The Wild Wild Left - Recommended Diaries

The Conquest and Theft of América, Pt. 13 ~ by Nezua

Diane G — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:55:32 GMT

Cross posted from The Unapologetic Mexican

ON JULY FIFTEEN OF 2008, Rhode Island Republican Governor Donald L. Carcieri signed an executive "Illegal Immigration Control Order" [pdf] into law. It begins with some storytelling.

WHEREAS, most Rhode Islanders and most Americans are descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world

Stop. Most are, true. And you know who aren't "descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world"?

Mexicans, for one. We are not "immigrants" on this land. We are Indians who have been invaded and occupied (just as Iraq has) by Imperialist Euro-forces, and who eventually blended with our greedy, self-justifying, resource-thirsting overlords by means of rape, occupation, an eventual perverse desire to blend and be like the rulers, and in time simply because we've all been living on the same land since then.

Not immigrants. Indians. People indigenous to the continent long before map lines were drawn by invading forces.

Farmers. Workers. Campesinos. For the longest time, we (this is how my nanita and abuelo made their living with my father) have been migrating farmers on this land, for thousands of years we have been quien lo trabajo esta tierra. And for all this time, we have been moving about with the seasons and the flow, just like rivers, just like pollen, just like water through the soil.

It was los perfumados with their WHEREAS clauses who blew in here with butchery and deception and greed and now want to tell stories about opportunity and ownership.

So let's get that clear.

WHEREAS, most Rhode Islanders and most Americans are descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world and Rhode Island continues to welcome new immigrants who legally seek the opportunities that the state, its economy, and its resources offer; and

WHEREAS law is a funny thing. I speak of it often. On one hand, we all refer to LAW as if it is some inviolable and sacred thing, but it's really not. Sure, at its best it protects all of us equally. In ideal, it should, and many practice it that way. But at worst, it's a control device for those in power, with money, usually white, and who dream up most of these laws that continue to justify conquest and oppression.

I appreciate how most of the nation is infuriated by Bush's crimes. And I appreciate that at least someone out there with the experience to say so thinks of George W Bush as a murderer. And I don't mean in the emotional and moral sense of the word, though these surely apply. But in the legal sense. (Of course this book has been witelisted. And yet, it has become a New York Times bestseller.) But you'll notice that in the same way Vincent Bugliosi's book has been whited out of our awareness, so acts the Mainstream Media forces in relation to the crimes that the USA government has undertaken in the last handful of years. Does it surprise you? From invasion to occupation to torture to (the probability of) Pat Tillman's murder to rapes at Halliburton, to torture and wiretapping and politicization of the US Attorney's office...it just goes on and on and on like a radio broadcast of sinister plots being played loudly in a stinking, overstuffed and vacant morgue. The very air rots, and it seems nobody with enough power cares to change it.

So what is "Law"? It is not enough to utter it and make me jump up in obeisance.

WHEREAS, Congress and the President have been unable to resolve the problem of illegal immigration, leaving the states to deal with the consequences of 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States,

It is disgusting to me that this "problem of illegal immigration" sits. Stalled. Unattended. People hurting, families destroyed. They just want to live, to eat, to dream, too. We want them on the other side of the fence, wallowing in poverty, only coming in through the back gate in single file to, as Bush has said, "Do the work nobody wants to do" and then "go home."

Go home.

Home.

Sadly, "home" is now too often detainment centers where human rights abuses and outright cruelty are hidden from our view. And the process that sends them there, so ICE and USGOVT can make cash from their detainment (hello taxpayer!) is hardly just.

That first interview, though, took three hours. The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from Guatemala? "I walked." What? "I walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river." We understood immediately how desperate his family's situation was. He crossed alone, met other immigrants, and hitched a truck ride to Dallas, then Postville, where he heard there was sure work. He slept in an apartment hallway with other immigrants until employed. He had scarcely been working a couple of months when he was arrested. Maybe he was lucky: another man who began that Monday had only been working for 20 minutes.
"I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be." His case and that of a million others could simply be solved by a temporary work permit as part of our much overdue immigration reform. "The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm." This man, like many others, was in fact not guilty. "Knowingly" and "intent" are necessary elements of the charges, but most of the clients we interviewed did not
even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served. This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest. He was unable to make a decision.
"You all do and undo," he said. "So you can do whatever you want with me." To him we were part of the system keeping him from being deported back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not know how they were going to make it with him in jail for 5 months. None of the "options" really mattered to him. Caught between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. He had failed his family, and was devastated. I went for some napkins, but he refused them. I offered him a cup of soda, which he superstitiously declined, saying it could be "poisoned." His Native American spirit was broken and he could no longer think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he said: "God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine."
There was my conflict of interest, well put by a weeping, illiterate man.
-THE TRUE STORY OF POSTVILLE

Barack Obama and John McCain pretend that cozying up to the very-safe NCLR (who flirts regularly with the idea of discarding the "Raza" part of their name so as to bow to Lou Dobbs and other ignorant, failing, flaking freaks and turn their back on tradition and la gente) is enough to win the Latino Vote.

Do not think, candidates, that we will forget the questionnaire you are trying to ignore . Do not think even the MSM is not in touch with us, they are. They will follow up and so will we.

WHEREAS, the presence of significant numbers of people illegally residing in the State of Rhode Island creates a burden on the resources of state and local human services, law enforcement agencies, educational institutions and other governmental institutions

And you want to take that burden away by insuring they are rounded up and whisked away to a hole somewhere behind a fence, where taxpayers are charged for their imprisonment.

Let me cut to the chase.

WHEREAS, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) added Section 287(g), performance of immigration officer functions by state officers and employees, to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and authorizes the Executive Order 08-01 March 27, 2008 Page 2
Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies, permitting designated officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions pursuant to a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), provided that the local law enforcement officers received appropriate training and function under the supervision of sworn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers; and
WHEREAS, law enforcement can more effectively combat criminal activity related to illegal immigration if federal, state and local authorities work on a cooperative basis.

Right, so Carcieri has now authorized the State Police to work hand-in-hand with ICE and DHS.

So the very next day, a panel met to discuss all the consequences of this new executive order.

PROVIDENCE - A 27-member governor's advisory panel charged with monitoring "unintended consequences" of Governor Carcieri's executive order on illegal immigration met for the first time yesterday. Carcieri appointed the committee after his March order sparked protests by community leaders, advocacy groups, and some of the state's top clerical leaders
-Immigration panel weighs outcomes of Carcieri's order

And what went down at that moment?

As the panel convened, immigration agents arrested 31 people - all believed to be maintenance workers - at six state courthouses, according to demonstrators who gathered outside the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Providence. The Rev. Jose Roberts, of St. George's Episcopal Church in Central Falls, said an ICE agent at the office confirmed the number. Many of those arrested are employed by contractors hired by the state to clean the courthouses.
-Immigration panel weighs outcomes of Carcieri's order

The community is not happy. (Though it seems many commenters on that post are. Go get 'em!)

It's an interesting pattern. Anytime anyone even appears to speak out against ICE/DHS/USGOV on migrant issues, they are locked up if undocumented, slammed publicly if they have a big enough bullhorn, or workers are rounded up en masse. The GOVT is fighting hard for its little prison-for-profit routine!

