Get your Rapture hats ready, kiddies! The sky is falling, and our wise gift of nuclear winter will propel us all into the loving arms of the all-knowing and all-everywhere G-d.

2007-11-10

gunshow wonders and Ron Paul-mania

Ron Paul supporters at gunshow

http://slashdot.org/~zogger/journal/187493

[ #187493 ]
Saturday November 10, @05:08PM
We went to the gunshow today, and the Ron Paul folks had a really decent end set of tables and were doing a good business giving away bumper stickers and flyers, etc, in bulk, encouraging people to turn around and redistribute. We got some. NO other candidate or political party was set up at the show, zero. Mostly young folks at the booth, one neogeezer like me, after I told them I cut my teeth working the goldwater campaign I was instant hero, got handshakes all around and high fives. Made me feel good.

Prices better than last time, despite the new or surplus ammo shortage, there was plenty of pro grade reloads available, and prices on hardware were fair. Lot of guys selling silver coins, too. I didn't have the scratch to spare for a new piece, but garnered some doo dads and some ammo I needed, and a coupla new knives, got one on my belt now, a real decent tanto style replica with paracord handle, only 10 bucks. There was a lot of exotic older pieces at the show, including some 1800s colt single actions and some ancient old derringers, one of them a slide open 4 shot, weirdest little gun I ever saw. Then your usual mass ar-15 family tables, every *possible* additional add on you can imagine, probably radar in there, who knows. Some look like straight out of a Hollywood science fiction movie. I'd say the armalite family has attained official cult status, maybe apple should make one....

    I was checking against some of my older investments, done darn good looking at the prices. What has completely disappeared is mil surplus ammo or cheaper stock old military rifles, saw zip of it other than odd boxes of some foreign steel cased stuff and a few mosin nagants and the odd enfield or springfield and of course your sks and ak variants (saw a real pretty valmet sporter AK, very nice work there). Only one M1 carbine at the whole show, saw a few original garands, both pricey (new is better deal now on them if you want a garand, like from springfield armory).

Thoughts on what should be at those shows as well, but you never see it. Alternate energy stuff, a nice booth with some solar panels and a wind charger setup on a tiny stubby tower would be neat. Radios, no good electronics dealers there for like freeplay windup stuff and various shortwaves or like FRS radios and so on. No "ruggedized" laptops or PDA action suitable for outdoor/survival/home backup during storms use. There's a few ideas for a second weekend business for someone there and not have to compete with the guy on either side of you at the tables, but still hitting a crowd that might be receptive to those sorts of articles.

6CDO Citi Crack Whack & Give Codi a Bone (-81kb)




http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/06/5054/

Citigroup: Too Big to Fail?

by William Greider

The fall of Citigroup is a resonant political event–akin to the Republican Party’s failure to win reform of Social Security–only this time the bell tolls for the Democratic Party. The creation of Citigroup as an all-purpose financial supermarket and too-big-to-fail banking marvel was very much the accomplishment of Clinton Democrats. They enacted the law in the late 1990s that authorized this megabank monstrosity, with coaching from Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and of course Sanford Weill, the creative genius who built Citi.

Now that this institution has slid into deep trouble and Rubin has been appointed emergency chairman to rescue it, Democrats inherit the stink.
.../...


  1. Arvy November 6th, 2007 1:25 pm

    “Reforming the deregulated financial system is another test for the new ‘New Democrats.’ I expect it will take them a while–maybe years–to face up to the implications.”

    Oh, for Pete’s sake. ‘New Democrats’ actually facing up to something?! Get real. So-called deregulation is just another word for the brand of ‘freedom and democracy’ (a.k.a ‘The American Way’ (TM) or unbridled ‘free market’ capitalism) that provides the sponsorhip for both parties and is promoted by them in turn, both at home and abroad.

    Here, courtesy of Mike Whitney ( http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney11062007.html ) is another way of expressing the reality of the situation:

    [quote]The real reason that the subprime swindle mushroomed into an economy-busting monster is that the markets are no longer policed by any agency that believes in intervention. The pervasive “free market” ideology rejects the notion of supervision or oversight, and as a result, the markets have become increasingly opaque and unresponsive to rules that may assure their continued credibility or even their ability to function properly.

