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. . . about Chaos,
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Seeds of Dissent in the U.S. Military Are Growing
(By Dahr Jamail, Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, July 2, 2009)
"It was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. I started to feel very guilty. I watched contractors making obscene amounts of money. I found no evidence that the occupation was in any way helping the people of Iraq. I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It's hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it." ... [COMMENT by Lorenzo: This is precisely how I felt during my deployment to Viet Nam in 1967 and why I became a pacifist.] ... "During my stints in Iraq between August 2005 and July 2006, we probably ran 300 patrols. Most of the men in my platoon were just in from combat tours in Afghanistan and morale was incredibly low. Recurring hits by roadside bombs had demoralized us and we realized the only way we could avoid being blown up was to stop driving around all the time. So every other day we would find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapon caches in the fields and everything was going fine. All our enlisted people had grown disenchanted with the chain of command." ... "Our platoon sergeant was with us and he knew our patrols were bullshit, just riding around to get blown up," he explained. "We were at Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport. A lot of the time we'd leave the main gate and come right back in another gate to the base where there's a big PX with a nice mess hall and a Burger King. We'd leave one guy at the Humvee to call in every hour, while the others stayed at the PX. We were just sick and tired of going out on these stupid patrols." ... These understated acts of refusal were often survival strategies as well as gestures of dissent, as the troops were invariably undertrained and ill-equipped for the job of putting down an insurgency. ... "Sometimes if they called us up to go and do something, we would swiftly send computer reports that we were headed in that direction. On the map we would manually place our icon to the target location and then move it back and forth to make it appear as though we were actually on the ground and patrolling. This was not an isolated case. Everyone did it. Everyone would go and hide somewhere from time to time." ... "Dissent starts as simple as saying this is bullshit. Why am I risking my life?" ... Sometimes such feelings have permeated entire units and soldiers in them have refused to follow orders en masse. One of the more dramatic of these incidents occurred in July 2007. The 2nd Platoon of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, in Baghdad had lost many men in its 11 months of deployment. After a roadside bomb killed five more, its members held a meeting and agreed that it was no longer possible for them to function professionally. Concerned that their anger might actually touch off a massacre of Iraqi civilians, they staged a quiet revolt against their commanders instead. ... Kelly Kennedy, a reporter with the Military Times embedded with Charlie Company prior to the revolt, described the shape the platoon members were in by that time: "[T]hey went right to mental health and they got sleeping medications, and they basically couldn't sleep and reacted poorly. And then, they were supposed to go out on patrol again that day. And they, as a platoon, the whole platoon -- it was about 40 people -- said, 'We're not going to do it. We can't. We're not mentally there right now.'" ... According to Sergeant Simpson, here's how a feeling of discontent and opposition creeps up on you while you're on duty: The part of the war you're involved in, interrogating Iraqis in his case, "doesn't make any sense. You realize that the whole system is flawed and if that is flawed, then obviously the whole war is flawed. If the basic premise of the war is flawed, definitely the intelligence system that is supposed to lead us to victory is flawed. What that implies is that victory is not even a possibility." ... "I love my country, but I believe that this particular war is unjust, unconstitutional and a total abuse of our nation's power and influence. And so, in the next few days, I will be speaking with my lawyer, and taking actions that will more than likely result in my discharge from the military, and possible jail time... and I am prepared to live with that.... My father said, 'Do only what you can live with, because every morning you have to look at your face in the mirror when you shave. Ten years from now, you'll still be shaving the same face.' If I had deployed to Afghanistan, I don't think I would have been able to look into another mirror again." ... Present-day G.I. resistance to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cannot begin to be compared with the extensive resistance movement that helped end the Vietnam War and brought an army of draftees to the point of near mutiny in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the ongoing dissent that does exist in the U.S. military, however fragmented and overlooked at the moment, should not be discounted.

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 7:04 AM

 

The End of America by Naomi Wolf

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 8:13 PM

 

Official story of 9/11 "almost entirely untrue" per U.S. Official
(Daily Kos, May 16,2009)
John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, . . . James Farmer has just come out with his new book. . . . Description: As of the 9/11 Commission's one of the primary authors report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues' work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write. . . . Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general’s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He reveals - terrifyingly and illuminatingly — the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, revealing them as they have never before been seen. . . . Farmer himself states that "at some level of the government, at some point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened." . . . Ultimately Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures tells a very different story — a story that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied. For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington. . . . In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center. . . . Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania. . . . These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11. . . . Sure would be nice to find out what really happened that day. And left wondering HOW such a monumentally huge fuck-up, at every level imaginable, both during the attacks, and after, and during the investigation that followed, could have possibly happened in this country. And why people were tortured to deliberately give false information that could be used in a report everybody knew was bogus anyway. . . . And why we are now involved in two wars, both unnecessary and without end ... And why we're being lied to about it all, to this day.