Because in case you haven't been following links or putting it together (and I've yet to draw it out clearly, I think), it's pure and simple. It's a cruel and every effective business model.

The USGOVT, propped up as it is by corporate interests and big biz, solicits workers for its cheap labor needs. It never mattered what this did to México, what it meant to anything but the bottom line for business and government. Just as clearly, Bill Clinton still doesn't really care too much what NAFTA is doing to México. (If I'm wrong, show me proof.)

And this slow crushing oppression and exploitation of this continent's indigenous has been going on a long, long time. And this exploitation of México for the benefit of foreign interests has been going on since Porfirio Díaz oversaw the flooding of Mexico with foreign interests and railroads were built that connected major Mexican cities/towns with points up north, but not with each other (laterally).

Every priest and pharoah worth her/his temple knows that a pyramid (be it a stone or economic one) does not arise without a crew of slaves (the Egyptians also were given pay/food for work, but it was negligible and sometimes rotten and sometimes withheld, and their living quarters spare and poor and crammed, as well.) Even on a smaller scale, Mitt Romney wants a clean lawn and trim bushes. But he ain't gonna be the one to do it! He'll hire the cheapest he can, and they will hire the cheapest they can. Little deal going on...I'll look the other way, give you less pay. Just don't make ME dirty my well-manicured nails. The Bush family wants tomatos and grapes upon which to decorate all their abfab picnics, but their family won't pick it. That was my family, mis antepasados, and much raza today. Just as the Chinese and the Haitians and the Africans and the Cubans have as well, we have slaved for the pharaohs.

While the pharaohs spit upon those who make their lifestyle possible.

And they will still make it possible, because now instead of being shipped back to Mexico and other parts south of the "border," they are being charged criminally even when it is not reality (as the above linked story about Postville makes clear in horrific and detailed narrative) with no understanding of their plea (what part of due process don't you understand?) or the consequences of it, or that they will soon be in a lonely jail where too many liberals and PROGRESSIVES® don't give a shit about them.

(One day those on the "progressive" side of things who think they can pick and choose their little causes and relegate the rest to Pet Issue Land will be stricken with a very real sense of urgency when they realize that you can't save the tenth floor lounge without saving the lobby and service entrance, too. And that the penthouses will fall the furthest before the fire's done.)

Being charged for Social Security theft and en masse creates a lovely little vortex from which they may never escape and WHEREAS even the laws in place afford them a fairer and faster process, this little sick gambit steps over that.

And those of us who are sensible and whose bones don't rattle with the ghost of pat buchanan's fear know that it's not like these people care about the damn Census. They don't care about Xicano blogotov throwers. They don't want to "take over" your damn corrupt land.

They just. Want. To. Eat. And. Live. Just to be able to move about, working hard for pay. They love their country and very often come here because it is the USGOV's business and practice to squeeze every bit of profit we can and centralize it here. They don't want to be here very often. But we shut down the open flow. USGOV is starving. USGOV is broke. USGOV is shaking in its boots and is seeing its racist xenophobic self-interest bloom like a turdblossom on George W Bush's Oval Office Sunbeam Rug. USGOV wants to keep its teams of detainers and raiders in practice at all times. And they need cash to do it, and they need a project to do so, and they need to keep feeding the Halliburton beast. And so they choose a class of people that most US citizens can easily rationalize an adequate amount of disinterest for.

Perfect victims. Hard working, don't get the language or the law, and unchampioned by most. Given lip service by Presidential Candidates, used as target practice by Right Wing radio hosts and Murkans on the "border," and used for profit once incarcerated.

This must stop.

Also covering the RI raids:

• VivirLatino
• Citizen Orange
• The Sanctuary

Reposted in full with permission from Nezua

Iraq Event Horizon

Jeff Huber — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:53:40 GMT

event horizon: the boundary of a black hole beyond which nothing can escape from within it

-- Merriam-Webster Online

After five years and change of turned corners and dead enders and last throes, is it possible that we're approaching an event horizon in our Middle East miasma? Stuff seems to happen faster than anyone can deny it occurred these days, and from the sound of things, it won't be too long before we're committed to getting out of Iraq in smart fashion or sucked into staying there until kingdom come.

The New American Decade

It hardly seems possible, but it was over ten years ago-January 26, 1998 to be exact-that Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century (PNAC) wrote their infamous letter to President Bill Clinton demanding that he invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein. Clinton blew them off. Whether that was an act of wisdom on his part or he was simply occupied with more pressing matters we'll never know.
The PNAC was undeterred, however, and in September 2000 it published the neoconservative manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, which called for America to secure global peace through military occupation of the entire planet. The PNAC was notably interested in using the "unresolved conflict with Iraq" as a fuzzy pretext to increase our military footprint heart of the Middle East. The PNACers knew, though, that it would be difficult to get America go to along with their yahooliganism "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event." On September 11, 2001, they got the "new Pearl Harbor" they were looking for.

On March 19, 2003 young Mr. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, justified by "slam dunk" evidence that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program and was probably at least sort of involved in the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after the invasion commenced, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, "We know where the WMD are." On April 9 the Army staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, and on May 1 the Navy staged Mr. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" ceremony onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Later that year, Mr. Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction" even though the CIA knew we hadn't. When violence began to flare, Rumsfeld said, "stuff happens." Time passed and stuff kept happening. Rummy blamed the trouble on "pockets of dead enders." Bush said, "Bring 'em on." They came.

In January 2004 the CIA said that the "stuff" was turning into a civil war. Bush said the CIA was "just guessing" about that civil war stuff. 2004 was also the year Lieutenant General David Petraeus took over training Iraqi forces and started handing out AK-47s like they were soccer balls. About 190,000 of the weapons disappeared themselves into the hands of Shiite militiamen. In October of 2004 the CIA concluded that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of WMD at the time of the U.S. invasion and had not begun any program to produce them.

2005 was a banner year for our woebegone war in Iraq. Dick Cheney declared the insurgency was in its "last throes." Mr. Bush said that "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand d`own." In November, the administration unveiled its new Victory in Iraq strategy. Lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman said Mr. Bush had turned a corner in Iraq.

On February 2, 2006 Rumsfeld said he did not believe Iraq would be a long war. On February 4, 2006 the Washington Post published an article titled "Ability to Wage 'Long War' Is Key To Pentagon Plan." On May 1 of that year, the third anniversary of "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Bush said the war had reached "a turning point" (mission accomplished again!). On August 19 Operation Iraq Freedom surpassed World War II in length. On August 21, Mr. Bush said, "We're not leaving [Iraq] so long as I'm the president." That day, he also admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. On August 29 Donald Rumsfeld called Iraq war critics "quitters." On November 8 he resigned as Secretary of Defense.

Also that year, Senator Arlen Specter admitted that Iraq was in a state of civil war. In November, the Pentagon began planning an escalation strategy that became known as "The Surge" and alternately as "Son of Stay the Course."

Bush announced the surge in January 2007. In February David Petraeus took over as the top U.S. military officer in Iraq and began handing out arms and bribe money to Sunni militants. Having armed, trained and funded both sides of Iraq's civil war, Petraeus proceeded to echo the administration in blaming Iran for arming, training and funding militants in Iraq.