    The “supply side” avatars of deregulation have transformed the world’s most vital and prosperous markets into a huckster’s shell-game. All regulatory accountability has vanished along with trillions of dollars in foreign investment. What’s left is a flea-market for dodgy loans, dubious over-leveraged equities and “securitized” Triple A-rated garbage.

    Let’s hear it for the Reagan Revolution.[/quote]

    Now, extrapolate that to the entirety of the system to which the US is inextricably wedded, politically as well as economically, and you may get some small glimpse into the underlying problems of that system. The chickens are coming home to roost — with a vengeance. Better hold on tight. You, unlike the ‘elite’ authors of the situation, are unlikely to find any safe haven to run to, and even they may be in for a few nasty surprises.

  2. Daniel David November 6th, 2007 1:41 pm

    If the Democrats “caused” this mess, as alleged by the author with Bill Clinton evidently signing bad legislation passed though his late-90’s Republican Congress, why didn’t the wiser Bush Republicans just fix it for us when they had both The White House and the Congress?

    The Democrats be stupid, weak, etc., etc., but if we now note that something like Glass-Steagal needs to be re-enacted (due to previous error) it will only be a strong majority of Democrats ever doing it. I mean, do you think Republicans are gonna do it?



  1. NewYorkDana November 6th, 2007 4:25 pm

    I agree with leobixby. We had a perfectly good banking system in place when there was a division between savings banks and commercial banks and what on earth was the purpose in letting banks sell investment instruments? I agree wholeheartedly with leobixby when he says “They have done absolutely NOTHING to make anyone’s life any better, except for the 5% they serve.”

  2. kloro November 6th, 2007 4:32 pm

    when will greider and other authors get it that publishing on paper only is old stuff.



  1. Atexan November 6th, 2007 5:24 pm

    To neumonk,

    Now there is no difference what so ever between the Domocrats and Republicans. They act as duopoly. Both of them are owned and controlled
    by big business/Money.
    Daniel David is nothing but a huckster and a shill for the Democratic party. No matter what is the subject of discussing is, he alway buds in and praises the Democrats?? Sound like a broken record.

  2. blueticket70 November 6th, 2007 5:42 pm

    Skippyagogo, “too big to fail” is a phrase that originated, as far as I know, in the softening-up P.R. period before the taxpayer-funded 1970s Chrysler bailout. The hook was that letting such a huge business fail because of its own mismanagement would unfairly punish thousands of families (as if that were the government’s, let alone Chrysler’s, main concern.)




  1. cruxpuppy November 6th, 2007 7:13 pm

    Mike Whitney has been calling it right along because he understands the simple truth in the esoteric complexity of proliferating new “financial instruments” that Alan Greenspan encouraged….

    ……the financial wizards were not content to get their stuff exploiting the public in the traditional way, there was real money to be made in conning each other.

    You’re a Citibank red suspenders guy who dreams of financial perpetual motion machines, so you create a new class of borrowers by cultivating fields considered fallow back in the days of regulation, the fields of bad risk credit that began to seem miraculously fertile after deregulation. You sell the American dreamers ARMs and other scams. (Greenspan described this as a species of altruism, ie, giving everyone a chance to own a home) Then you take this funky paper and you mix it together with other mortgage debt that doesn’t smell so bad and you label it a “collateralized debt obligation” or CDO.

    You have created a new “instrument”, a “security”, almost as good as a municipal bond, you say, only really sexy. You market these CDO’s to the members of your own class, the only ones who might have some understanding of the nature of the new instrument.

    No one really understood it, of course, least of all Mr. red suspenders MBA, because the money mania is an irrational exuberance based on the “new physics” of the deregulated free market.

    The great maestro, King Lizard himself, speaking ex cathedra before a fawning congress, bestowed his blessing and the entire suspendered class breathed a sigh of relief. If the Greenspan understood it and pronounced it good, then put the peddle to the metal and multiply those CDO’s!

    Meanwhile, Rosie Menendez, who was convinced she would win the lottery by the time her ARM would reset from $600/month to $1200/month, had to move in with her cousin when she did not win the lottery and lost her 3 bdrm house.

    By now, it is becoming apparent to Citibank and the suspendered class that finance is not a world unto itself, that money is just a daydream if it is not linked to genuine productive activity, ie, Rosie Menendez serving you your burger and fries. Money does not actually make money, it never did and never will.

