syria, Iraq, India, Egypt and the Ukraine, Russian foreign policy appears to be the lone consistent winner. Although President Obama has stated he will invest $1 billion in stepping up the US military presence in Eastern Europe based on the tension in the Ukrainian, since March, the White House has approved more than $23 million in security assistance to Ukraine and is now saying it will give Kiev an additional $5 million aid. Meanwhile, China and Russia are in the midst of a massive Gold buying spree plus the deals with the nations mentioned above, makes any sanctions mentioned by the present administration an effort in futility.

In all reality it was foolish for the President to promise the impossible of ending a war in which his policy has virtually flamed Sunni and Shiite sectarian violence. Then remains the question many have yet to ask, why was such a vile person considered fit to be released into the world, when times before at closings, administration’s would just relocate such person to Gitmo? Yes the administrations have some cards it must play and they may not produce a winning hand. Bluffing and inconsistencies in foreign policy have seemed to put the U.S. all over the map. One the one hand we are aware that the Iraqi leadership is backing Syria against the U.S. supported militants yet say little if anything about it, and on the other that Maliki continues to implement repressive attacks on and against Sunni in Iraq. In both Iraq and Ukraine, it may be best for the administration let things go as they will and take an I.O.U., because America has messed things up enough already in both regions.

Interactive Map: Relocations of Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors

2014-07-08T14:19:00.000-04:00

View Relocations of Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors in a larger map

Real Threat of undocumented Crossing is to Public Health

2014-07-07T13:11:00.001-04:00

Now before some zealot, pro-black/pro-white only progressive liberal republican starts to attack me, I just want to say that I am pro-people, all people and that I practice the use of logic and reason as opposed to emotional invective to present my perspective on what think. For the record, I am an infectious disease specialist, with a stern history of FUNDED research from institutions including but not limited to the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Army Medical Research Centers and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. My academic career began running a child survival and maternal health project for more than a year in South Eastern Nigeria with Africare, from which I would spend the next 16 years of my teaching and Research with the Emory University RollinsSchool of Public Health followed by a brief period with the Morehouse School of Medicine.

What I am interested in, is presenting a narrative that is not sensational enough for the mainstream media to detail, for it does not provide the entertainment values of protestors jousting for position like they were in some medieval arena. Nor does it have the emotion required to engender the words racist, bigoted, or hatred, which seems to be top billing for most news outlets.

What is missed from the discussion of the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S. border is the issue of public health. Basic public health and safety (which in my locution are the same) should be the paramount concern addressed more than humanity, economics, mothers and even children. Now I will say for the record, I have a problem with folk who have more compassion for people coming to the U.S. than the homeless veterans and children we have on our streets currently; and I find it funny that the folk who want to provide for these people (whom are definitely in need), are the same ones who will call the police on a homeless man asking for change, or who forget about the 1.6 million homeless children we have on our streets who were born in America, whom have yet to see the government provide for them in the manner in which these new arrivals have been provided for. And this is in particular directed to the black folk who display anterograde amnesia seeming to never ask for similar provisions for the 800,000 African American kids living on the streets. In the 2011 school year, enrollment statistics in preschools and K-12 programs reported a figure of 1,168,354 children in public schools known to be homeless. In the nation's capital alone, the Public School System reports that over 3,000 of its students are known to be homelessness. Plus, California, New York, Texas and Florida are among the hardest hit by the homeless youth crisis, and presently these states are also dealing with the brunt of the recent immigration influx.

Yet still, mine is one of public health. When I say public health, I am referring to the practice of protecting and improving the health of individuals, communities, and populations, locally and globally. This is accomplished via focusing on preventing disease and injury by promoting healthy lifestyles in concert with implementing educational programs and policies developed in an effort to achieve these goals: specifically, as they regard preventing and controlling the spread of infectious disease.

What has been barely mentioned with this massive surge in undocumented persons entering the United States, is the rate in which infectious disease, many of which are tropical, inundate theirhomelands. This is a threat that should be taken seriously and sounded so that all of the citizens in America can take the necessary preventive precautions.

With 52,000 plus and growing, it was only a matter of time before communicable illness started being documented among the new immigrants. Last week, San Diego’s Local 1613 of the National Border Patrol Council issued a press release announcing a Border Patrol Agenthad contracted scabies, a contagious skin infection caused by mites. This happened in connection with the transfer of detained illegal unaccompanied alien children from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, while they were being processed in Otay Mesa, California. Before this, an unaccompanied minor was hospitalized anddiagnosed with H1N1 (swine flu), after being housed at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, a facility run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Also in Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents in have discovered four cases of the H1N1 flu strain among illegal immigrant children held at two detention centers in Brownsville.

Not only have we seen the aforementioned, but California is in the middle of a whooping cough epidemic, with more than 3,500 cases of whooping cough reported between Jan. 1 – to June. During the last two weeks of June, the California Department of Public Health reported more than 800 new cases (more than all the cases reported in 2013).

I am not writing to scare anyone but rather to alert concerned individuals of the outcome that may happen if we continue to ignore the impact this mass immigration may have on public health outcomes in our community. These are just a few of what has been documented among others including chicken pox and MRSA staph infections. I wont even mention Cutaneous Leishmaniasis, Rift Valley fever, Schistosomiasis or anti-biotic resistant Tuberculosis. The reality is that these events have major and sever potential of becoming a public health crisis. In particular since that many of these individuals live in the tight spaces in which the children are contained on their way here and are housed in small congested areas in detention centers where they are housed in the U.S. Not only do these increase chances of spreading communicable diseases to other children but to border guards as well, and the general community within which they live.

So while you are caught up on the emotions of this issue, please do me a favor, and do take the time to educate yourself on what a disease pandemic, as a consequence of our porous borders, may mean you those already here in the United States.

The Yale-Harvard Supreme Court: Us versus Them

2014-07-02T14:57:00.003-04:00

Over the past few weeks, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has rendered several major decisions. These have either been applauded or vilified depending on which side of the political spectrum one is on. Personally, I could care less about the decisions, which from my perspective have less to do with legalities than compared to the tactics of divide and conquer as practiced by Oligarchs for centuries. But what is disturbing, is the sever lack of universal representation that currently, and in the past has comprised the jurist that sit on this nine person corpus.

Since 1956, at any given time, there have NEVER been less than three justices from Harvard and/or Yale sitting on the SCOTUS. And since the appointment of Anthony Kennedy in 1988, Harvard and Yale graduates in concert have comprised a majority of the court. When Elena Kagan was confirmed, it made all sitting on the SCOTUS had either attended Yale (Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor) or Harvard (John G. Roberts Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer) for law schools. Can you say American aristocracy?

I say this because in Washington of recent decades, it appears that the prevailing assumption as it pertains to the SCOTUS is that, the best minds and smartest people for the job graduate from either Yale or Harvard. Albeit a possibility of fanatical truism, in reality such never has, or will be the case. As such, unlike representative bodies like the Senate or the House of Representatives, the SCOTUS is not representative of AMERICA at all. Sure you got black and Latino persons, and some white men and white women, but that just doesn’t cut the cake and rather too simplistic in a diverse population inclusive of regional distinctions in thinking as ours.

This disproportionality in the number of justices from Harvard and Yale is frightening and should be to all. It is a form of legal aristocracy because there is none when it regards diversity of the legal educations of the folk who happen to be on the most important political body in our nation. I mean is it impossible to find a great and smart legal mind from the halls of Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, University of Virginia, William and Mary or the University of Tennessee? Nope, the Yaleharvarification of the SCOTUS aint about quality of the mind, but moreso of the Presidents whom appoint them and the legal field good ole boy network.

In simple terms, this is all about limited access networking. First, for the past 26 years every president has been a graduate of Yale or Harvard. This may be why among other things; all of the sitting members of the SCOTUS are either Catholic or Jewish. And it seems that all clerked on the Supreme Court once upon a time ago. If this constitutional republic is to function at full capacity and utility of its citizenry, diversity of education at the highest ranks of government, in particular the SCOTUS is paramount and a matter of survival.

When our elected officials, the folk who are responsible for making these sections and appointments to government positions we did not have a say of choosing and working on behalf of the citizenry, limit their pool to a small body, it works against the best interest of the nation. I mean, we saw what happened when African Americans and women were added, so why restrict the applicant pool in this instance?

The danger is that under the present results of this process, we get a narrower perspective on life because people in the restricted pool are reinforced to think the same and have more in common than different.

Imagine where our nation would be if we did this in all fields. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, Fred Smith of Federal Express attended the University of Memphis for his MBA, Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College and Warren Buffet went to University of Nebraska. I guess if you are starting a business or not looking for a job there are different requirements compared to obtaining a SCOTUS appointment. Could you imagine a field of Business dominated by just two schools? Oh that is right, you can, and well argue the observation in the affirmative since it were the Harvard and Yale Finance MBA’s that blew up and crashed Wall Street and the national and global economies.