Hello, I Must Be Going

The pace picked up. Dick Cheney started trying really hard to pick a war with Iran. New Defense Secretary Bill Gates got Admiral William Fallon installed as head of Central Command to keep Petraeus under control. Fallon let everybody know he thought Petraeus was an a** kissing little chicken s***, and that Dick Cheney was crazy, and that the surge was stupid because we needed those extra troops to get things in Pakistan and Afghanistan under control, and that he wouldn't let a war with Iran happen on his watch, so he got fired. Bush nominated the a** kissing little chicken s*** to take Fallon's place, and the a** kissing little chicken s***s in the Senate confirmed him.

Bush and Cheney said it would be appeasement to talk directly to the Iran about things unless they gave up their inalienable right to develop nuclear power, but they didn't mention how they'd characterize the bribes Petraeus was handing out to Sunni militants in Iraq. Democratic candidate for president Barack Obama said he'd talk to Iran without ridiculous preconditions, and his opponent, Senator John McCain, said that just showed how ridiculous Obama's notions of foreign policy were, that offering to negotiate without making ridiculous preconditions would only lead to negotiations. McCain's supporters said that showed how McCain had more foreign policy savvy than Obama.

Obama also said he'd withdraw troops from Iraq in 16 months. McCain said he might keep them there for fifty, a hundred, a thousand or a million years. Obama, like Fallon, said that we need to pull troops out of Iraq to focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Suddenly, in early July, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said any status of forces agreement would have to contain a timeline for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, and later he said that he liked Obama's plan to have American G.I.s home in 16 months, and brother, did the stuff hit the fan after that!

People tried to say that Maliki hadn't said what he said, that he'd been mistranslated, or that he'd been snot slinging drunk when he said those things, or that he'd been possessed by aliens or demons when he said them, and what have you, but everybody pretty much got the message.

The neocons ramped up to full spin, trying to swing momentum back in their direction. Young Mr. Bush agreed to set a "time horizon" with Maliki, and the a** kissing little chicken s***, sensing the wind shift, allowed as how, yeah, maybe he should look at starting to bribe bad guys in the bananastans now, seeing as how well that had worked for him in Iraq.

Some in the warmonger camp were devastated, though. One high ranking ex former retired administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the silliness involved, said that upon hearing the news of a departure timeline Joe Lieberman cried like a girl and Lindsay Graham fainted dead away in his closet.

It's tempting to conclude that we've crossed the event horizon in the Middle East, that the end of the Iraq war has begun and it's too late for team Bush to start a war with Iran. Remember, however, that the neocons still have Karl (The Brain) Rove and Dick (The Dick) Cheney on their side, and the only neocon bastard more devious than either of those two is Lucifer (The Archangel).

It may be that we'll never quite cross the event horizon in Iraq, that if anything happens at all, it will happen with a whimper so soft that we won't know if we stayed or went, because the neocons will have cooked up some new and improved fiasco that once again has us so distracted we can't tell whether we're coming or going.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Russ Wellen's interview with Jeff at The Huffington Post and Scholars and Rogues.

More ugliness from the West Bank

shergald — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:08:09 GMT

Stuff like this happens everyday in the West Bank as peace activists attempt the most dangerous of all types of protest against Israel's military occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, in this case, in Ni'ilin.

The nonviolent type.
Ashraf Abu Rahme shot by Israeli army while handcuffed and blindfolded

July 20th, 2008
In video footage released (see below) on the 20th July by B'Tselem, Ashraf Abu Rahme of Bil'in village, can be seen being handcuffed, blindfolded and then shot at close range by the Israeli army.
Ashraf was taking part in a solidarity demonstration attempting to break the siege of Ni'lin when he was detained by the army. While clearly handcuffed and unable to see, an Israeli soldier can be seen shooting Ashraf in the foot with a rubber-coated steel bullet from extremely close range, while another soldier holds him by the arm.
The footage was filmed by a resident of Ni'lin who showed it to international solidarity activists living in Ni'lin on the 19th July. The ISM activists were shocked by the footage and quickly passed it on to B'Tselem who have released it to the local, Israeli and international media. They came upon the video by chance, after paying a social visit to the home of the resident who shot the footage.

Click on the ugliness first hand. It only lasts one minute. It is not the exception. Incidents like this one happen everyday.

Thanks to the International Solidarity Movement for permission to publish today's atrocity. What will happen tomorrow?

While it is doubtful that this film will ever reach the international or American press, at least we here on left wing blogs can understand what is really happening over there as Israel pursues its military occupation and war against Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.

Another Day in the Land of 'Fuck You, I Got Mine!'

Ed Encho — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:19:08 GMT

Roosevelt is DEAD! His policies may live on, but we're in the process of doing something about that as well

-Rush Hudson Limbaugh III

Somewhat lost in the torrent of the endless industrial sized buckets of horseshit that are lovingly shoveled into the open sewer of the American mind every day is the ugly little matter of our rapidly imploding economy. The looming insolvency of Freddie and Fannie and the coming Washington bailout of both of these money laundering whorehouses with the rest of the Wall Street casinos soon to come is largely unknown to the average 'Murkan' stumblebum who is exalting in the dual births of the messianic spawn of Brangelina, watching an endless series of meaningless ball games and trying to keep his/her pathetic, over-extended, revolving credit financed little lives in their sepia-toned fantasy world going for just a bit longer.
The glimmer twins, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson are paying dividends to their criminal buddies on Wall Street by continuing to keep this rotten, dying pig of an economy long ago strip-mined by the rapacious looter class while the rest of America was cowering from terrorists hiding under their beds, praising Jesus, fightin' those hated libruls and making goddamned fucking sure that there would be none of that Nazi-inspired Darwin shit taught in our nation's sad little drone factories that have for too long been allowed to masquerade as schools.

Rest assured that Paulson and Bernanke will do whatever it takes to provide rearguard cover for the Bushreich as they continue to implement the police state that will quell the rabble on that looming day when they all finally have that little light bulb go off inside their dullard little heads that they have all been fucked in the ass by the system without the courtesy of a reach-around. First and foremost the banks must be saved, the grand temples of avarice in which U.S. looter capitalism gorges itself, heads to the vomitories, pukes up the excess and then skitters back to the banquet table to gorge some more all at the expense of the now headed for extinction middle class. In any sane society those two charlatans would be thrown in prison for fraud along with the rest of their cronies but the cashing out is not complete just yet, there are sucker rallies still to come (like today's 276 point Dow Jones/Plunge Protection Team mutual masturbation orgasm) before the parasite elitist class can jump off of the host and direct their private jets and yachts towards more hospitable destinations such as Costa Rica and Dubai or anywhere else with favorable extradition treaties.