    That is the bullshit the suspendered class mistakes for nourishment, always has and always will until some one shuts down their casino of lies.

    That won’t happen. Greider won’t admit we’ve come to the end of days. He thinks reform when only revolution will suffice.

    He thinks Rosie Menendez and her ilk will bail out the suspendered class because Citibank is too big to fail. Congress will try, but the dollar won’t carry the load. The fact is Citibank is too big to survive. Citibank is the problem. It should be symbolically interred next to Milton Friedman.

  2. PrestonDigitator November 6th, 2007 7:40 pm

    The really BIG story in market news today is that the monolines are officially in total melt down. The monolines insure banks against defaults on all those CDO’s and other derivitives plays and is a TRILLION DOLLAR nightmare. This is a direct link to the take-down of even the municipal bond sector. This is a breach of 3rd line defenses and the best (Worst) indicator yet of the magnitude of the US AND GLOBAL economic melt down.
    I’d also like to take this opportunity to officially announce that: Allen Greenspan is the Paraclete of MAMMON*ography.


  3. PrestonDigitator November 6th, 2007 8:23 pm

    .../.... Then you may, (or may not) hear about the megolithically sacrosanct*est of them all, Mellon bank of New York, with it’s 20 trillion dollar asset line being attack as if by Parana.

  4. PrestonDigitator November 6th, 2007 8:39 pm

    One exception to J.P. Morgan Chase’s doomed future is this: J.P. Morgan Chase controls the gold market. Today, the value of one ounce of gold hit $850. If you, some day soon, see that the gold market has, for some trumped-up reason, just taken a big, out-of-the-blue hit, loosing say 2 to 2.5%, you’ll know that J.P. has just “skimmed” that market and retired that corresponding amount of debt off of it’s derivitives losses. just watch!!!!

  5. cruxpuppy November 6th, 2007 9:35 pm

    And isn’t it funny, Preston Digitator, that it was JP Morgan, iconic facsimile of the incorporation of the US, who with his cronies, engineered the Federal Reserve, and that this Frankenstein has turned on its creator by manipulating this global economic debacle into being? It’s ironic. These fools never seem to consider that self-interest and the common good are actually one and the same and that the survival of the fittest depends upon the survival of the weakest, otherwise who will the fittest have for lunch?

    Do you really think JP Morgan Chase has enough gold to cover its losses?

    Personally, I think these mavens are quietly planning a switch to the Amero. They wrecked the dollar and are set to kick it aside onto the ash heap of history. There ain’t going to be no stinking reform! When the national casinos go bust, go global!


  6. AlexLawyer November 6th, 2007 9:58 pm

    Not to worry. Bob Rubin will show up on Hillary Clinton’s doorstep, hat in hand and political contributions at the ready, and a bailout will be orchestrated. It’s all being choreographed now.

  7. PrestonDigitator November 6th, 2007 10:15 pm

    All good points CP. The biblical line about “what so ever you do to the least of these” has never seemed more prescient than today and in regards to this terribly flawed gaggle of auspicious buffoons. Do these mega-banks really believe (especially at this stage of the melt-down) that hiding their losses will stop the implosion in its tracks???That’s one thing that has always fed my sardonic distain for any and all official-dum(b), and that is when they go to such juvenile lengths to cover their incompetence and just add to the consequences in every way, especially in magnifying their stupidity and woeful failure to achieve even a modicum of maturity……wtf, is that one of the qualifications for “my service to the Public”? The idea of the Amero is intriguing, but I don’t think this is all part of that grand-wizzards-behind the curtain scheme….not at this time. It may have been planned as the end game if the house of crap economy had held together to it’s planned conclusion….for credibly hoisting the US to Empire status by such masterful economic brilliance. But alas, when we have technicians trying to pass themselves off as true craftsmen of world fiscal policy….you get a mountain of smoldering dung….and that will be the way the rest of the world accords us now….and rightfully so. This should doom any further delusions of Empiric grandeur for ohhhh, say 3 generations……if anyone is still around.