Where would we be if science, technology and medicine operated in this manner? This would mean no University of Tennessee Medical Center or St. Jude Hospital in Memphis, no John Hopkins, Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Cal Tech, MIT and Washington University in St. Louis.

The entire ideal of just two schools running the decision that will impact the entire nation is feculent. It is clear that other factors may be involved that may not even benefit the citizenry but rather the government and corporations since they are people now legally as a consequence of several recent court decisions. Most should be able to detect how many modern SCOTUS decisions benefit global plutocrats more than us, and in concert with the media and the criminal behavior of bankers and financiers; like the other two branches of our government, the SCOTUS seem to repeat a narrative of a future that George Orwell would have described as being manufactured to serve the interest of all and everything except justice, truth, virtue, and liberty. If my corollary is correct, this will not result in anything good for America.

U.S. Foreign Policy: A Civil War Here, a Civil War There

2014-06-25T12:33:00.002-04:00

I am so glad cats like John McCain and John Kerry didn’t win the Presidency. Likewise I am just as sad that George W. Bush and Barack Obama won the presidency and if there is a God, I am certain he would let Sponge Bob Square Pants ascend to the Presidency before Hillary Clinton. And all of this is stated in objective terms, the most prominent being that the Bush and Obama Administration’s foreign policy when implemented only results in civil war, no matter where it is practiced, but especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

Case in point, this past Sunday, during a joint press conference with Egypt’s newly elected President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, "The United States of America is not responsible for what happened in Libya, nor is it responsible for what is happening in Iraq today." In the same briefing, he later stated, "US is not engaged in picking or choosing any one individual... it's up to the people of Iraq to choose their own leadership."

Both of these statements are a complete and utter ignorance of the facts from a historical and temporal context or either blatant lies. Although vilified for stating such, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei correctly accused Washington of just exploiting the violence in Iraq and Syria to regain control of Iraq by placing it once again “under its [U.S.] hegemony” and rule of “its stooges.” This has always been the premise of plutocratic desires under the storm cloud of nation building and implementing democracy, as amorphous a concept as it is. In 2003, I read that “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history” – Ari Shavit, April 5, 2003 Haaretz News Service-Israel. I find this statement, with the Semitic tone aside both accurate and consistent with history insofar as we can evaluate the aforementioned from the perspective of the foreign policy statements and practices of the last two U.S. executive administrations.

The general problem is that regardless of political affiliation, the neo’s (neoconservatives and neoliberals) have a greater concern in their corporate financiers interest than the citizenry of America, and this my friend is regardless of political party and or the race of the President. Their preference is to place an inordinate amount of focus and attention on places like Syria, Libya, Iraq, Ukraine and other foreign nations, than the needs of U.S. citizenry. Instead, they apply the same standard to us as a foreign nation: drones, massive intrusive spying, domestic economic destabilization and labeling the average man a terrorist simply for exercising liberties guaranteed via the Bill of Rights.

This is clear to see for the thinking person. Let us examine the first example of President George W. Bush and de-Baathification. Shortly after the fall of the Saddam regime, via L. Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), in one of his first things President Bush introduced was the de-Baathification program to remove members of the Ba’ath Party from their positions of authority and to ban them from future employment in government. They [the Bush Administration] selected Ahmed Chalabi to head of the De-Baathification Committee, which had the goals of preventing the Baath from regaining power, avoiding and retribution against Baathists and isolating the majority of Baathists from their party leaders.

This process of de-Baathification was supported via the forfeiture and seizure of all party assets and property, which was to be held in trust by the CPA for the use and benefit of the Iraqi people, albeit there were no real Iraqi citizens involved, just an Iraqi de-Baathification Council (IDC), composed entirely of Iraqi nationals formerly living in the U.S. and Europe mainly.

From the beginning de-Baathification was a very incongruent and f##ked up process for lack of a better phrase. Not only did it not achieve it aims, it also polarized Iraqi politics and worse, made the Iraqi military and government even more unstable after U.S. military intervention and occupation. Then it brought in al-Qaeda, to a region where it had never existed before as well as driving a wedge between Sunni, Shia and even Kurds in Iraq. And after all of this, Barack Obama came in, and when you thought his promise to end the war would make things much better, they actually followed the GWB foreign policy playbook and made things even worse.

Taking U.S. policy a step farther, the Obama Administration took up the doings of the fat cats of Saudi Arabia and Qatar along with big banks of the West and have in effect declared war on Shiites the world over. Now to be clear, I would like to see Obama, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Rice, Kerry, Rice, and tried, as War Criminals and should be.

Kerry comments only reinforce the failures of America’s Manifest Destiny foreign policy. As such, no past Administration or current one will ever take responsibility for a foreign policy of endless wars of aggression and regime change. It may even be more appropriate to call U.S. foreign policy as the policy of civil war. Where ever we insert our political nose abroad, the result is the destruction of a stable nation and civil war. We see it now in the Ukraine where Obama supports the fascist Poroshenko’s new government, as well in the outcome via our interference in Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan or wherever the U.S./NATO decided to involve themselves without request. Again, categorically, I repeat, the US is responsible for Libya, Tunis, Egypt and Syria.

And now the fine mess of Obama policy has by intent, morphed into a sectarian Sunni versus Shia conflict. Strangely, all in nations for the most part which were secular governments. The Obama administration has consistently taken a foreign policy approach in the Middle East and Africa of over-throwing secular governments, this time it is Syria. This was done by intentionally arming and letting groups like ISIL grow stronger and stronger. He openly complains against Assad in Syria, and Iran, but ignores how Sunni leaders in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia violate the human rights of their majority Shia populations. Think about it, several months ago when the Iraqi government asked for U.S. airstrikes to repel ISIS, Obama refused, which was probably the first time he refused such an offer from an allied government. I mean, he didn’t even ask for approval to conduct illegal airstrikes in 8 other countries under the guise of fighting terrorism. Even stranger was observing President Obama refusing to acknowledge that our closer allies in the region (Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) have been giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Islamic extremist terrorist group invading Iraq and attacking the Syrian government.

Lastly, the assertion that the U.S. believes that people have a right to decide if they wish to govern themselves is only true when the U.S. say’s so, for we have seen them place many in power whom the nations had no interest in being brought to power as we recently saw with Poroshenko in the Ukraine, Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and to a certain extent, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt. S###, the U.S. even installed Saddam Hussein.

American policy will never be in a position to address the multitude of issues in the Middle East whether it pertains to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Indo-Pakistani conflict, or the rise of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somali. I don’t know what world Kerry and the present administration, nor the prior administration live. I guess it is like Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Hitler’s Third Reich said: “Tell a good lie enough times and people will think it is the truth.”

Dissent in A Fear Society

2014-06-17T20:42:00.003-04:00

In his book THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACY, Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet political prisoner released from prison by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 wrote “A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.” He also added, “A society that does not protect dissent will inevitably be based on fear.” Although it is clear his perspective is based on his personal experience growing up as a Jew in the former Soviet Union, it strikes me as if he is writing about America today.

Since the start of this century, the focus of the US federal government, in all aspects has been directed toward encouraging uniformity and conformity, in view, belief and idea of all its citizens, specifically by playing on the emotional projection of being either “with or against us.” This mentality gained its maximum utility of expected outcomes when the U.S. began its famed “war against terror.” Terror being singularly contrived from emotion representing in its basic understand an extreme fear. I say this because no two individuals, let alone all humans for that matter are the same. Some may have an extreme fear or water, others may not; some may have an extreme fear of snakes and insects, others may not. However, this is the desire of the powers that function in the highest capacity of both political and corporate leadership in America.

Now there are many that would argue against my thesis, however, they would most be those individuals that consider themselves progressive and would in the same sentence disavow the historical truth that their views are rooted in socialism, specifically cultural Marxism. They will also in the same sentence admit that no one has the same identical experiences, backgrounds, views, preferences and/or intelligence, yet cannot accept that others may not agree with them based on the aforementioned. The point being, the notion of a complete and uniform homogenous society defined by a severe ideological commitment to uniform collectivist values, ideas, views and beliefs is as realistic as the Easter bunny.

The reality of individual differences I speak of is a social pariah in today’s America. Dissent, even based on fact or personal view is currently equated to being the enemy. And there are many examples to this. Let’s us take global warming for example, which has been conveniently changed to climate change. Now from my experiences and readings, I understand that even before the Wurm glaciations (before man existed), there has always been climate change on the Earth – this is a scientific fact. However, with this said, if I don’t accept it is due to man, or that no single factor has ever been the sole cause of any phenomena, I am ridiculed by the majority; and instead of being disproven by discourse and data, called names and ridiculed.