That the shuffling masses of asses are still playing this game is farcical, the price of gas is nearing five-dollars a gallon in some areas, the food bills are skyrocketing, the mortgage is in foreclosure and the credit limits on the demon plastic have been maxed out and they still are dry humping as the Titanic lists and takes on water. The two idiots running for president are dishonest stooges of dueling factions of the rotting empire and neither one dareth utter anything even approaching a semblance of the truth lest they be mocked and ostracized by a propaganda machine unlike anything that Paul Joseph Goebbels could have envisioned in even his wettest of wet dreams. Lemmings will be lemmings though and any such thing even close to righteous indignation is bereft in these doomed creatures who have for too long been conditioned to worship mammon and call it God. It's just goddamned un-American to do anything but to idolize the oligarchy and the super class that it serves. So complete has the revisionist history been, so deeply embedded are the false memories, so brainwashed by the vomitous flow of consumerist garbage spewing from the 52' inch electronic deity in the living room that we have all been reduced to serf and chattel with nary a whimper. Just pass the chips and that remote and leave us be, it's time for American Idol.

Welcome to chumpland, your ticket has already been punched so please proceed to the nearest prison where you can begin your service as a slave laborer. Americans are such fucking suckers, candy coated crap and all that is missing is a stick up their assholes.

The financial sector has been gamed to the point of collapse by the economic chicanery of the same sort of scoundrels who George Washington once referred to as a "squadron of corrupt paper dealers" and Frankin D. Roosevelt called out the same unscrupulous bandits as "economic royalists". There are of course other more profane things we can call them the pack of greed-headed traitors who sold out America for chump change like unscrupulous slumlords bleeding a depressed property before dumping it to find more suckers to leech off of but it was America's delusional worship of such rapacious, monstrous psychopaths that allowed the grand fucking to occur.

An unwritten law of nature is that for every fucker there must be at least one fuckee and in a country in which the idolization of money and wealth for the sake of the worship of false gods as Donald Trump, J.R. Ewing Jack Welch there is no shortage of either. With the rise of Reagan and the rolling out of that shining gold plated calf Americans lined up to suck it's poisonous cock, maxing out the credit cards, being sucked into debt slavery by a sham system set up for that express purpose and by withdrawing into self-contained atmospheres of toxic greed and covetousness while ignoring those things that really and truly matter in order to pursue that cheap television electronic crack high of the pursuit of the mythical American dream.

The greatest bait and switch in American history was that period after the Powell Memorandum laid out the game plan for the Reagan juggernaut that would destroy the unions, gut the regulatory agencies for fun and profit and produce a mutant generation that now believed that the path to success and prosperity came courtesy of the lottery and grotesquely insidious scams like "Who Wants to be A Millionaire" rather than the unspoken traditional pact of loyalty and hard work between employee and employer mapped out a path to prosperity and created a middle class that was the envy of the world and made dreams possible of a unique national destiny to change the world for the better. Then the festering nest of fascist vipers that has always existed in this country hijacked that dream and turned it into a nightmare.

The seeds have been sown and very soon we will be reaping the whirlwind for a quarter century of disastrously corrupt and fundamentally flawed neoliberal economic philosophy that rode in on the coattails of the great Ronald Reagan, or maybe it was the opposite but make no mistake, the average American will be the one left holding the proverbial flaming bag of dogshit while the looters laugh all the way to their offshore tax shelters and foreign banks. Americans have been indoctrinated to blame themselves for their lack of wealth and to view the poor as lazy lepers and the wealthy as superior human beings.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. from Kurt Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse Five:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American journalist Kin Hubbard "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be." It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying fom the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere believe that many things are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleanic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

And just who are our national role models and heroes? Who is there that Americans should hold in the highest of esteem? Brittney and Lindsay and Tomkat and the Donald and Paris don't do it. Our history has been scrubbed and sanitized by the economic royalists and the fascists to eliminate any mention of true heroes of the working class and of a real democratic society. The vast majority of those compliant little consumers that have for too long been churned out by a starved for funds and battered into submission school public school system that has been turned into a nationwide network of drone factories (one of the only things that we mass produce in America anymore) have never heard of those who sacrificed for those things that came to be taken to granted to the point where they are now being taken away.

Where is there any mention given of Eugene Debs or of Joe Hill or of Saul Alinsky or of Mother Jones? What about General Smedley D . Butler who called out the blood barters with his tract War Is A Racket and his exposure of the Business Plot where wealthy traitors schemed about a coup against FDR? What is taught about Huey Long? I mean other than the widely accepted narrative of a power mad, corrupt tyrant instead of the man who scared the living shit out of the elitist establishment with his "Share Our Wealth" program that made the New Deal look like Reaganomics. Long stood up to entrenched interests and the moral rottenness of looter capitalism, he built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools as well as provided free textbooks and he even dared to take on the almighty Rockefellers and Standard Oil. Long railed against institutionalized corruption with his "Every man a king" type of populism and he was making dangerous noises about running for president. The ending of the Huey Long story is all too predictable and familiar: he was of course assassinated.

And what of Hellen Keller? The little girl who overcame blindness and deafness and whose struggles with her handicaps are taught to American children as an example of how to overcome adversity as they are indoctrinated to the lies of a society that demands sacrifice and backbreaking work from the lesser classes as unquestioning slaves to the whims of the modern pharaohs on Wall Street. She has been sanitized, turned into a Horatio Alger version of the little engine that could while her later life as a social activist goes ignored. Hellen Keller would grow up to be a champion of women's suffrage, she would join the Industrial Workers of the World and to help to found the American Civil Liberties Union. She was a socialist who dared to speak out against the power base and their exploitation and for that sin her life has been through revisionist history turned into a perverse fairy tale and yet another myth to bolster the system that would make slaves of us all. The little engine that could was very quickly uncoupled from the rest of the train once the narrative switched tracks from one of inspirational value to one of social justice.

And there are others, there are many others who risked all to end child labor, to fight for equality and the forty-hour work week and unemployment protection and workers rights, workplace safety and a right to basic human decency but they go largely unheard of. A good and easy to read book about the working class American labor movements that I recommend is Sharon Smith's excellent Subterranean Fire because let's face it, it is one motherfucker of a rock that has to be rolled up that steepest of all hills and education is necessary in order for the necessary deprogramming to occur. Official history is always written by the victors rather than the vanquished and because most of lying is through omission the banishment of American progressives from our history is a calculated and cynical effort to distort and distract until the final goal of a massive redistribution of wealth upwards and offshore has been completed and the country has been bankrupted and beggared by the economic royalists. Then the looters will either retreat behind the walls of their gated communities, hire private security firms for protection from the unwashed masses or flee this goddamned husk of a once great economic power altogether, their loyalty has always been to green and gold rather than red, white and blue.

One of history's most important and enduring lessons is that hundreds of thousands must toil in the muck in order to allow one rotten, greedy son of a bitch to have his face displayed on a sphinx. The American middle class are the ones who are forced by their Wall Street pharaohs to build the bricks for the monuments to the super wealthy under increasingly hostile conditions in increasingly dangerous work environments with an increasingly smaller amount of straw.

The establishment after all has a vested interest in the existence of a huge and desperate underclass. The accompanying crime and urban rot helps to breed the necessary fear that justifies increased police powers and surveillance so as to keep the interests of the elite safe and sound while they sleep behind the walls of their gated communities each night. We were swindled by the free market pimps and deregulation pushers, all that it all did was create conditions for monopolies and trusts and consumer gouging. Take an honest look at yourself, are you truly better off today than you were yesterday? Or the day before? Or five years ago?

Well understand one thing.....today is as good as you are going to have it for the rest of your life under this existing rotten sysem.