ALSO SEE:
John Farmer's Book: "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11"

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

9/11 Commission report -- info obtained through torture

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 10:59 AM

 

Mayor of Eugene proclaims Medical Marijuana Awareness week
(Salem-News.com, April 29, 2009)
The city of Eugene, Oregon has done something that few cities so far have had the courage to do; Eugene is commemorating Oregon's Medical Marijuana Program during a special week-long observance.

Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy put forth a proclamation that minces no words about the positive side of this medical herb which is being used at this time by over 22,000 Oregon residents.

OFFICE OF THE MAYOR

City of Eugene, Oregon

PROCLAMATION

WHEREAS: In November 1998, Oregon voters passed into law the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act, allowing Oregonians suffering from debilitating medical conditions to use marijuana as medicine. Currently, nearly 25,000 patients are enrolled and over 2,900 doctors have provided recommendations for patients' utilization of medical marijuana; and,

WHEREAS: Thirteen states have passed laws allowing for chronically and seriously ill patients to use cannabis with the approval of their physicians; and,

WHEREAS: On September 6, 1988, Drug Enforcement Administrations (DEA) own Administrative Law Judge, Francis L. Young, ruled that Marijuana, in it˙s natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known; and,

WHEREAS: There are over are over 17,000 published scientific studies on the therapeutic values of cannabis and cannabinoids in the National Library of Medicine, and, there are over 2,600 patents filed for the medical use of cannabinoids in the United States Patent office; and,

WHEREAS: Pre-Clinical and Clinical trials indicate that cannabinoids are useful in controlling Alzheimer˙s Disease, Cancer, Chronic Pain, Diabetes, G I Disorders, Hepatitis C, Multiple Sclerosis, Osteoporosis, Pruritis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Sleep Apnea; and,

WHEREAS: Marijuana has a history of thousands of years of safe use without any recorded deaths attributed to its use, and, all citizens deserve to know the truth about cannabis,

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Kitty Piercy, Mayor of the City of Eugene, Oregon, do hereby proclaim the Week of April 30th, 2009 to May 6th, 2009 as Medical Marijuana Awareness Week in the city of Eugene, and encourage all citizens to join in this observance.

Kitty Piercy, Mayor

Dated this 22nd day of April 2009

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 4:33 PM

 

Hey Paul Krugman, where the hell are you, man?

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 5:02 PM

 

Hemp Is Not Pot: It's the Economic Stimulus and Green Jobs Solution We Need
(Dara Colwell, AlterNet, Posted on March 26, 2009)
While Uncle Sam's scramble for new revenue sources has recently kicked up the marijuana debate -- to legalize and tax, or not? -- hemp's feasibility as a stimulus plan has received less airtime. . . . But with a North American market that exceeds $300 million in annual retail sales and continued rising demand, industrial hemp could generate thousands of sustainable new jobs, helping America to get back on track. . . . "We're in the midst of a dark economic transition, but I believe hemp is an important facet and has tremendous economic potential," says Patrick Goggin, a board member on the California Council for Vote Hemp, the nation's leading industrial hemp-farming advocacy group. "Economically and environmentally, industrial hemp is an important part of the sustainability pie." . . . With 25,000 known applications from paper, clothing and food products -- which, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal this January, is the fastest growing new food category in North America -- to construction and automotive materials, hemp could be just the crop to jump-start America's green economy. . . . But growing hemp remains illegal in the U.S. The Drug Enforcement Administration has lumped the low-THC plant together with its psychoactive cousin, marijuana, making America the planet's only industrialized nation to ban hemp production. We can import it from Canada, which legalized it in 1997. But we can't grow it. . . . "It's a missed opportunity," says Goggin, who campaigned for California farmers to grow industrial hemp two years ago, although the bill was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, citing the measure conflicted with federal law. . . . Considering California's position as an agricultural giant -- agriculture nets $36.6 billion dollars a year, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture -- Goggin's assessment is an understatement. Especially if extended nationwide. . . . "Jobs require capital investment, which isn't easy to come by at the moment, and we need hemp-processing facilities, because the infrastructure here went to seed. But this is a profitable crop, and the California farming community supports it." . . . Just how profitable? According to Chris Conrad, a respected authority on cannabis and industrial hemp and who authored Hemp for Health and Hemp, Lifeline to the Future, the industry would be regionally sustainable, reviving the local economy wherever it was grown. . . . "Hemp will create jobs in some of the hardest-hit sectors of the country -- rural agriculture, equipment manufacturing, transportable processing equipment and crews -- and the products could serve and develop the same community where the hemp is farmed: building ecological new homes, producing value-added and finished products, marketing and so forth," he writes in an e-mail from Amsterdam, where he is doing research. "Add to that all the secondary jobs -- restaurants, health care, food products, community-support networks, schools, etc., that will serve the workers. The Midwestern U.S. and the more remote parts of California and other states would see a surge of income, growth, jobs and consumer goods." . . . Considering today's economic crisis and the combined threats of peak oil and global warming, there is increasing pressure to move toward sustainable resources before everything goes up in smoke. If there was any time to revisit hemp, it's now. . . . "Industrial hemp is the best gift a farmer could have. It's the ideal alternative crop," says Gale Glenn, on the board of the North American Industrial Hemp Council. Glenn, now retired, owned and managed a 300-acre Kentucky farm producing burley tobacco, and she immediately launches into hemp's benefits: It's environmentally friendly, requiring no pesticides or herbicides, it's the perfect rotation crop because it detoxifies and regenerates the soil, and it's low labor. . . . "You just plant the seed, close the farm gate and four months later, cut it and bale it," she says. . . . And there's more. As a food, hemp is rich in essential omega-3 fatty acids; the plant's cellulose level, roughly three times that of wood, creates paper that yields four times as much pulp as trees; hemp is an ideal raw material for plant-based plastics, used to make everything from diapers to dashboards. . . . In fact, Germany's DaimlerChrysler Corp. has equipped its Mercedes-Benz C-class vehicles with natural-fiber-reinforced materials, including hemp, for years. Even Henry Ford himself manufactured a car from hemp-based plastic in 1941, archival footage of which can be found on YouTube, and the car ran on clean-burning hemp-based ethanol fuel. . . . This leads to the most compelling argument for hemp: fuel. Hemp seeds are ideal for making ethanol, the cleanest-burning liquid bio-alternative to gasoline, and when grown as an energy crop, hemp actually offsets carbon emissions because it absorbs more carbon dioxide than any other plant. . . . As the world rapidly depletes its reserves of petroleum, America needs to create a renewable, homegrown energy source to become energy independent. Luckily, unlike petrol, hemp is renewable, unless we run out of soil.