  8. cruxpuppy November 6th, 2007 10:51 pm

    I dunno, Preston D, the Europeans got to the euro because they were sick of nationalism and wanted to compete, but we may get to the amero because we have to and expand our national identity by devouring weaker neighbors in the process. The US is itself too big to fail and the worthless dollar is supported internationally by virtue of that fact. If it can no longer dollarize ME oil, it can amerize Canadian and Mexican oil, of which there is a sufficiency. It is not so much the vain grandiosity of “true craftsmen of world fiscal policy” as it is the ad hoc decisions of a powerful thug. Rome lasted quite some time with powerful thugs at the helm making it up as they went along… It is not beautiful thoughts ringing with the pure tones of reason, but ugly deeds that put thuggery on center stage…the amero is not quantum physics…Al Capone would have understood it perfectly.




  9. PrestonDigitator November 6th, 2007 11:14 pm

    DanielDavid, you asked “and who would be willing to possibly do it.?”

    I truly believe Kucinich is the only candidate that can pull the world out of it’s pending doom. I truly believe that his grasp and respect for the constitution and it’s inherent demands to run this country by upholding the law…..THE PEOPLES LAW, is seriously our last chance at correction. He’s no superman in any respect…… he just happened to latch onto, and inculcate the validity of what is the essential core of what makes America, America…..no mystery, no magic, no need for slight of hand, smoke, mirrors, deception…..just simply UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION. In so doing, he is comfortable with any and all contingencies, feel no threat, no intimidation, no delusions, and can easily project that comfort in his convictions. What does it say about how far we, as a nation have strayed from what made us who we are, when the only guy who truly GETS IT, is treated as an outsider??????



  1. simonhhh November 7th, 2007 11:11 am

    PrestonDigitator November 6th, 2007 7:40 “…monolines are officially in total melt down. The monolines insure banks against defaults on all those CDO’s and other derivatives plays and is a TRILLION DOLLAR nightmare…”

    Actually, a 471 trillion dollar nightmare..the real size of the world financial derivatives market…mostly unhedged and exposed either way long or short…Warren Buffet and Addison Wiggin have been warning about this explosive cocktail for years…

    With the US dollar in the toilet, Gold at $840 and Oil bumping it’s head on $100 all bad nasty little Economic Policies [SIC] of Bu$hco and his merry band on incompetents are COMING HOME TO ROOST BIG TIME…

    PS: One clue to this disaster; War expenditures are ultimately destructive to any economy in the LONG TERM..something Bu$h failed to study, understand or comprehend at university….Perhaps he was too busy getting pissed up and drugged out…

  2. PrestonDigitator November 7th, 2007 5:04 pm

    All good input mat,jxh,&simon, Hey didn’t any of yoz guyz like that title,”Paraclete of MAMMON*ography’? I had to sit on that for 36 hours, burning a whole in my pocket, before I had an applicable chance to use it. lol. Oh, and did you notice that Tuesday the market jumped up 137 points based on mostly bad fundamentals?? The market-wizard-behind-the-curtain always gets news 12 to 24 hours before we do, and jacks up the market, knowing that the next day, it’ll have to go down……it’s done so consistently that it’s become a given. gdbarnacles.

  3. RSJ November 8th, 2007 6:31 am

    Similar to the unsuccessful parasite that kills its host — as opposed to the successful parasite which works to help the host stay alive, thereby prolonging its own life — large international corporations have reached the point where they are a pernicious infection, a flesh-eating bacteria that is killing the greatest consumer market the world has ever seen, the United States. By failing repeatedly to help the host sustain financial health by exporting its jobs, poisoning its environment, devaluing its dollar, lowering its tax base, and selling unregulated nearly-useless investment instruments to its public, they are assuring an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions, one that will sweep most of them under in its wake.

    Some of the more giddy ‘free marketeers’ are pursuing this comic formula: Asia and the Pacific Rim nations will soon develop economically to the point where they can absorb the billions of dollars of electronic toys, luxury cars, light trucks, overpriced homes, and other pricey paraphernalia that are a hallmark of the modern American consumer. That’s just plain crazy. With even the highest-paid Indians and Chinese earning only about $30-40K per annum, versus their American cousins who were pulling down $70,000 to $100,000 for the same work, it’s going to be generations before those societies will be able to afford the lifestyle of the average middle-class American.

    In the meantime, the biggest losers in this game, aside from America and Europe, will be the large multi-national corporations who became so mindlessly aggressive in their lust for profits that they murdered their host.