We Are All Losers: The system itself is designed to make losers of us all except that extreme few with the means to purchase influence and therefore protection.

Under this system we all lose, mainly our losses are incremental.

We lose our lives through an increasing amount of time spent on a job locked in a struggle of diminishing gains to even survive.

We lose our health

We lose time with our children and families, this is the most tragic loss of all in most instances as it perpetuates the cycle of the decline in human relationships and destroys the family. Despite what the establishment propagandists and their phony religious wars with their insipid 'pro family' sloganeering it is not the loss of morality in through cultural changes in society that is causing the degradation of the family but the greed of an unfettered and monstrous capitalist system that demands more and more in order to slake its bloodsucking appetite for profits. It is the pursuit of these profits at the expense of our humanity that has laid waste to the family, and our values and every day that we are forced to prostitute ourselves in order for the wealthiest of the greed mongers to further entrench themselves is one more day closer to the day that we will ultimately die in vain for their sins.

And in buying into the legitimacy of this big lie of a system we ultimately have lost our souls.

Welcome to the ownership society, they own OUR ass and fuck you because they got theirs while playing the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet here in Der Homeland for chumps!

Under Attack Again- A Rant

GentillyGirl — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:46:25 GMT

Cross-posted from-

http://gentillygirl.com/2008/0...

Though eating at McDonalds isn't my cup of tea, (try once in the last seven years)I applaud their decision to help fund the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

In fact, I had a Big Mac the other day. I will have a meal there once a week from now on.

Here's WorldNetDaily's take on this-
http://worldnetdaily.com/index...

Read on for my response to these idiots' crap about my tribe.
Sweet zombie Jesus! Its Friday night and our enemies are at it again.

What is it about these mooks that they keep demonizing my tribes? Look bitches and cross-wearing bastards... come at me, one who has ALL the parts. Come at me, one who represents the Deity of Humanity's earlyist form of Spirituality. Come at me with your bigotry and hatred. Come and see what the Intersexed/Trans woman can serve you. Come and see what this little girl thinks about your religion's fucking mutilation of my body for your bat-shit insane "belief" system. Come and ask the woman that could never have children because of your "choice" about her Future.

Here's a quote from these congenital idiots-

"In other words, if a 'transgender man' or, say, employee at a McDonald's believes his supposed 'gender' is really a woman, so he wears a dress and high heels, he should be able to use the female restroom. That surely would do wonders for the productivity and workplace environment of female employees and customers at a small business, including all those local McDonald's franchises!" LaBarbera said."

You fucking dick, I have a uterus and ovaries.You are going to restrict my life and freedoms when I have the same parts as a woman? (That's right, women don't get a "choice". Lets just say, "Jack, you ignorant slut!". I will not back down.

When the Hell will these shits understand that not everyone came out of a cookie-cutter? That Humanity encompasses a spectrum? That many people don't fit your unreal ideal?

Some research says my tribe is 1 in 4,500... other research states that we are 1 in 1,000. I chose the latter figure and I can back that up. We exist.

You wish to deny or minimize my Goddess-given rights as a Human Being? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

My life has meaning and I have friends. Fuck you if I don't fit your ignorant pre-conceived notions. (You never mattered in the first place). We have been here from the Beginning, and we shall be here to the end of Time. My friends, and my life, have meaning. We are also Sacred outside of the cross-wearers B/S. We are the ones that can cross the barriers. This is the Gift given to those who "walk between the worlds".

If you have to go to your "book" to refute me, kiss my panty-clad tush. Ya's ain't gonna find the reference. And yes you fucks, I have studied the literature.

I am more than ready to handle your childish and sophomoric shit. I can tear your "book" apart in a few minutes. It ain't rocket science.

Leave us alone you ignorant fools. Fuck off and die.

Since when did the "Surge" succeed?

GreyHawk — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:46:56 GMT

Crossposted to ePluribus Media, DailyKos, Docudharma and Below Boston

Maybe I missed something -- that can happen. In real life, things can sometimes occur that are unexpected. But this seems almost surreal:

_____
Obama website's opposition to successful surge gets deleted
A funny thing happened over on the Barack Obama campaign website in the last few days.
The parts that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared. John McCain and Obama have been going at it heavily in recent days over the benefits of the surge.
_____

I distinctly remember posting this:

From the Pentagon: The Surge didn't work.

That was back in January of 2008, only seven months ago. According to the Wikipedia entry, there's a mixed bag of results -- a reduction of violence, but none of the stated political progress that "the surge" was supposed to achieve. Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Affairs had this to say in the May/June 2008 issue:

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Summary: The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.
_____

In my mind, this means that the "Surge" ultimately failed, particularly since the levels of violence appear to have only been reduced to pre-surge levels.

Nir Rosen of Rolling Stone wrote a piece in the March 2008 issue called The Myth of the Surge. There are some interesting, and telling, observations within:

_____
Having lost the civil war,
_____

...the civil war that we were told wasn't happening by pundits, in case you didn't recall...

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many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides - and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq - it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces.
_____

Gee, that sounds a lot like the brief blurb I'd posted above the fold about how the Surge failed, and that reduced levels of violence were essentially because of a secondary plan by Petraeus was implemented.

_____
To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."
_____

Um, yeah..."the Awakening." I think we need some folks on Capitol Hill to wake up, too...

Anywho, according to the piece, the "Surge" appeared to have had no real effect in the reduction of violence.

In fact, as recently as April 24, Time Magazine's Mark Kukis wrote a piece called Is the Surge Backfiring? in which he made the following observation:

_____
It remains to be seen whether the dozens of other combat outposts popping up around Iraq amid the surge will come to face similar attacks aimed at sending U.S. troops back into heavily fortified compounds and, in the hopes of insurgents, ultimately home to the United States in defeat.
_____

A previous Time piece by Michael Duffy (with Mark Kukis), from January 24 of 2008 -- several months earlier -- gave an indication of what constituted progress. It was titled The Surge at Year One:

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Before the surge, elements of al-Qaeda in Anbar province were carrying out grisly atrocities against local Sunnis, including women and children, who refused to join the jihad against Americans. The Sunnis approached the Americans for help, and Petraeus was happy to oblige. The local uprising against al-Qaeda is known as the Anbar Awakening, and it gave the U.S. a model for turning local tribes, clans and whole neighborhoods against the insurgents.
_____

Again, confirmation of a strategy that fell into Petraeus's lap.

_____
Over the past year, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 125 local proxy armies, an ad hoc force of at least 60,000 that one could call "the other surge." Known as Concerned Local Citizens groups (CLCS), these militias serve as watch groups, police forces and eyes and ears for U.S. forces all over Iraq. But while American commanders are delighted to have help, not all Iraqis are comfortable with the CLCS. Many in the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government worry that the citizens groups-which are mostly Sunni and in some cases are little better than street gangs-will eventually morph into antigovernment militias. Lately al-Qaeda has stepped up attacks on Sunnis who take up arms with the Americans.
_____

Can these local groups make a substantial difference? Apparently, they have been -- and hopefully, they'll continue to. But where does that leave us? And how much has this, in turn, helped increase the effectiveness of the Surge?