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 7:31 PM

 

The Voters' Uprising: President Obama What Are You Thinking?
(Don Hazen, AlterNet, Posted on March 23, 2009)
"During the past nine months, gigantic financial bailouts amid collapsing economic life made visible the crippling divide between governing elites and citizens at large. People everywhere learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't. They watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. 'Where's my bailout,' became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people watched as establishment forces relaunched their campaign for "entitlement reform" -- a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid." . . . Writes Taibbi in Rolling Stone: "It's over -- we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline -- a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British empire." . . . Just about everything is riding on how we navigate this unprecedented, and frightening, moment in history. And and our new president appears to be on the verge of squandering the enormous goodwill that swept him into office. He has a decision to make, and thus far he seems to be siding with the banks and not with his voters. If that is what he continues to do, it could be a very quick demise to a very promising career, as his unpopularity will quickly build. . . . Frank Rich, in another compelling essay from Sunday calls it, Obama's "Katrina moment": "A charming visit with Jay Leno won't fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers' bonuses won't fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won't fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans' anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by the [New York] Times last week: 'President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.' " . . . There is much outrage across the land and increasing agitation. Many want to know what they can do to channel their frustration and anger in useful and productive ways. Over the next days and weeks AlterNet will be capturing the best of the ideas and organizing, the best writing, opinions via interviews, and novel and compelling experiments designed to face a future that none of us expected, and frankly are not quite prepared for. One interesting idea -- Common Security Clubs -- part study circle, part mutual-aid association and part social-action group, are popping up in communities where people are looking for ways to support each other and take action. . . . Chuck Collins writes: "The common security club model was born out of work done in the last few years by people struggling with overwhelming indebtedness. Participants spend some time discussing the root causes of the economic crisis, drawing on readings and materials provided by the network. But they mostly focus on what they can do together to increase their economic security and press for policy changes."

Read a full description of the clubs' goals and activities here.

AlterNet is presenting these four powerful and informative articles and blogs in full text, as a public service.

Each of them originated in other media outlets. Here are the links for each of them, if you wish to read them in their original sites:

Obama Told Us to Speak Out, but Is He Listening?
William Greider, Washington Post

Has a 'Katrina Moment' Arrived?
Frank Rich, New York Times

The Big Takeover
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

We're in This Together
Chuck Collins, On the Commons

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 8:09 PM

 

We Are Being Robbed!
(MATT TAIBBI, Rolling Stone, Mar 19, 2009)
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya . . . So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial - we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. . . . a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table . . . The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'etat. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations. . . . The crisis was the coup de grace: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout. . . . The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. . . . Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide. . . . Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks - those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses - had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business. . . . But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. [when Bill Clinton and the Democrats went along with the looters and canceled Glass-Steagall.] . . . The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. . . . When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant - a guy named C.K. Lee - basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." . . . By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. . . . So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people - to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone - then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee - collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards. . . . When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension." . . . Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says. . . . This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency - many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications. . . . Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified. . . . This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors. . . . Which, when you think about it, is insane . . . In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations. . . . In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. . . . The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a protege of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide. . . . In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. . . . As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. . . .