    As I’ve posted on other threads at Common Dreams, the only ‘up’ side of the national economic collapse I’m convinced is coming before the next election — a depression worse than the 1930s — is that it will provide a strong antibiotic to rid us of the worst of the overgrown and unfriendly corporate parasites that have been leeching the life blood from our system. As in the 1930s, Congress will be forced to reimpose tight regulations on the corprocracy and the investment classes, if they want to stay in office — if they even hope to have a stable country to represent.

    In the aftermath, the only evidence of the existence of Citigroup and its ilk will be displayed in museums, right next to the Tyrannosaurus Rex bones, another voracious predator rendered extinct by a sudden change in the climate.

    “You market these CDO’s to the members of your own class, the only ones who might have some understanding of the nature of the new instrument.”

    Cruxpuppy, while I agree with most of your analysis, this point is not quite accurate; CDO’s and other similar shaky ‘high-yield’ investment paper were invented to be pitched to dentists in Dubuque, nurses in Wichita, retirees in Pompano Beach, and small business owners in Scottsdale, as well as to pension funds — people with get-rich-quick dollar signs in their eyes blocking their common sense. The Wall Street savvy wouldn’t touch this tainted stuff; it was hyped to bring in bucks from the gullible and not-well-informed small and mid-level investor, the Chuck Schwab-Etrade crowd. If you’ve seen the film “Boiler Room” you have an idea of what I mean.

    Arvy, thanks for the Mike Whitney link; as you say, he’s been prescient over the years and, if our government had any brains, rational thinkers such as Whitney would be making economic policy rather than wealthy ‘free market’ blowhards like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/06/5057/

The Western Appetite for Biofuels Is Causing Starvation in the Poor World
Developing nations are being pushed to grow crops for ethanol, rather than food - all thanks to political expediency

by George Monbiot




http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/06/5050/

Some War Protestors Jailed; Others Set Free

by Ryan Grim

As Desiree Fairooz sat with her Code Pink colleagues waiting for lawmakers and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to arrive for a recent House committee hearing, she had no plans, she said, to get arrested. “I already had a case pending.”

But she couldn’t resist the opportunity when Rice walked in nearly unguarded, and she rushed the Cabinet member with fake blood on her hands. As Fairooz was being hauled from the room, Capitol Police arrested two other women who’d been sitting near her but hadn’t done anything yet.

You can see a video of the October 24th event here.
The image “http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/1024_07_1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

One of the enduring images of Capitol Hill culture is the anguished protester being hustled by authorities out of a congressional hearing room, often hurling insults at scowling lawmakers as they leave. But this familiar scene is shrouded by a couple of Washington mysteries: What triggers an arrest? And what happens next when someone gets busted?

As it happens, there’s no simple answer to either question. Capitol Police say they give wide discretion to individual officers on whether an evicted protestor gets arrested.  [or their leg broken...etc / js zog]




2007-11-06

Behind the Facade of "(DELIBERATE) Incompetence"


"(DELIBERATE) Incompetence"  ( & the "Shock Doctrine" ) is the meta-theme of this decade.
NOLA proved it beyond death-defying stupidity.  The Foreknown* 9-11 was the big show.  The hoaxed butterfly ballot and hanging chads were the opening act. For seven years the theme of  "(DELIBERATE) Incompetence" has been the trademark of all major decisions.  Alberto Gonzales was the only guy that didn't get a promotion or award for it.
*(search "Lucky Larry Silverstein" about the WTC's $Billion asbestos liability)

Behind the Facade of Incompetence

It is clear that the US media moguls would have us believe that the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq was a sincere effort to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East, gone awry. But we must remember that everything associated with capitalism is about marketing: making the people believe that things and events are the opposite of what they really are, and creating artificial wants that neither benefit the individual nor society, while simultaneously embellishing corporate profits.

This understanding would have been equally evident in the mainstream media’s buildup to the war had we a less propagandized, better read, and more informed citizenry. Even the politically naïve should have known that Saddam Hussein’s threat to the US, so vividly hyped in the media, was pure marketing propaganda.

But the majority of the people bought it, and now we have no choice but to live with our purchase. Short of a major social upheaval, we are going to be in Iraq for a very long time, and the death toll will continue to rise, especially for the Iraqis—the unwilling recipients of our corporate benevolence delivered through carpet bombs, terror, and torture. For these are the undeniable legacy of our foreign policies, and the illegal, amoral, acquisition of property by blunt force trauma.