_____
As former Sunni insurgents have made common cause with the U.S., one of Iraq's largest Shi'ite factions has been eerily quiet. In late August, for reasons that are still a little mysterious, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army to desist from attacking U.S. forces. U.S. officials believe al-Sadr's move was less about helping the U.S. than about purging unruly elements from his 60,000-man militia. Another interpretation is that al-Sadr is simply waiting out the surge and that his fighters will return to the fray when U.S. troops have withdrawn. Whatever the reason, Odierno reckons that al-Sadr's cease-fire is responsible for a 15%-to-20% reduction in attacks on U.S. forces over the past year.
_____

Emphasis mine

Ah ha.

So, if al-Sadr hadn't ordered his army to desist, violence would be up 15%-20%.

From the executive summary of a report from the International Crisis Group comes this assessment:

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Against the odds, the U.S. military surge contributed to a significant reduction in violence. Its achievements should not be understated. But in the absence of the fundamental political changes in Iraq the surge was meant to facilitate, its successes will remain insufficient, fragile and reversible. The ever-more relative lull is an opportunity for the U.S. to focus on two missing ingredients: pressuring the Iraqi government to take long overdue steps toward political compromise and altering the regional climate so that Iraq's neighbours use their leverage to encourage that compromise and make it stick. As shown in these two companion reports, this entails ceasing to provide the Iraqi government with unconditional military support; reaching out to what remains of the insurgency; using its leverage to encourage free and fair provincial elections and progress toward a broad national dialogue and compact; and engaging in real diplomacy with all Iraq's neighbours, Iran and Syria included.
_____

Emphasis mine

The Surge contributed to the lessening of violence, but failed to facilitate the fundamental political changes that it was supposed to accomplish.

We know that as of April, the the reported numbers of trained Iraqi security forces are unreliable. And as the economy continues its downward spiral in both foreign and domestic circles, this report from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) last September is overdue for a follow-up: (Abstract, reprinted in full; emphasis mine.)

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There is a paucity of facts about the effects of the recent military "Surge" on conditions in Iraq and whether it is paving the way for a stable Iraq. Selective, anecdotal and incomplete analyses abound. Policy makers and defense planners must decide which measures of success or failure are most important, but until now few, if any, systematic analyses were available on which to base those decisions. This paper applies modern statistical techniques to a new data file derived from more than a dozen of the most reliable and widely-cited sources to assess the Surge's impact on three key dimensions: the functioning of the Iraqi state (including violent civilian casualties); military casualties; and financial markets' assessment of Iraq's future. The new and unusually rigorous findings presented here should help inform current evaluations of the Surge and provide a basis for better decision making about future strategy.
The analysis reveals mixed evidence on the Surge's effect on key trends in Iraq. The security situation has improved insofar as violent civilian fatalities have declined without any concurrent increase in casualties among coalition and Iraqi troops. However, other areas, such as oil production and the number of trained Iraqi Security Forces have shown no improvement or declined. Evaluating such conflicting indicators is challenging.
There is, however, another way to assess the Surge. This paper shows how data from world financial markets can be used to shed light on the central question of whether the Surge has increased or diminished the prospect of today's Iraq surviving into the future. In particular, I examine the price of Iraqi state bonds, which the Iraqi government is currently servicing, on world financial markets. After the Surge, there was a sharp decline in the price of those bonds, relative to alternative bonds. This decline signals a 40% increase in the market's expectation that Iraq will default. This finding suggests that, to date, the Surge is failing to pave the way toward a stable Iraq and may in fact be undermining it.
_____

That's not too promising, as it stands -- since the report was issued in October 2007, and Petraeus's strategy of essentially bribing militants into joining forces with the US troops started after the fact, the current status of Iraqi state bonds may have changed (anyone got those numbers handy?).

Overall, however, I think that it is fundamentally incorrect to label the "Surge" as a success: it failed. Progress was made during it, but not directly due to it -- it was incidental. The primary goals and objectives were not accomplished, and may in fact be quickly eradicated should al-Sadr rescind his mysterious order that instantly quelled 15%-20% of the violence.

All this, and in the meantime our "success" in Afghanistan is unraveling.

No, the narratives that are currently assuming that the "Surge" was successful -- and stating it as accepted fact -- should be challenged.

The "Surge" was not successful; it failed to achieve its objectives. The troops, however, appear to done better with a little help from the Iraqis themselves due to unique situations that presented themselves during -- but not as a result of -- the Surge, and their efforts have been largely successful with regard to reducing violence. Combined with the inexplicable aid of al-Sadr's cease-fire, violence in down, but without actually achieving the initial goals of the surge that reduction in violence will be a temporary one at best.

Israel's Great Iran Adventure: Hell Is Coming

Ed Encho — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:21:25 GMT

According to an article in Sunday's London Times George W. Bush has now given his blessing to the criminal nation of Israel to go forward with the ill-conceived and soon to have disastrous consequences for the rest of the planet (especially Der Homeland) strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. I cannot possibly understate the ramifications of such an insane sanctioning of an outright act of war that at the very LEAST is going to crash the economy and at the worst is going to lead to an era of human misery and suffering on this spinning orb unlike anything seen since the worst days of World War Two. This is the big one folks, our ticket to the dance is about to be punched and history (if there is anyone left to tell it) will damn us for eternity for our collective complicity in this global conflagration.

"President George W. Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.
"Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread skepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political, and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an 'amber light' to an Israeli plan to attack Iran's main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.
"'Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack, and tell us when you're ready,' the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use U.S. military bases in Iraq for logistical support."
Quoted in support of this lunacy was think tanker Kenneth Katzman:
Among the sceptics is Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst and author of a book on the Revolutionary Guard. "I don't subscribe to the view that Iran is in a position to inflict devastating damage on anyone," said Katzman, who is best known for warning shortly before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to attack America.
"The Revolutionary Guards have always underperformed militarily," he said. "Their equipment is quite inaccurate if not outright inoperable. Those missile launches were more like putting up a 'beware of the dog' sign. They want everyone to think that if you mess with them, you will get bitten."

The neocons have been wrong about EVERYTHING - keep this in mind. But what can I say, we are pretty much fucked right about now, the round has been chambered, the barrel pressed to our temples and now George W. Bush is giving the go ahead for the trigger to be pulled. I would also recommend reading Justin Raimondo's piece on the great Antiwar.com today entitled Amber Alert:

The Israelis, in concert with their amen cornerin the U.S., have been engaged in a propaganda blitz targeting Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, the whole point of which is not to pressure the Iranians into backing down, but to force the U.S. to take action in lieu of the Israelis going it alone. Why fight if your big brother is willing to wage the battle? To that end, the Israelis are taking aim at Washington, rather than Tehran, in a full-scale political assault that shows every sign of succeeding where it counts - in the Oval Office. The Times cites a top Pentagon official:
"It's really all down to the Israelis. This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn't believe that anything but force will deter Iran."
Translation: The U.S. will not be the first to attack Iran, but it may well join in once the Israelis get things started. Laura Rozen, writing in Mother Jones, reports that a parade of Israeli officials - including Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi - is due in Washington over the next two weeks to impress upon the Americans the urgent necessity of taking military action. Rozen spoke to neocon superhawk David Wurmser, former adviserto Vice President Dick Cheney on Middle Eastern affairs, who said:
"'Ultimately, my gut tells me that most of the administration on most levels would push back very hard,' on Israeli pressure on Washington to authorize it to strike Iran, Wurmser added. 'What those in the administration who don't want Israel to act probably won't want is for it to be taken to the highest level. They would always be afraid that [the president] might not be so tough on the Israelis. If the Israeli [government] really intends to do something, they would go to the highest level without a lot of people knowing.'"
They may have gotten to the president already, as Rozen reports:
"A former Pentagon intelligence official who spoke with Mother Jones also alleges that Meir Dagan, the chief of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, held secret meetings with officials in the White House on Wednesday. Neither the Israeli embassy nor National Security Council would comment on whether Dagan had been at the White House."
This is really the crux of the matter: George W. Bush. Reckless, more radical than most of his advisers, and now dangerously fixated on his "legacy," he is more determined than ever to leave his lasting mark on the Middle East and the world - and, given that the Constitution has been abandoned, and a single man can take us to war without the consent of Congress or the people, an apocalyptic departure from office seems more likely than not.

As I put forth in my previous piece9/11: Cover For A Coup D'Etat I believe that the 'terrorist' attacks weren't even the greatest crime of that particular day. Rather I believe that there is enough circumstantial evidence to show that an inner circle of deeply embedded neocons and moles used the Edward Luttwak model of a coup d'etat along with the Continuity Of Government (COG) infrastructure to put into place a rogue government here in the Homeland and to allow for the implementation of the PNAC/Clean Break neocon doctrine for seizing control of the Middle East and ultimately encircling Russia. This cabal then used their embeds in the media and their controlled/compromised Congress to radically overhaul the laws in the U.S. in order to surveil, torture and lay the groundwork for martial law via NSPD 51 if it became necessary. The winged monkey shock troops of the easily manipulated Left Behind crowd would provide cover as they cheered the coming apocalypse so they can fly naked up to sit at the foot of God's throne while watching the carnage of those who are not cholse as though it were a damned football game.

You just can't make stuff like this up!

Something went wrong afterwards though - the disaster that is Iraq - that knocked the Armageddon Express off track but as yesterday's article in the London Times shows the plan is back on with a near imminent Israeli attack on Iran (which will be joined by the U.S. once Iran retaliates) that is going to open a box of hell and lead to not only WW III but a complete economic collapse with anarchy in the streets when gas prices triple overnight and the entire food distribution system shuts down reducing the majority of the fat and happy population to the unthinkable - a survival level existence.

And nobody is going to do a damned thing to stop it, especially NOT the Democrats nor the national propaganda network in the U.S. media that will be force feeding the world's largest lemming colony Jon Benet Ramsey updates along with the silly Bradgelina twins who for all the adulation showered upon them could be the coming of the messiah.

It's gonna get real ugly real soon folks.

Why Can't We Admit Defeat?

gottlieb — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:20:15 GMT

Now that we've won the Iraq war so decisively, folks want to re-tool our troop deployment back into Afghanistan - the war we won so decisively seven years ago because the first war we won decisively has turned into a much deadlier war than the last war we won decisively. You follow?

This 'global war on terror' is going so well isn't it? Seven years; trillions of dollars; millions dead; countries (including our own) in ruins; our national karma insuring hell in a hand-basket.

Why can't we just admit defeat?

Seriously. Why can't we just say, "Well, we really fucked up. We need to start over and the first thing we're going to do is investigate what really happened on 911 for the very first time."

With no preconditions, no predeterminations; no predestinations.

This would be the smart thing; the just thing; the wise thing.

Why can't we do it?

911 started this whole 'global war on terror.' It advanced a well-known agenda of right-wing neo-conservative war-mongering profiteers.

If you're supposed to ask 'who benefited' after a crime, then, golly, this crime would be easy to figure out. But the American government infested with right-wing neo-conservative war-mongering profiteers never asked the question.

It's like Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison in JFK reading through the Warren Commission Report when a line of questioning was reaching an obvious path of reasoning and the questions would just stop and Garrison would plead, "ask the question!"

Same thing with 911.

Instead of investigation, we got accusation. Instead of pursuing anomalies in the official conspiracy theory we got obfuscation, stone-walling and cover-up.

Yet the 'crime of the century' was never properly investigated to this day.

Why?

Isn't it karmically clear our disastrous defeat in two wars in pursuit of 'terror' is proof that we did not pursue justice? If we were the wronged party and our actions righteous, then why has 'god' sided with the enemy?

We're America for god's sakes. We're the greatest nation in the history of the world and we're getting our ass kicked by those whose enlightenment ended in the Dark Ages.

We've got smart bombs and laser beams and satellites that can read headlines in a newspaper from outer-space. We've got the best equipped, trained and motivated military on the planet. We've got truth and justice on our side.

Don't we?

Something has gone terribly wrong. The United States Government of right-wing neo-conservative war-mongering profiteers has embarked on a wild goose chase against phantom fanatics and thus resorted to shooting anything that moves. We've the lost battlefield and we've lost the hearts and minds needed to help secure our righteous vengeance and establish domestic tranquility in far-away lands so 'it' never happens again.

But what if our mindless, reckless and feckless pursuit of "Al Qaeda" was wrong in the first place? What if, for purposes contrary to our belief, we were sent on a wild goose chase simply so some could profit and there wasn't an ounce of truth to the accusations made as to what really happened on that modern day of infamy, the day of the New Pearl Harbor, so fervently prayed for by right-wing neo-conservative war-mongering profiteers?

Shouldn't we at least ask the question instead of branding those who would ask as traitors or kooks or nuts or shameful people dragging the victims of 911 through a slime pit?

Isn't the easier explanation for the rush to war after 911 an economic one, rather than a question of justice?

I guess we will never know and instead rely upon the word of right-wing neo-conservative war-mongering profiteers, murderers, war criminals, liars, thieves and heartless devils for our truth. The official 911 conspiracy theory is accepted history in the face of obvious national defeat, embarrassment and bankruptcy.

The results of 911 were a right-wing neo-conservative war-mongering profiteer's wet-dream.

And a nightmare for the world.

And, yet, to question the word of treasonous serpents is itself treason. To fight for an honest, open and truth-seeking investigation of 911 is for kooks. To point out our battlefield defeat is based upon a false premise to justify our military folly in the first place is to face ridicule and scorn.

One thing about America, for all of its moral certitude and god-granted exceptionalism it can never admit defeat or error or regret or apologize for anything.

Our sin for believing instead of investigating and frothing instead of understanding has led to our downfall.

The true architects of 911, whoever they are, knew us so well, knew the men in power so well, that they brought down the greatest country in the history of the world without firing a shot.

America was attacked on 911, but it pales in comparison with how America has attacked itself since.

Iran + Iraq = Ironic

Jeff Huber — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:04:42 GMT

"As this law [of extremes] begins to lose its force and as this determination wanes, the political aim will reassert itself."

--Carl von Clausewitz

Young Mr. Bush has managed to irretrievably lose his Iraq misadventure, saving his successor the trouble of trying to put off defeat indefinitely.