For me, not relying on the words of a politician, specifically that carbon is a pollutant and man is the SINGLE cause of these changes, is my death nail. Why because in my argument I include the sun and its recent periods of strong coronal mass ejections and solar radiation storms, stronger solar flares and increased UV radiation of the past few decades, in formulating my perspective. I also include the observation that these events we experience Terrestrially cannot be caused by man or “carbon pollutants” alone if it is well documented they are occurring on Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto (Pluto is undergoing global warming, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in the planet’s atmospheric pressure during the past decade plus), Mars, Triton (Neptune’s largest moon), and other celestial bodies which don’t have SUVs or humans driving them.

And don’t ask them to compare the Carbon dioxide rates of Venus to Earth in terms of Carbon dioxide density, then they only curse more for you having dissenting and differing ideas of your own. Especially if you ask, if Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and Triton all "appear" to be warming, how can we be sure that Global Warming is man-made let alone a function of carbon dioxide emissions? The only response one in my experience would get are vehement attacks on charcter but not facts, simply because I trust physicist and MIT over Al Gore and Barack Obama.

Like the war on terror, this entire man-made carbon is a pollutant (when carbon is organic and not inorganic) is fatuous and typical of a fear based society just like the war on terror. This is also observed even with regards to basic beliefs. If you do not agree with gay marriage or homosexuality one is called a homophobe simply for not believing in the practice. Personally it is like saying because I hate the Dallas Cowboys (which I do); I am a footballphobe – complete and utter idiotic nonsense. The way I see, one can believe what they want, and I can listen or accept or disagree, but just because we have different views don’t make me think you are stupid or less than those who agree with me.

See America, we are not as free as we think in this constitutional republic. Whether folk can see it or not, this nation is teetering on the brink of tyranny. Yep, I said it. If one is chastised for not accepting what others say you should accept, or believe what the middle of the normal distribution say you should, and you are punished for such, that my friend is tyranny of the fascist order. Don’t take my word, recently a former vet was arrested and called mentally ill for voicing his views against the government on Facebook, and now, The Obama Administration via Eric Holder will be implementing a program designed to punish and imprison folk for thought that they see and deemas disagreeable. And this isn’t from Orwell’s 1984.

We have these behaviors now because most folk do not think for self and have instead been indoctrinated into what to believe. As such, when they do think, it is merely an amalgamation of generalizations and stereotypes which are not grounded in research or fact, but rather due to their learned irrational natures and simple mindless. Consequently, when their beliefs are questioned and/or challenged, if they cannot ignore you, they take it as a personal attack to defend the status quo, they call you intolerant and prejudice just because they don’t understand specific distinctions or nuance or from a personal point of view, they just hate to be wrong, because that in their minds such makes them feel as if they are not important.

This is what happens in a fear society, when you do not agree you are the bad person - the enemy. All that matters, even if they know they are being controlled and their thoughts are not their own, is that those they acknowledge the power that makes them feel important, correct and even worse – knowledgeable.

America from this perspective is moving away from a free society because dissent and differing views and beliefs are no longer tolerated or accepted. And the folk who accept this would never dare to accept or think that their government, like the intellectuals under Stalin, or the scientific class of Iran in the early 1980s, would ever think of doing such. But that is how it is done, it isn’t call TV programming by accident, nor is by chance that major news outlets glorify the masses on behalf of the corporate and political class.

So if you did not know, now you should, but I suspect most will ignore the wisdom in this tractate and cut on their idiot box and talk about shit they don’t know what the fuck they talking about as if they really know. And I have no problem with saying what I believe, for as it was once written, you make enough laws we all can be criminals and this my friend, is a risk I can live with as a free thinker.

What the West Point Address tells us about the Obama Doctrine and Obama’s Man Crush on the MPIC

2014-06-01T15:31:00.002-04:00

The record is clear that the impact of Bush foreign policy both politically and economically, resulted in nothing good for America. The only tangible outcomes were destroying the government of Iraq under false pretense, disrupting the standard of living for tens of millions, tens of thousands Americans dead or permanently maimed, hundreds of thousands dead Iraqis, the entry of al Qaeda into Iraq where prior they had never existed, and hundreds of billions in wasted tax dollars.

Unfortunately, President Barack Obama, although in the beginning he made a point to continuously reinforce that he had no interest for interfering in the affairs of other nations, his foreign policy actions seem to out Bush, George W. Bush. Just this week he confirmed this for the entire world. In his address at West Point, Obama provided a picture of how after five years, he sees his foreign policy efforts, and in all aspects, it is troubling, neocolonialist, and in tone reminiscent of the Rumsfeld Cheney bravado of the previous administration.

Now I cannot blame Obama singular for this, in fact most of the blame should be placed on those who voted for him, for they never read his policy positions prior to running for President, or read his speeches delivered to groups like AIPAC in 2007. They never concerned themselves with his limited, if any foreign policy experiences with the exception of a brief stint on the foreign relations committee or him having no military experience at all.

He embraced the joint special operations view of pre-emptive war and expansionist foreign policy as manager in chief of the U.S. imperial empire. Rather than exploring who he actually was, progressives, whether because he was a democrat, or if he were black, or that he made promises that any pragmatic person would not believe based on his past statements, turned a blind eye towards the reality of his prism of executive action.

Several statements stuck out which may be a looking glass into the remaining years from a foreign policy purview for the standing commander in chief. The first was: “The United States is the one indispensible nation.” I can only say the question would be, in what manner? By definition, the President is stating that either the United States or he is absolutely necessary. I personally disagree, unless necessary is correlated to causing trouble around the world, incessant practices that reflect the violation of international law, human rights and the basic respect for others to do as they please without U.S. interference. This position in word actually brings him closer in line to the prior administration for as it is stated in a basic Theorem of trigonometry: the same named trigometric ratios of conterminal angles are equal (conterminal angles in this case being a democratic or republican commander in chief).

The President also added, that “It is impossible to ignore sectarian conflicts, failing states and popular uprisings.” This also makes one cringe with his understanding and implementation of U.S. foreign policy, national security and U.S. interest in terms of priority. History under the present administration has lucidly indicated that the President has a problem with reading the pulse of both the American people and the world around him. The way he went about dealing with Egypt is just one example. First he supported the democratic elections which brought Mohamed Morsi to power, albeit a member of the Islamic Brotherhood and hesitantly supported the popular uprising against an autocratic dictator named Mubarak. All because it was evident the present administration did not have a pulse of what was going on in Egypt in real time and had allowed their unconditional support of Mubarak, even amidst his long record of human rights violations to cloud their understanding of what the people of Egypt wanted and had experienced under the man the U.S. supported.

Strangely, after giving support to the democratic desires of the people of Egypt albeit late, an Islamic fundamentalist theocrat was elected whom Obama placed full support and validation behind. Next we saw protest again in Egypt, but this time there was a coup, in which the Obama administration said nothing, did nothing and even gave the new government (coup) billions in military aid justifiably, by not referring to the overthrow as a coup. So although he openly said this in his West Point address, the fact assert otherwise. Now the Egyptian people hate the U.S. more, and channels of cooperation have increased between Egypt and Russia. This is a strange statement seeing that near the end of his address President Obama revealed: “America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism – it’s a matter of national security.”

The President also said [It]...is not whether America will lead, but how we will lead, not just to secure our peace and prosperity, but also to extend peace and prosperity around the globe.” The how is evident. The Obama motto follows the Bush playbook like an AFC coach discovering the West coast Offense. Leadership via the Obama doctrine is dividing and conquering at home and unilaterally destroying and disrupting sovereign nations, even if against international law. This is no more visibly seen than what occurred in Libya in 2011.

There was no reason or compelling U.S. interest to go into Libya unless it was on the behalf of what I have called the military police industrial complex (MPIC). This is just all of the big banks, big corporations and big lobbyist that make sizable piles of loot on war, incarceration, insider trading and media manipulation. Not only would war make them loot but they would be able to use their neocolonial desires to destroy one of the world’s last state own central banks in Libya. Fact is we followed France and Germany and didn’t lead at all with respect to Obama’s intervening into Libya. But like a good politician, reasons we contrived and lies even told. The biggest was human rights, protecting civilians, and people believed it although we can’t even help the innocent civilians we promised to aid in Haiti after their earthquake and even supported the U.N. to say that although Cholera never was in Haiti until U.N. troops arrived, they can’t even suit the U.N. to clean up the water and pay for the lives of 40,000 people who died as a result. Meaning, it is visible how we lead.