If we are to survive as a republic, we must appreciate that capitalism and its cousin, global corporatism—not Saddam Hussein, not Communism or Socialism, nor Islamic terrorists, are the greatest threats to democracy. Zionism and Christian fundamentalism, which attempt to provide the flimsy moral basis for our Middle East policy, also pose significant obstacles to world peace by denying justice to others and promoting ethnic cleansing.

It is beguiling that we have yet to learn this fundamental lesson, that we know so little about our own history, and the role that mass ignorance plays in determining the future.

The narcotic of state sponsored propaganda has a powerful and hypnotic effect on our collective senses, and it is rending asunder the fabric of what is supposed to be a free and civil society. We believe what we are told and accept what we are given, without demanding truth, justice or accountability.

It is imperative for the purveyors of war to maintain a cloak of secrecy and a façade of public support where, if the truth were known, none would exist. It is necessary to keep the truth concealed in order to throw the public off the scent of the corruption that is the guiding principle of corporate governance and plutocracy, fomented by morally bankrupt men and women; a system that causes irreparable harm and suffering to its innocent victims and then profits from the misery and suffering it inflicts.

These days it is popular to describe the events occurring in Iraq as the result of incompetence, mismanagement, miscalculation, and benevolent bungling; to characterize them as a well intentioned mistake on the road to freedom and democracy, rather than the moral abomination they are. What we have in Iraq is not the result of any of these phenomena. It is the intended consequence of cold calculation to bomb Iraq into submission, to thoroughly disorient its people, and to apply economic shock therapy before they can recognize what is being done to them.

The intent is to invade sovereign nations either militarily, economically, or both; and to force unbridled capitalism on them. This means, of course, that we must first overthrow the existing governments—many of them democracies, and replace them with ruthless dictatorships willing to betray their own people, and amenable to opening up their countries to corporate exploitation and privatization.

So called free market capitalism requires corrupt leadership on the receiving end that is willing to accept bribes while becoming a puppet to the US. This is how some of the must brutal regimes in the world came into power. Corporate America is always beating the drums of war in search of profits and ever increasing shares of the world’s markets. Enough is never enough—they want it all.

Aside from overthrowing popularly elected governments, the unspoken objective of mature capitalism, guided by the doctrine of economic shock therapy, is to turn once sovereign nations into totally deregulated corporate states, answerable to no one.

This objective will be accomplished by privatizing the nationalized infrastructure, inviting in foreign investors, removing tariffs that protect local business and cooperatives from predatory multinational corporations, and downsizing the workforce; by eliminating social spending, and removing all forms of corporate controls. In short, by conducting a fire sale of each nation’s stolen assets and auctioning them off at bargain basement prices to wealthy multinational investors.

The intent is to create an unfettered corporate state in which the market, driven solely by profit, is the final arbiter of all things; an Orwellian world in which human rights, labor laws, environmental protections, and social justice do not even exist, much less enter into market equations.

Aided by the World Bank and the IMF, we are rapidly arriving at a state of global corporate fascism—the free market reform of manic capitalism, greed on steroids; a horrible economic monster unleashed upon unsuspecting people the world over, masquerading as democracy and free trade. And it is occurring in blatant contradiction to everything that is free, decent, and fair; a monstrosity utterly devoid of humanity and empathy for those struggling to survive.

But behind the marketing façade of a beneficent capitalism that is more oxymoronic than real, the skeleton of Reaganism, free marketry, and trickle down economics is exposed for all to see. We are witnessing naked greed unleashed upon the world like a swarm of locusts the size of North America. The fabulously wealthy are realizing obscene profits, while the majority of the world’s people are forced into economic servitude, many of them living in abject poverty, scratching out a bleak existence on sweatshop wages under horrendous conditions.

Economic slavery and burdensome debt, not freedom and democracy, is what we are imposing upon Iraq, aided by the most powerful military in history and, all too often, with the blessings of an oblivious and propagandized citizenry. Aside from the fierce resistance to the occupation, the US is achieving all of its major objectives in Iraq.

Like flies circling piles of stinking excrement, the lords of unfettered capitalism are buzzing around the bloated corpse of what is left of the world. And they have no intentions of stopping at Iraq. Iran and Syria are waiting in the wings: war that will not end in our lifetime.