Last week, at a meeting with ambassadors from the United Arab Emirates, Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki proposed a short-term memorandum of understanding on the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq that includes a formula for American troop withdrawal.
The Bush administration bull feather merchants accelerated to full pluck. According to White House spokesman Tony Fratto, Maliki's statement was consistent with the goals of the Bush administration. "The prime minister is reflecting a shared goal that we have," Fratto said, "which is that as the Iraqi forces become a more self-reliant force, we'll see reductions in U.S. forces."

Gordon Jondroe, another Bush spell caster, said, "Negotiations and discussions are ongoing every day. It is important to understand that these are not talks on a hard date for withdrawal."

Nice try, fellows. What Maliki actually said was, "We are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty," and that the goal of Jondroe's aforementioned negotations was to reach an agreement on "the departure of the forces" or "a timetable on their withdrawal."

Maybe Fratto and Jondroe were hoping Maliki was drunk when he said those things, and would apologize the next day about any confusion he may have caused, and say he didn't remember what he told those ambassadors but whatever he said, please ignore it. If so, Iraqi national security adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie sucked the wind out of their sails when, after a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf, he said, "We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn't have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq."

So much for the New American Century.

The Aim Reasserts Itself

The Bush administration still hasn't supplied us with a consistent explanation for its woebegone invasion of Iraq. Young Mr. Bush has admitted that Saddam Hussein had no hand in the 9/11 attacks, even though his blow up toy Joe Lieberman continues to insist that "We're in a war against Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11."

Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz confessed in May 2003 that weapons of mass destruction became the casus belli of the Iraq invasion merely because it was "the one issue that everyone could agree on." That it took until summer of 2008 for the U.S. to remove the last of Hussein's uranium stockpile from Iraq illustrates the lack of seriousness with which anyone in the Bush administration actually regards weapons of mass destruction in general and nuclear proliferation specifically as a threat to the United States.

The real aim of the Iraq invasion is to be found in the neoconservative manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, published by Bill Kristol's infamous Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in September 2000.

According to the PNAC, charter members of which included Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Doug Feith and Scooter Libby, the need for an increased U.S. military footprint in the Middle East "transcend[ed] the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." The "unresolved conflict with Iraq" merely provided "the immediate justification" for an influx of forces, and 9/11 provided the "new Pearl Harbor" they needed to convince the rest of America to support their ambitions.

So it is that John McCain, the neoconservative movement's crown prince, waxes manically about keeping American G.I.s in Iraq for "a thousand years." (In case you're wondering, no, McCain didn't come up with the thousand-year mantra all by himself. Like so many neocon slogans, that one came from an earlier politician who spoke of establishing a thousand-year something-or-other.)

Hence, whenever the neocons speak of their Iraq misadventure in terms of "victory" and "defeat," what they're really talking about is whether or not they get to park U.S. troops there forever.

The Persian Ploy

World-class sociopaths that they are, the neocons will continue to generate excuses and deflect blame for their failure to create "open arms" in Iraq. "Internal Iraqi political pressures" has already received generous bandwidth. The Bush spin machine was quick to declare that the administration is considering increasing the pace of the pullout from Iraq (as if they were actually considering a "pull out" in the first place), not as a reaction to Maliki's invitation to pack sand, or because the force is collapsing from the deployment tempo, but because the extra troops are needed in Afghanistan.

When somebody mentions extra troops are needed in Afghanistan because things have been going to hell there since we abandoned it to invade Iraq on fuzzy pretexts, the echo chorus will blame NATO for not giving us enough of the right kind of help, and when somebody mentions that we're lucky NATO is helping us at all after Donald Rumsfeld called Europe "irrelevant" back in 2003, well, somehow all that will become Barack Obama's fault for not supporting the Iraq invasion, and the need to take troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan will one way or another reflect how successful the "surge" was and how right John McCain was to support it.

When that unholy house of cards collapses under the weight of its own illogic, the administration will fall back on its favorite scapegoat: Iran. Why not go to the well again? They've been lying to us about the Iranian's involvement in the deaths of American G.I.s in Iraq and their supposed desire to acquire nuclear weapons for over a year and a half now, and thanks in large part to the mainstream media's assistance, they're still getting away with it.

The neocon artists will likely also get away with telling American that Iraq told us to leave because that's what Iran told Iraq to tell us. They won't tell America that the Iran they're talking about is the same Iran that in 2003 told us they'd stop supporting militant groups in Lebanon and Palestine and to help stabilize Iraq. Had we dealt with Iran then, our Middle East Miasma would be our Fertile Crescent Conquest, but Dick Cheney told them to go away. "We don't talk to evil," the Dark Lord said.

Alas, poor irony.

Hell Meet Handbasket

gottlieb — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:19:53 GMT

You ever get the feeling we're Dorothy's house caught in the whirlwind but it ain't Oz we're headed toward?

Barack Obama has proved to be the Savior with no clothes.

Bush is Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao rolled into one big drunk and retarded deer tick.

Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice makes Satan's spawn look like Baby Huey.

The mainstream media makes Orwellian propaganda look like straight talk.

The almighty dollar is worth a wooden nickel.

The global economy is just another word for tyranny.

The dying gasps of an Imperialistic war-driven economy searches for endless conflict in every nook and cranny so even Lichtenstein poses a threat to national security.

Common folks have been hoodwinked into bankruptcy and sold down the river by greed mongers that make greed mongers look like philanthropists.

Half the people are stoned and the other half are stupid.

Fairy tales are sold as documentaries while truth is hidden in a hermetically sealed Cracker Jack box.

The Constitution has less value than used toilet paper.

The rule of law only applies to crack heads and jay walkers.

Criminals are patriots and patriots are terrorists.

God is a Saturday morning cartoon show and the congregation comprised of sugar-addled kids who think critical thinking is treason.

The next President will be an old crank or a young buck but both are cowards and apologists for politics as usual in a world where politicians have the approval rating of a road-kill skunk.

"Change we can believe in" is a bumper sticker slogan full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

"Yes we can" is the dying gasp of a stadium full of fans rooting for Casey at the bat.

The only difference between Democrats and Republicans is lipstick.

The idea of a populist revolution has the cache of a Paris Hilton brain-trust.

A government of, for and by the people has been sold to the highest bidder in world where corporations are people.

Capitalism is freedom and freedom is capitulation.

Liberty is choice and choice is between A and B, while the rest of the alphabet is off limits to anyone without gobs of cash, a security clearance and membership in the Party of Tyranny laughingly called Free Trade.

The past is a myth, the present a nightmare and the future another broken promise.

TV is reality and News is a morality play.

War is peace and peace is murder.

Slavery is freedom and eternity the reward for surrender.

The world is on fire but it's sold as a fireworks celebration of independence and progress.

And the people? The common man and woman?

Beasts of burden; units of labor; less than zero in a zero sum game.

A world where hope is an audacity, change a chimera and truth hypocrisy.

A world where competition is natural and nature a whore.

A world made up of vanity and called righteousness.

The world existed before humanity and it will continue after man destroys himself in a fit of arrogant pride.

The human experiment is a failure and the proof is in the blood, smoke and crushed bone of empire, conquest and denial.

The good news is that this too will pass.

The bad news is we won't be here to see it.

The long war has just begun and we are the enemy.