Libya is the perfect example of the Obama doctrine. If a nation is doing good for its region or country, then it must be destroyed because their success is a threat to U.S. national economy because Bush and Obama has fucked ours up miring our economy in debt for war. At no time was it mentioned by progressives that Gaddafi gave Libya the highest human development index in all of Africa, or that he stood in the forefront of the struggle for Africa against U.S. supported apartheid in Israel and South Africa. This mean nothing to neo liberals and neoconservatives, because investment under neocolonialism only increases the gap between rich and poor nations, which in simple terms means foreign capital is used not for the people, but rather for the exploitation as opposed to the development of the undeveloped world.

So those who agree with this approach, or worse stay silent, are progressives who are in reality procolonialism. No matter what one says, Gaddafi was pan African and pan Arab and desired such to make all of Africa independent from the West.

Now the President also dropped that he wanted to continue his Libya model in other places. For in the Obama worldview, whether military force will be used anywhere, is for the president alone to decide. In the speech he noted “America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocation not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future.” First how can a Nobel peace prize winner that has used drones to kills thousands of women and children in Yemen, Afghanistan,Pakistan, and Somalia know anything about conscience, when by practices his foreign policy is to escalate aggression without invite whenever he feels, or needs to buttress his approval rating? As he said in the same speech, we know this is already the case given he said [The] “United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interest demand it.”

Obama’s foreignpolicy beliefs are clear. He said “The issue of transparency is directly relevant to a third aspect of American leadership: our efforts to strengthen and enforce international order.” This is how he perceives his role as commander in chief. Foreign policy is basically using counter-terrorism to stunt the economic growth of other nations and deepen their citizenry into poverty while making U.S. plutocrats even wealthier. He has established a large covert presence in North Africa in total secrecy (transparency), away from democratic debate, and without any Congressional approval or oversight. This is what he means by transparency.

Moreover, Obama has expanded drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. In simple terms has continued the practice and policy of the Bush administration with respect to foreign policy. He has invaded more countries and violated just as many if not more human rights and issues of state sovereignty that George W. Bush ever did. Ironically while asserting and pointing the finger toward Iran, China and Russia which I assume is a replacement for Bush’s “Axis of Evil” he described and referenced so frequently.

In sum, Obama uses military force whenever he wants, wherever he wants, and without anyone's permission. He ignores as Lincoln wrote, "The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.” Obama's ongoing use of military force in multiple countries ensures that the posture of the US for the foreseeable future will continue to be one of endless war. This my friend, is the Obama doctrine in a nutshell.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calls for 'limits on First Amendment rights'

2014-05-27T14:00:00.001-04:00

The Age of Phony Compassion and Fake Hash tag Celebrity Activism

2014-05-22T15:07:00.002-04:00

Over the past few weeks, many have been in an uproar over the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian school girls in Borno State Nigeria. They were taken from their school as the slept and huddled off in trucks to places in the Sambisa forest outside of Maiduguri and possibly beyond. Albeit nearly three weeks after the actual crime occurred, the concern is needed and well deserved. But somehow, I feel that the interest is fake and phony and I will tell you why.

When I was a child, growing up in Memphis in 1960’s, activism was real, tangible and hands on. This type of activism in the age of social media and remote control sedentary decadence is rare mainly because the modern western influenced psyche assumes that action is limited to what one can accomplish with a keystroke or the push of a button. It allows one to be reticent and hidden in their personal urgency to acknowledge and even confront evil in any form or manifestation it may engender.

The #bringbackourgirls is just the recent example of this artificially contrived concern for a criminal act that in all honesty, many did not care about either through ignorance and not being informed or because it did not gain traction until some famous person they idolized brought it to their attention. Consequently making it retro chic to be concerned and to care and thus promote the hash tag. Otherwise there would have been a concern for all the past ill and crimes committed by the Islamist organization Boko Haram. But the record and fact exhibits and documents such was not the case.

There was no #dontburnourboys hash tag when just this year in February, the same Islamist attacked a boarding school in Potiskum, Nigeria in the northeast of the nation that resulted in the killing 29 students and one teacher. All of which were burned alive. Likewise, there was no #stopkillingourchildren when Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau and his band of militants opened fire on students in their sleep at a secondary school in Nigeria's troubled northeastern Yobe state, or when they set fire to a locked dormitory in Damaturu, Nigeria and then shot and slit the throats of students who tried to escape through windows during a pre-dawn attack in which 58 students were killed. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the attack in June in the village of Mamudo which left 22 students dead. In all of the above attacks, all of the dead were teenage boys or young men between 10 and 18 years old.

Now again, the attention pertaining to the girls is deserved, but why was their no attention to the aforementioned attacks on students the same age? Was it because they were males, was it because they were burned alive and had their throats slit which may be less appealing for attention than kidnapped children? I cannot answer any of the prior queries but I can assert that something is amiss. Either in the west we feel more attached to women in need more so than boys or men in need, or either we are stupid creatures of the moment caught up and motivated by celebrity trends of the day and actually do not really care what happens in faraway places like Nigeria, regardless of religious affiliation or gender.

Now before you say I am making excuses, missing the point or just “hating”, I must add that I lived in Nigeria for more than a year when I was doing my post doc. Moreover, although I lived in Owerri in Imo state and Lagos more than half of my time there, I have been to and worked outside in the LGAs around Maiduguri and the Sambisa Forrest where I did onchocerciasis eradication (river blindness). It was so thick we had to park our land cruisers and walk miles to our target LGAs. Not to mention I have worked and stayed in Calabar, Jos, Kano, Benin, Kaduna, Onitsha, Afkipo, Afikpo South, Port Harcourt, Ngor Opala and too many other places in Nigeria to name. So for me it is personal. I know about Boko Haram and personally, they are just like Uganda's cult-like Lord's Resistance Army with the only difference that the latter is Christian. And while Boko Haram has repeatedly targeted Christian institutions such as churches, most people killed in attacks have been Muslims. I understand that Boko Haram was created in 2002 by a radical Islamist cleric in Maiduguri, Borno state, after he was expelled from two mosques in Maiduguri by Muslim clerics for propagating his radical views.

So to me, the attention is well deserved, but to be honest we must admit that it is fake and phony. If such were not the case, we would have hash tags for this week’s bombing that killed 130 people, or the bombing the following day that killed scores more – but we did not. Just like we don’t care, don’t know, and don’t want to know about what is going on in the Central African Republic where Christians are chopping up and beheading and even eating Muslims left and right.

I won’t say that we don’t care (black people) because the victims are black, but I will say for most in the west, there may be some sort of shame and guilt over Rwanda’s genocide, or the exploitation of child soldiers in Uganda and the killings in Darfur, Sudan; for we know the record indicates conservatively speaking, since 1996, 6 million Congolese have been killed. And in all of these cases we know that our President, who looks like us black folk, has turned a blind eye to Africa. First when he waived the ban on sending military aid to nations that use children as soldiers in 2013, and specifically with respect to Nigeria, when the Obama Administration, after John Kerry took over as Secretary of State, the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, Terence P. McCulley, accused the Nigerian government of “butchery during a confrontation with Boko Haram terrorists in Baga, on the shores of Lake Chad, and in May 2013 threatened to withdraw U.S. military aid from the West African nation.”

So the way II see it, I am glad of the attention, yet at the same time I know it is fake and phoney and comes with barely an iota of concern and compassion. But such is the standard in this new world of hash tag diplomacy and celebrity activism and a sad standard it is indeed.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: The Affordable Healthcare Act

2014-05-21T12:11:00.002-04:00

I have openly stated for the record that if one desires to explore how the Federal Government operates in the function of health care administrator, just look at the Veterans Administration Hospital Services – where the average wait time to see a physician is five months. In all sincerity, this is how, based on observation and past history, I perceive Obamacare will be implemented and administered. However, I will say, regardless of political affiliation, one must wait and see if the Affordable Care Act actually accomplishes and does what it was indicated to do when initially proposed by and signed into law by the President.

It was first hard to understand why any legislature would vote for a bill that none had ever read, to have any comprehension of all the mandates, subsides and regulations entangled in large sums of paper that represented the law itself. However, it is possible to evaluate its eventual effectiveness – namely by determining if it actually meets its objectives of reducing health care cost, provide health care coverage for all and lastly, if you can actually do what the President stated: keep your physicians or policy if you like them.

The last is a given so I won’t spend too much effort on that. However, the first, reducing cost is the main concern. It should be clear that in order to reduce health care cost, one must know how much health care service are in dollar terms. This is something that varies by hospital to hospital and specialty to specialty as research notes. For example, the Washington Post reported that the cost for a patient on a ventilator at one hospital was $115,000 and $53,000 at another and $30,000 at yet another. Procedures for lower limb replacement in the same article ranged from $117,000 to $25,600. One example showed that inpatient cost for joint replacement in Oklahoma was $5,300 but $223,000 in Monterey, California. In NYC, cost for treating asthma varied 321% between two hospitals approximately 60 blocks apart. And I won’t even go into cost for aspirin, toilet paper and overnight stays in a hospital ward.