If the world were as enamored with capitalism as its adherents proclaim, there would be no need to masquerade it as anything other than what it is—economic self interest for the privileged, driven by insatiable greed, funded by the public treasure. There would be no need to impose it on the world through high tech militarism and occupation, preceded by elaborate propagandistic media blitzes and tricks. All people would seek it out, as they seek water to slake their thirst and nourishment for their bodies.

So we must ask ourselves: When has it ever been in the pubic interest to over feed the rich and starve the poor? When has it ever been in the public interest to destroy the earth for the sake of profits? When has it ever been in the public interest to promote war and injustice over peace and shared prosperity?

Just people everywhere must resist evil or run the risk of being complicit in it. Neutrality, indifference and apathy, are untenable responses to what is being done in our name. Somehow, we must awaken from this media induced cultural stupor. We must do so under the prying eyes of government and private security contractors who are protecting corporate investors from democracy, and from people like us. Each of us is being diminished just as the Declaration of Independence states: “harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Every citizen is faced with a simple choice: organize or perish. The storm clouds of World War Three are looming on the horizon. These are extraordinary times that demand something from every one of us.

Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Providence of geopolitical West Virginia. Read other articles by Charles, or visit Charles's website.



http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/11/behind-the-facade-of-incompetence/
  1. kikz said on November 4th, 2007  #

    to discern truth, one must be able to think rationally.

    the MSM is symptom, not cause.

    ij , you need to read.
    free online/in entirety
    j.t. gatto’s
    underground history of american education
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

    does more than an ample job of explaining the true scope/goal of the systemically designed class war/assault on reason America has currently engaged in for a very long time.

    snip from chap 8: Plato’s Guardians
    … As long as such a pump existed to spew limitless numbers of independent, self-reliant, resourceful, and ambitious minds onto the scene, who could predict what risk to capital might strike next? To minds capable of thinking cosmically like Carnegie’s, Rockefeller’s, Rothschild’s, Morgan’s, or Cecil Rhodes’, real scientific control of overproduction must rest ultimately on the power to constrain the production of intellect. Here was a task worthy of immortals. Coal provided capital to finance it.

    Through the dependence of the all on the few, an instrument of management and of elite association would be created far beyond anything ever seen in the past. This powerful promise was, however, fragilely balanced atop the need to homogenize the population and all its descendant generations.1 A mass production economy can neither be created nor sustained without a leveled population, one conditioned to mass habits, mass tastes, mass enthusiasms, predictable mass behaviors. The will of both maker and purchaser had to give way to the predestinated output of machinery with a one-track mind.

    Nothing posed a more formidable obstacle than the American family. Traditionally, a self-sufficient production unit for which the marketplace played only an incidental role, the American family grew and produced its own food, cooked and served it; made its own soap and clothing. And provided its own transportation, entertainment, health care, and old age assistance. It entered freely into cooperative associations with neighbors, not with corporations. If that way of life had continued successfully—as it has for the modern Amish—it would have spelled curtains for corporate society.



2007-11-04

Monopoly Media is Fascist Fodder

MONOPOLY Corporate Media NOT “left” or “right” issue – It’s a FASCIST fraud
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/65870/

Posted by: stryder on Oct 26, 2007

Do yourselves a favor and do search under “Operation Mockingbird” “Gatekeepers of the Left” and “alternative media censorship”.

While rogue Fox “News” is a transparent Fascist propaganda farce – the corporate media is hardly clean on any key issue facing America or the world at large. An easy example is a completely bogus “war on terror” that virtually every media outlet in America beat a drum for based on the ongoing cover-up at 9/11.

That includes Paul Krugman’s own NY Times.

Now we have a war of genocide by U.S. soldiers and private mercenaries from the Mid East to Eurasia murdering civilians (most women and children) for Big Oil petrodollars. Over a million killed at Iraq War alone by last count and more than 2 million homeless.

The excuse for the Iraq debacle was “faulty intelligence” and “incompetence” etc, by Washington and the entire media.

This is utter drivel.

There was no “faulty intelligence” nor “incompetence” when it came to the trillions in Big Oil and war spending at stake for propaganda foisted “war on terror” that is nothing more than a bloody fraud. Testimony from UNSCOM’s Scott Ritter, the Downing Street Memo and other sources well confirm this.

The same bloody fraud is at the dark heart of the entire monopoly corporate media machine at Fascist U.S.A.

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