A social Marxist would say let us have one cost across the board, but such would not consider a surgeon with 20 years experiences and no clinical complications experienced by patients and a first year without any clinical experience (which would go against all the rules of rewarding expertise and competency).

The President often repeated that the ACA would reduce the cost of premiums by $2,500 for a family of four. However, using the same math the Administration employed, one scientist calculated it would increase premiums for a family of four by more than $7400 by 2222. When I did the formula, I came out with a similar figure closer to $7,900 per family of four (my model assumed that both head of household were not employed). The Manhattan Institute, although they did not disclose their method completely, predicted and increase of 41% which in any case is way more than $2,500. This was as of the end of last year and was an overall estimiate not giving any weighted effects for states like Georgia or Indiana where increases are estimated to be 198 and 72 percent accordingly.

New information shows that based on official filings by insurance companies in Virginia, that policy rate increases range between 3 to 17 percent for 2015, and are attributed to new cost associated with implementing the ACA as a function of being mandated to cover less healthy and previously folk that never had health insurance.

Although the President stated that this law would assist in providing coverage for folk who did not have health insurance. It is difficult for me how his administration came up with the number of people who did not have health care coverage since it fluctuates, similar too manner in knowing how many cares are owned by people versus the actually number that are drivable and on the road. Since this proposal was implemented during the start of our current and present recession, the Obama Administration goal of signing up 7 million really wasn’t too difficult since close to 40 million currently have no form of health coverage, inclusive of the botched roll out of the web site. To be completely honest, as the federal government, it is difficult for me to believe then even have a clue of how many uninsured folk in America, regardless of being either democrat or republican.

Although many promulgate that the subsides will help deal with these projected increases, in reality they will not hide the pain that certain folk will have for paying extra for others who cannot afford to pay for their policy or being required to pay for service they do not need. My mother for example, is 72 and still wonders why she has to pay for maternity coverage (when she can’t have children or why she has to, by law have prostate cancer coverage when she doesn’t have a prostate).

In summary, anyone who will say that the ACA is a failure or a success is not being honest or objective. All will have to wait for small and large business, which the president gave waivers, to sign up and see what other laws go in place or changes made to the ACA to complete the final product to evaluate it appropriately. What can be said that it will have a major impact on the U.S. Economy, since the government has taken control of approximately 30% of the U.S. GDP with its control of health care insurance and health care delivery? What we can say is that the ACA will definitely change how many small and large business hire and provide insurance coverage. What we can say is that the ACA will limit individual choice in healthcare and may even impact the growth of the health care delivery industry as a hole. Lastly, what we can say is that in time, all will feel the impact of ACA whether for the good, the bad or the ugly.

14 years of the same ISH

2014-05-10T14:25:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I feel as if I am in a bad dream, it is as if President Obama and President George W. Bush are one in the same, for the policies I was vehemently against while GWB was in office, I am still against and have been put in effect a lot more viscerally under Obama. What I saw with Bush: the incessant wars, taxbreaks for the wealthy, the banks and Wall Street getting wealthier without any threat of prosecution for criminal wrong doing and war mongering, I see two times in President Obama.

Bush did not place U.S. domestic issues as being our main priority, and nor does Obama. Bush was preoccupied with Iraq, and Afghanistan and Mr. Obama, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and now the Ukraine. Currently the latter is more like some dystopian Fourier reality, that for him is dynamic and fascinating, but for the majority of Americans, wasteful and unnecessary. It is as if the Ukraine and parcels of land 99 percent of Americans will never see or set foot upon, deserves more attention than the millions of Americans with major financial needs like the hungry, the homeless, or the millions who can’t pay their rent or mortgages or whom need jobs at living wages.

There is no valid reason to be occupied with the Ukraine when what we face at home is a true national security threat economically. Just this past week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen informed the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that under current policies the federal government’s deficits “will rise to unsustainable levels.” Unemployment, depressed wages and unadmitted inflation is killing us. We are over our head and drowning in deficit spending so all we left with is printing “mo money, mo money and mo money,” to use a phrase from “In Living Color.”

Why is the U.S. economy more of a national security issue than the Ukraine? First, at last count, about 5 trillion or approximately 47% of U.S. debt is owned by foreign investors, the largest being China and Japan at (plus $1.1 trillion each). Unlike us, the Russian government expects to have a budget surplus according to the IMF. Add to this, Russia also has a trade surplus which increased to $18.86 billion while the U.S. trade deficit continues to fall. If anything, maybe the U.S. wants a war so it can rev up its dire economic prospectus. For it is clear that what we observed when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, the same can be noted, applied and said for the Obama Administration – the economic and financial need of conflict with another energy rich nation.

Why else make a big fuss about nothing? Obama in his neoliberal caricature resembles Balzac’s master criminal Vautrin more than the leader of the free world as the U.S. has been coined. Big oil and Wall Street made a killing under Bush. The U.S. invasion of Iraq crushed that country, destroyed Iraq’s state-owned oil industry, and grew the price of crude from $20 a barrel to $147 a barrel in 2008 (needless to state Exxon Mobil’s most profitable year ever). The point being whenever sanctions are placed on an energy rich nation, U.S. plutocrats get paid. Obama is just extending the Bush playbook and we saw such in 2011 when sanctions were placed on Iran and Sudan. And when they don’t work, we have good ole NATO, who implemented an undeclared war on Libya, not to forget the CIA efforts in Syria. Thus, it doesn’t take a high school graduate to foresee the impact or likely impact the disruption of the flow of Russian energy to Europe would mean for big U.S. oil companies.

Obama and Bush are in policy, one and the same person, the only differences are gang, I mean political affiliation and ethnicity. The U.S. I suspect see the Ukraine as a means to grow and escalate military spending across Europe, making the U.S. military industrial complex more loot on behalf of U.S. oil interest. See, what corporate U.S.A and Wall Street know is that war drives capital into the United States, which keep U.S. banks the main feature of the global economy by cutting the deficit and artificially propping up the dollar. This is the only conclusion that is both reasonable and logical for as German MP Alexander Neu noted, “Not a single NATO country is in any way threatened,” by the actions in the Ukraine. Plus, what would we expect, there are more than 6000 German companiesactive in Russia with more than $27 billion invested in the nation. Meaning just like Iraq was no threat, or Libya, or Syria, Obama economic and foreign policy is no different than his predecessor with the exception it is on steroids.

Real Life Transformers: Check Out This Video of a Helicopter Transforming Into a Truck

2014-05-08T11:38:00.001-04:00

Fundamental Zealotry and other Nonsense

2014-05-07T11:02:00.003-04:00

I have come to the realization that the lack of the ability of the majority of citizens of these United States, in particular we African Americans, t think critically is intentional and have taken a turn for the worse. It like clear that the main reason for this is that the power that be know and accept that a lot of money is made when folk do not have the ability to think critically.

Over the past two weeks, two specific events have drawn me to conclude of such, as that distractions seem to garnish more attention than events and occurrences that actual merit our focus the most: the Donald Sterling Saga and the skit on Saturday Night Live written and performed by Leslie Jones.

Seems that the only thing we black folk get up in arms about is our skin color, confederate flags and the n-word. It as if we only have our antenna out to pick up what bigots say but can't see the forest for the trees. The issues that are destroying our community go unattended and are pushed back in our collective unconscious, in particular for this generation in which they believe that just because a politician is black and a democrat you can’t say anything wrong about the person policies, not the man I mind you but policies. If we were in tune to other issues, we would likely in the case of Sterling attend to his message about institutional racism in America and abroad, specifically alluded to by what he stated pertaining to the real manner in which Israel treat blacks and Africans. But no we do not. If we had our ears to the ground, we would attempt to address and discuss the bigger issue of how and why owners get public support through stadium subsidies & even antitrust exemptions in cities where the urban areas are mainly African American and Latinos, whom tax monies build the large stadium complexes but is not poured in the despondent and deplorable public education systems the vast majority of us send our kids too. No we don’t dare address such.

On the real, why are we concerned about multi-millionaires that play professional sports when the quality of life for most black men in America is mostly negative? It seems that the only place black men are over represented where they display a modicum of success are in the sport and entertainment industry, and frankly, I am frequently more offended by the lyrics of rappers like Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, 2 Chains, and Future than by what Donald Sterling said or Leslie Jones performed.

The truth is that all that is negative, pessimistic, gloomy and associated with failure is where we as black men are vastly and disproportionately over-represented. Nationwide we account for more than 50% us dropout rate and maintain the lowest college enrollment than any other group by ethnicity and gender in the nation. In Mississippi, Michigan, Louisiana, Indiana, Georgia,Florida, District of Columbia, California, Arkansas, Alabama and many other states 10% of less of black males in high school read above an eighth grade level.

Personally I think mass incarceration deserves more attention that a television comedy show or a NBA owner. Those who kill non-Latino whites are over three times more likely to be sentenced to die as those who kill African-Americans. The killer (no pun intended) is that for the same crimes, the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black.

Then there is the lucid observation that we as African American men are more likely to be unemployed, under employed, trapped in low wage jobs, have higher rates of job instability, lower wages, and extremely longer bouts with unemployment; which may account for why nearly 49 percent of black men are arrested for non-traffic offenses by the time they turn twenty-three.

I can’t comprehend why a whole bunch of us black folk more concerned and vocal about millionaire slaves and racist owners, or a comedian when, most of us are living from paycheck to paycheck, have suffered huge financial setbacks and are still scared about the future. The cold, hard truth is that we have one microscopic group of folk who have resources, are making loot and continue to enhance their financial position and a president that has increased their wealth. But we do not dare address this, specifically that the economic conditions of African Americans has gotten worse over the last five years more than any time in modern history.

None of this gets us mad, just old outdated bigots that allow us to show our support for political correctness and other cultural Marxist beliefs. Even Ebony magazine chimed in on this by unleashing their racist watch dog extraordinaire Jamila Lemieux on a comedy skit, on the same weekend in Chicago (Ebony’s own backyard) in which 4 people were killed and 24 others are injured in shootings. The same weekend in which Donnell Flora, 25, who uses a wheelchair took a bus to deliver a gun to his niece to shoot a 14 yr. old girl over a Facebook post over a boy. Then there is the fact that in Chicago, 92 percent of African American men are unemployed. But none of this was exciting enough, no racism involved, therefore again pushed deep back in the recesses of the black mind. Maybe they need to talk about the issues that would make folk write books with titles like “Food Stamp Bitches,” or why maternal deaths are on the rise among African American women in the United States, but I doubt it. Even going back to look at Richard Pryor’s slave sketch he did on his show when I was a teen in the 1970s, seems would upset black folk today, which makes me think his comedy would be viewed as inappropriate currently. But these same folk yell free speech when it is Beyoncé, Lil Boosie or some other subject-verb challenged miscreant.

As a community we rarely write about our deep issues and concerns like we once did, nor are we black writers interested in such, because to do so would mean looking at the mirror and accepting that a lot of our problems are not and cannot be singularly attributed to racism. How many of US would hold our kids to the standard of nothing less than a 95% being acceptable to bring home as a grade as Kwasi Enin parents did? Parents? How many of us will cut the TV off and sit with our kids and do homework and read to them instead of watching the Real Housewives of Atlanta? How many of us take our kids to the library weekly or even own library cards. Small things can and do make a difference.

Sometimes being distracted by thing we cannot change does our community more harm than good, by taking our attention from what we CAN address and deal with in our own backyard. Truth is, it was Abraham Lincoln who said and wrote: “Free them [black slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this" (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, p. 256). A man clearly who doesn’t or couldn’t deserve the right to own a NBA team in today's, world of intolerance and impracticality.

Holder Says People Need to be Brainwashed

2014-05-02T10:56:00.001-04:00

US China Japan Quandary

2014-05-02T10:52:00.005-04:00

As I write this, President Obama has ended his Asian tour (sounds rockstaresque). Although he was met by major protest nearly everywhere he went, from the Philippines where protestors were sprayed with water hoses to Malaysia, his main worry continues to be how to deal with Japan, an ally but at the same time not offend one of America’s largest holder of U.S. debt – China.

In word, President Obama stated that the US Japan alliance was "stronger than ever" adding in so many words that America opposes any efforts (by China) to undermine Japan’s administration of the disputed and uninhabited Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea (note East China not East Japan). By taking this position, The President basically questioned China's sovereignty and “legitimate interest," to use the words of foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang, in the Diaoyu Islands, which they feel have nothing to do the Japan-US security treaty. Also, there remains the effort of the U.S. to implement Obamas GATT and NAFTA, the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which excludes China.

Some may argue otherwise, but it should be remembered that since the fall of japan after WW 2, it was clear that a primary objective of the occupation of Japan would be U.S. military control in the region for decades to come albeit not originally outlined in the Potsdam Declaration as such. This was achieved when General Douglas MacArthur, along with a few staff WROTE the entire new constitution of Japan that has lasted ever since. Specifically via But the most unique and one of the most important provisions came in Article 9, which outlawed the creation of armed forces and the right to make war.

This is a difficult prospectus for the U.S. while mainstream media incessantly pounds that China is faltering economically, the question is compared to whom? Not the U.S. for certain. First, U.S. bureaucrats insist that the Chinese economy is in deep trouble, although the Chinese economy grewat 7.4% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2014. In particular when compared with the miniscule expanded 0.10 percent growth in the U.S. Gross DomesticProduct (GDP) observed in the first quarter of 2014 over the previous quarter. And loot will continue to flow in to China given the global demand for copper, soybeans and multiple investments and trade arrangements between China and South America. China has a large hand and equal investment in Copper in both Chile and Peru and Iron in Brazil as well as sustainable energy development in Venezuela. Plus one must recognize the long standing relationship China and Trinidad have in the Caribbean. The reality is that South America now imports more from China than it does from the European Union, according to the U.N. economic agency for the region.

Then there is the issue with China and Russia , which appear to be making moves toward quitting using (diversifying) the US dollar or at least significantly cutting the dollar share in their forex reserves (a move that will most likely broaden the Yuan’s daily trading range). Add to this that from of January 2013 to the end of July, the Bank of Russia reduced its stockpile of US Treasury securities from USD 164.4 billion to USD 131.6 billion (a reduction of US Treasury obligations by USD 32.8 billion, or by 20 percent), there are some serious issues on the table for the administration to address and not just give window dressing.

Even more important is that the military containment of China for the U.S. is the main reason this administration has proffered unequivocal support for Japan, although they are well aware that such may have a dire impact and strain on the U.S. economy. Specifically, speaking, if China desires to retaliate, in concert with Russia and other BRIC nations, the result could led to starting the demise of the dollar – meaning the American way of living will be severely impacted as a consequence with growing levels of inflation in the form of increases in the cost of food, clothing and gasoline and utilities.

It should be reminded, give the manner in which the U.S. has targeted Russia for what has occurred in the Ukraine, and leaving China out of the TPP talks, what we observe as closer interaction between Beijing and Moscow are really about protecting their domestic economies. But it is not farfetched to see that is they continue this close corporate, an outcome of bad and poorly thought-out U.S. foreign policy could be a direct challenge and attack on the dollar.

The U.S. concerns in China will prove to be challenging for the present administration. For one they are all over the place in policy and tend to reflect a moderately satirical ineptness to the goals and aims of their foreign policy efforts. On the other, I am still waiting (as I suspect others) for Mr. Obama to define what he means by “rebalancing” U.S. policy towards Asia, when his actions show opposite and even worse, the same old U.S. approach. By this I mean the neocolonial zeal reflected in President Obama’s desire to re-occupy the Philippines consequently continuing the United States historical imperialist agenda in Asia.

China has the second largest economy in the world and recently it has been project to pass the U.S, before the next year, with some economist suggesting that the size of the Chinese economy will become three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040. The concern is that much of the U.S. dollar’s valuation stems from its lock on the oil industry and if China and Russia and the BRIC nations can accomplish this, next thing is the dollar is gone and gold will rise. As I write and you read, Iran is already in the field trying out a non-dollar based international trade system.

It will be hard for Obama to both keep from upsetting China and at the same time appease Japan, as current news reports in the region have noted. It is the administration desire to maintain U.S. military hegemony in both Malaysiaand Philippines, by making sure neither nation ever reach the strength militarily equal to Vietnam, as well as do all possible to prevent China from reaching parity with the U.S as a naval power that could eventually challenge American in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. The obstacle is, has the Obama administration really thought about what their actions may result in, or are they just making it up as they go like they were in a game of pick-up and run?

June 1914 or June 2014?

2014-04-28T10:48:00.000-04:00

In a few months it will be the summer of 2014. As such it is difficult for me not to project infinite possibilities reduced to a singular historical event - the start of World War I in 1914. See, up to the actual start of the First World War, folk were completely oblivious to how dramatic a pace things would change, and it makes me wonder if the same type of reticent ease evinced by most Americans will be abruptly ended this summer given the tensions between the EU, USA and Russia.

Now I am not saying all is exactly the same, true, different times and different events, but some of the parallels are notably similar. Now albeit in this age of sound bites, in which the TV pundits tend to accept that the cause of WW1 was singularly due to the assassination of the presumed Austro-Hungarian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a group of Bosnian Serbs from the revolutionary movement called Mlada Bosna (‘Young Bosnia’) while he and his wife were visiting Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, personally, I consider several other factors that were responsible for the war that just happened to culminate in the aforementioned event. In fact, I would even venture to say that this was just an excuse for the Austria-Hungary alliance to declare war on its neighbor in an attempt to eliminate what they perceived and completely contrived to be a ‘Serbian threat.”

Now these other events, remind me strangely of what is occurring in the Ukraine in concert with the EU, Russia and the U.S. First, there was the Franco-Prussia war of 1870 to 1871 which saw France take a beat down leading to them having to pay Germany a lot of loot as a consequence which assisted in the creation of a powerful German Empire with a military and industrial complex to match which Europe understood would severely disrupt the balance of power on the continent. Similar in the manner in which the so-called actions of Russia have caused within the contextual arrangements via the Crimea and Ukraine. Notwithstanding the same locution present suggesting the predisposition of NATO towards Russia emergence after the demise of the U.S.S.R., that borders more on emotive perspectives than rational reality - the type of responses that frequently lead to, instead of squashing, motives directed toward civil and even worse, international wars.

In addition, two other events, TheMoroccan Crises (inclusive of both the Tangler Crisis of 1905-1906 and the Agadir Crisis of 1911) and the formation of the Balkan League (a military alliance against the Ottoman Empire in 1912, between Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria) were just as responsible. With respect to the first, what is on the historical record is that the events in Morocco almost brought the European heavy weights to war because they were orchestrated by the Germans to drive a wedge between France and Britain, but instead enhanced British hostility towards Germany. Likewise the manner in which the EU and President Obama has accepted the legitimacy of the government in Kiev (which was funded by Western Governments), as being legitimate without elections, supporting one popular rebellion but not recognizing similar popular rebellions in Crimea and in the Eastern Ukraine.

The second, was implemented by the Austria-Hungary alliance and resulted in removing the possessions of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and divided these territory among them, resulting in Bulgaria turning against Serbia and Greece - their former allies. Eventually the Bulgarians were defeated and forced to give up their claims in Macedonia, shocking the European heavy weights (inclusive of Russian allies of France and Great Britain), but in particular the Austria-Hungary Alliance that vehemently was against a strong Serbian state. This, in the same manner in which the west is against a more powerful growing Russian expansion in Eurasia proper today.

Just like the US and EU sees Russia today, Vienna saw Serbia both as a rival in the Balkans and as a direct threat because it feared that its Balkan neighbors may become the core of a future South-Slavic state (wasn’t happening but this is the fear promulgated by the west today concerning the Balkans). The Balkan Wars made Austro-Hungarian neo-cons even more determined to take concrete action to prevent further strengthening of Serbia.

I say this because what is clear is the fact that the Ukraine is not a member of NATO, has been a thorn in the side of both U.S. and EU developing objectives that would authorize the concerns of the Eastern Ukraine’s and others that lean toward Russia in the Ukraine, for NATO to respond militarily to these recent events albeit not warranted. I wrote about this a few weeks ago but since then, Obama is adding gas t the fire. Then there is the empty token of "I mean business by sending 150 troops to Poland, and getting the Romanian Army to move it's troops t the Russian border and the Ukrainian Army surrounding a city of 300,000 in the east.

It seems that it doesn’t require a degree in History to see that the same way Germany wanted a preventive war against Russia and France years before WW1, The EU and the US desires a war (preventative or not) for similar reasons, mainly economic.

With all of these bailouts of European nations over and over again, adding more and more debt to national coffers, if history is any indication, war is and obvious consequence. First because it is the best way for a government to take people’s attention from horrendous economic conditions they are mired in and two, war is always the outcome when there is no global economic recovery. And right now, the world is smack dab in the middle of a global currency war: one in which everyone from Brazil to China is devaluing their currencies in an attempt boost exports and GDP. And again, the last time we saw this happened, the result was WW 2. Why, because our Federal Government and plutocratic elite need wars to take some of the pressure off from our growing debt and exorbitant federal spending.

Currency wars lead to trade wars, which lead to rising inflation and global economic uncertainty and it is a well-known fact that the U.S. government considers economic threats as a basis for going to war. This is why Gaddafi was murdered, because he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to Saddam because he was moving away from the U.S. dominated petro dollar. And as we speak, bilateral currency swaps are on the increase in and no less than 23 nations are moving away from the dollar to Renminbi: what is in the work is that nations are trying to move the dollar completely out, and use Yuan mainly oil and gold trading. This is a no-no from the U.S. perspective and supports the contention that for us, wars have been able to do one thing from the West’s perspective - bring all countries under the umbrella of Western Central Banking.

Supposedly, the Geneva accord between Russia, Ukraine, the US and EU was supposed to make ALL groups to surrender weapons and leave official buildings. But this did not happen. As it stands, tensions in the Donetsk region, are ramping up, especially in the city of Sloviansk – where the entire city (300,000) is occupied by pro-Russian separatist. They say that as the People's Republic of Donetsk, they are just reacting to military operations launched by the Ukrainian army on Slavyansk. Then there is the small little something-something that the Ukraine energy firm Naftogaz has been asked to pay Russia Gazprom $11 billion for gas already used but unpaid for.

Bush, as Obama today, are just as war-like as Wilhelm II was in Germany when he ascended to the throne in 1888. Likewise, they are just as protective of U.S. banking interest and as such, the way I figure, there are a lot of similarities historically, albeit different names and places, between the past 100 years. Regardless, whether via incompetence or intentionally, the Obama Administration is escalating tensions in the Ukraine and surrounding region as well as with Russia. Fact is that Washington aided in the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian leader regardless of his character and presently is encouraging the new leaders in Kiev to all they can to keep the flames going, even violence

What The Government Could Do With That Location and Meta-Data

2014-04-22T10:30:00.000-04:00

Wifing Politicians: I don’t love these politicians (plutocrats)

2014-04-21T11:05:00.001-04:00

I am writing to satisfy one issue, and that is why do folk take up for these political plutocrats regardless of political affiliation? It is as if folk cannot see they are all in the same gang of scratch my back crony-capitalist crooks. And for those unaware, crony capitalism refers to the intercourse between the state and corporate power. These cats have two sets of laws, one for us common folk and one for the elite folk. This manifested by two kinds of economic models of capitalism which breaks down to the over-regulated capitalism we have to abide by and the protected and unregulated variety for corporations, cartels and said participants.

Personally, as a libertarian, I unlike conservatives or liberals or progressives believe that part of the price of freedom is allowing others to have their freedom equally. Moreover, I believe whether I agree or like or dislike something, if it is peaceful and voluntary and harms no one, I can tolerate such. Unfortunately, this is not the game played by the ruling political elite regardless of party affiliation.

And even with all of the empirical evidence we observe, we allow these folk to play us like a fiddle, telling us things that do not even make sense yet many of us accept without question because we love our politicians. Love them so much we will let them lead us to poverty and a penal existence. So enthralled with them that we allow them, the federal government to give billions tax free in the form of TARP and even more via Quantitative Easing and all that so they can make loot in the markets at the cost of money that in theory should have gone to pay salaries of average employees.

The real concern is that in order to do this, we have to be complicit in our own death. To accomplish this, they make up stuff; I mean artificially contrive stuff as well as the proof to support the stuff they made up in an effort to communicate impending doom. Take Global warming for example (ironically newspeaked into climate change) or any environmental cause. This the strategy used by plutocratic political elite and it is grounded in their sense of “moral absolutism” that makes them feel that since they have money, money shouldn’t be an issue to you thus your value as being regular folk, only exist to make them believe “WE” need them to tell us what to do.

We can also look at the civil rights and black power movements as examples. What did these folks do then? Well we were it before global warming and the environment. First, they focus on inequality amongst various societal sub groups like African Americans and encourage us to act against these certain political targets. It was just a few weeks ago the democratic held an all-nightclimathon talking about global warming. This was 28 democratic senators all because some rich cat said he wanted to put $100 million behind politicians dealing with global warming. And we all know, including the money behind them, the politicians and the masses, that 60 percent in America think the economy is the most important issue to address and climate change next to the bottom, especially us black folk. Why, because climate change makes them wealthier.

In the early 1970s, Aaron Wildavsky, the former Dean of the Graduate School of Public Affairs at California Berkeley described their play book as being designed to “have middle class civil servants, hire upper class whites, to use lower class blacks” to stack the front line to complain against the political institution or policy (or lack of) at hand. And this minus-sum game as Wildavsky describes, often leaves African Americans worse off than we were before.

Take the recent election of Barack Obama. The change and hope mantra had folks wanting to tear the club up. But in 2014, what do we see? We see home sales going up for those with a price tag of $10 million plus, but not regular folk, especially if they are African Americans. Black Americans, Obama's most loyal supporters, are among the hardest hit by this uneven recovery.

The average price for a kilowatt-hour (KWH) of electricity hit a record of 13.5 cents in March based on data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: meaning it was up about 5.5 percent from 12.8 cents per KWH in March 2013. In March, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also shows that shrimp prices jumped 61 percent from a year earlier. Cost for pork items, especially bacon are also dramatically on the increase. Ironically the story line is due to a disease. The increases of cost in agricultural and beef products have been conveniently blamed on a drought (disease and drought equally environment).

All to make you think there are more things (the environment) which are more important than feeding your family, earning a living and maintaining a roof over your head (humans). Think about it PETA will tell you not to eat meat and that slaughtering cows is inhuman but they get their lot from VISA, who owns Omaha Steaks and got big loot in the Kentucky Derby (can’t make this ish up).

You might be a progressive, but you are not a progressive elite and you, if defined as such are not seeking the same goal as they are. The recession officially ended in June 2009, but we still are down 6 million jobs from pre-recession levels and now these cats got us believing that Obamacare and the economy are separate issues. But fact is that the new trend is not giving part-time workers company health coverage like Target, who will no longer offer health insurance to part time workers. Meaning, class, African Americans will be the hardest hit by this.

The disparity between rich and poor has blossomed since 2009 and the job participation rate is way worse, not to mention the average person has less money to spend and is taxed much more - all when our nation's debt is our greatest concern because WE paying the debt. And you know how I know we paying the debt? Because, more than 23 million American households rely on food stamps. Households operationally defined let us say as being four per household which equals 92 million Americans. And although more whites on welfare than blacks, we rely on it disproportionately more than whites.

This one reason why neither democrats nor republicans will ever simplify the tax code because this is the plutocratic politician’ main source of revenue (taking huge contributions (bribes) in exchange for tax breaks for the super-wealthy. They want inflation because the math proves that inflation (when prices go up) raises GDP subsequently making federal debt cheaper to service every year. But where we live and everywhere else, median household income is down 7% since 2000. And don’t forget if we removed the top 1% households from this equation, the decline for the bottom 99% would be more than closer to 30% (my math). Thus via the tax code and quantitative easing, the purchasing power we have is slowly being siphoned and swindled and given on purpose by our government to super rich folk, who in turn get to borrow money from the Fed at an interest rate of zero.

American politics is completely, owned, run and operated by the most powerful economic elite that politics and corporate America can proffer, which leaves out the democracy this republic was created on for the rest of us. Yawl, especially black progressives, needs to stop wifing these politicians. I mean if black folk regardless of political orientation put as much into protect, defending and believing in self and our communities as much as we wife these politicians, we wouldn’t have am problems. But we don’t, and now a majority of us believe and trust the government. When did we start to believe in and trust the government I ask again? Of all folk, African and Native Americans should never trust the government, especially the federal government. But that is just me, and unlike most, I don’t love these politicians.

The government is coming after you…even if you did nothing wrong

2014-04-17T10:15:00.002-04:00

It seems each day I am reminded of how poorly informed the average American is. This is especially true for the average African American, who speaks of politics through the jaundiced lens of faux progressivism and protecting our president and his political party no matter what they do. But for some reason, I think this is because as a community, things have changed. When I was growing up in Memphis during the city sanitation strikes, African Americans never trusted the government or politicians, even if they were black. I mean when someone like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. goes out of his way to threatened to accuse Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bayard Rustin of having a homosexual relationship, just to protect white racist democrats, unless the protest they had planned in 1960 at the Democratic Convention was cancelled, it is easy to see why such was the case and why the majority of us, traditionally never trusted democrats or republicans regardless of race.

Today, African Americans actually believe in and trust the government to do what is best albeit facts suggest otherwise. The stark reality is that things will only continue to get worse and we with our heads in the sand, will accept anything our political puppet masters tell us. Unfortunately, by the time we wake up, it may be too late and like everybody else, we will find out that the government is coming after us…even if we did nothing wrong.

Some may say this is an overstatement, but for the folk that do assert such, I suggest you read the Bill of Rights and the history of the French Revolution, as well as observe the parallels for themselves. The problem is that having a Mulatto President got black folk thinking it is all good. Just the presence and appearance of our swarthy-skinned President makes people think it is alright, making them accept without question, or even more problematic, not pay attention to the real world around them.

But if we would just look around, we would see that the gap between what the poorest make and what the wealthiest bring home has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. According to the current administration, we are in year five of the “economic recovery” yet we have no job creation in concert with many companies cutting their payrolls. Add to this the observation that U.S. food prices are up nearly 20 percent so far this year and steadily rising. To believe the words of any politician, in particular this administration about the economy is getting better borders on psychosis.

What did we get by awarding the current administration with 93 percent of the African American vote in 2012 and 95 percent among that group in 2008? Economically we are worse than we were in 2009 and our participation in the labor market has been steadily falling farther since that same year. Simple truth is that since his election, economic improvements have occurred for all other ethnic groups in America with the exception of blacks.

Now the next step is domination by police and military enforcement. Now "the most transparent administration in history" has just ordered U.S. Army to seize every Apache helicopter in use by the National Guard and prior to this, the U.S.Postal Service, EPA, IRS, NOAA, the Department of Education & 90 agencies, have been and are purchasing and storing BILLIONs of round of hollow point ammo and thousands of military rifles for domestic use only. Not to mention that recently, the administration convinced their plutocratic buddies in the cell phone market to agree to add a phone kill switch beginning in July 2015 which they say is about the rash of cell phone thefts but is really about is about disabling cell phone cameras to keep the free people from posting and sharing government abuse and violence to other via the internet. Maybe even worse is that the FBI just announced that they plan to have 52 million photos in its NGI Face Recognition Database by next year (everybody, not just criminals).

And if you want to see two examples of this, that have nothing to do with race, all we have to do is look at what happened with Miriam Carey and more recently with Nevada rancher Clive Bundy. The Carey story tells us one thing: that if you are a black woman, you cannot get scared with men in swat regalia in mass pull guns out on you when you are with your child. Doing so gets you murdered legally and the Whitehouse will cover for this murder, call all the news media and tell the world you was shooting at police, trying to attack the Capitol, was crazy and on major medication when in fact she had no gun, and the autopsy report, made public six months after she was shot dead revealed that the 34-year-old woman had no drugs in her system and was struck by five bullets from behind, two of which were in the head.

Clive Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management, whose Director was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former senior adviser and son (RoryReid), is being forced by the government to give up his land, or have his cattle killed until he does: land which his family has worked over 140 years. Why, because Reid’s sons represents a large Chinese energy company that wants to build on the land. Some say well both are wrong. I just disagree, if the government can say any land is federal, then they can even claim your land and home by asserting such, like they did this man here.

Fact remains, no matter where we look, we see the military training in public streets and preparing for martial law right in broad daylight, and we don’t say anything. Likewise we see Nationwide,Police assaulting and murdering innocent people with zero consequences, even when they are handcuffed in the back of cars .Why? Because we are silient, don’t want to rock the boat and say nothing about the administration of our current President even if it is true. They way things are today, policing in USA is roping in as many people as you can, see how many have guns or warrants, and then basically throw back the innocent ones. The problem is that they end up sweeping up a lot of innocent people and charging them with pointless crimes, fueled by a war on drugs that only results in the mass incarceration only the poor and people of color and more prisions. And each year, Obama’s Budget show federal prisons (not Education) is here he sallocates most of our tax dollars. For example, Obama’s FY 2014 Budget requests a total of $8.5 billion for federal prisons a 3.5 percent increase over the FY 2012 appropriated level.

We as a people and a nation need to be honest with ourselves. As it currently stand, we are immaterial and disposable. The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy run by plutocrats, inclusive of our present President. Ours now, due to our own ignorance, is a government dominated by the political influence of the elite and wealthy Americans for their benefit alone over what is best for ordinary citizens. Don’t sleep, what they did to Miriam Carey and are doing to Clive Bundy, has nothing to do with race and they will do it to you and I also.

It is Starting To Get As Real - Land Grabs, AGenda21, Eminent Domain

2014-04-11T13:49:00.003-04:00

Books Read Thus Far 2014

2014-04-10T10:24:00.001-04:00

Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War by Pepe Escobar
Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge by Pepe Escobar
Obama does Globalistan by Pepe Escobar
How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds by Paul Craig Roberts
The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy by Paul Craig Roberts
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis
No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad by Daniel S. Markey
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Mark Mazzetti
Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding by Husain Haqqani
The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics by Andrew Small
Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
German Colonialism: A Short History by Sebastian Conrad
The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor
The Negro In Illinois:The WPA Papers edited by Brian Dolinar
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi
Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan
The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind – and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healy
All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power by Nomi Prins
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey
Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis (Jacobin) by Benjamin Kunkel
To Catch A Thief by David Dodge
Death and Taxes by David Dodge
Bullets For The Bridegroom by David Dodge
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

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