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 11:55 AM

 

ENOUGH! ... Comment by Keith Olberman

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 4:19 PM

 

Does America Face the Risk of a Fascist Backlash?
Without loans from China, the U.S. economy cannot be revived. The significance of this cannot be overstated: the U.S. no longer exercises sovereignty over its own economic affairs. That sovereignty now resides in the hands of China, the U.S.'s greatest long-term rival.

Thanks to Republican policies of massive debt and shipping jobs abroad, the U.S. has technically become a colony of China.

If the largest companies in the world, those at the very heart of the capitalist system itself, can lose virtually all of their value in only 18 months, what is the possible meaning of the phrases "efficient markets" and "fundamental value"?

The other core tenets of free market ideology are equally compromised. Major actors are clearly not rational -- a breakdown of theological proportions admitted by no less an avatar of the cult than its pope himself, Alan Greenspan. Free markets clearly cannot, will not, regulate themselves. It is precisely their innate, irrepressible propensity for sociopathic greed and predatory fraud that has brought the whole of the world's economy to the precipice of collapse.

If Obama is successful, it will not only advertise the full extent of their failure, it will provide a model of liberal governance that would render Republicans irrelevant for decades, much as FDR's success left them out in the political cold for an entire generation. Liberal failure is a matter of life and death for Republicans.

And it's not at all clear that the liberals won't fail. No one should underestimate the task at hand. Never before -- not even during the Great Depression -- has the country inherited such a daunting, intractable set of economic problems

The Republican propensity for fascism must not be underestimated. Witness their phony justifications for the war in Iraq, fanning the flames of nationalistic aggression, just as Hitler did with Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the 1930s. Consider their symbiotic embrace of corporate interests in the oil, weapons, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, finance, and other industries-the same type of corporate interests that sponsored Hitler's ascent to power. Look at their efforts to dismantle civil liberties with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. Or their relentless, pervasive propaganda laundered through their corporate-owned right-wing media machine.

These are the classic hallmarks of fascism. The strategy is to obstruct recovery, facilitate collapse, and then incite the faux-populism of public resentment to re-install a corporatist oligarchy which has failed, but which will not abide a reduction of its privileges or a diminution of its control.

World War I was a once-in-a-millennium upset in the architecture of global power. In four years, it shifted the center of that power from Europe to the United States. But failure now by the U.S. will shift that center once again, from the United States to China, out of the western world where it has resided for the past 500 years. The psychic shock to the billion-odd people living in western civilization, with its liberal democracies, capitalist economies, and Enlightenment ideals, will be incalculable, irretrievable.

This shift may be inevitable and only a matter of time. It is quite possible that the damage inflicted on the western world's economy by rapacious Republicans is already beyond repair. But it will be tragedy beyond measure if such a shift is consummated by the very wrecking crew that took us down the road to ruin, all the while so unctuously proclaiming "patriotism" as its crowning ideal. They are not patriots and their goal is not the revival of American power. It is the revival of their own power, even at the expense of America's. They represent a very dangerous threat to the nation's future.

[The link above will take you to the full text of this story.]

... and who do you suppose will rise to become the Republicans' version of Hitler? ... stay tuned!

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 3:03 PM

 

Coal-sponsored CNN rejects anti-coal ad

Interestingly, YouTube won't let me embed the video you can see via the link above. I wonder why?

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posted by Lorenzo 8:55 PM

 

A Moment of Truth for the Democrats

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posted by Lorenzo 3:20 PM

 

Olbermann - 8 years of Bush in 8 minutes

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posted by Lorenzo 11:42 AM

 

The End of Law in America
(Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 15, 2009)
Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. "I don't believe that anybody is above the law," he responded, but "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." . . . I'm sorry, but if we don't have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years - and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama's remarks to mean that we won't - this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don't face any consequences if they abuse their power. . . . Let's be clear what we're talking about here. It's not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation's security. The fact is that the Bush administration's abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies. . . . Speaking of Iraq, let's also not forget that country's failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There's much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years - in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq? . . . Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years? . . . One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn't there be some penalty for the Bush administration's politicization of every aspect of government? . . . Alternatively, we're told that we don't have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration's political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won't do it all over again, given the chance? . . . Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it's probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he's going to swear to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." That's not a conditional oath to be honored only when it's convenient. . . . And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that's not a decision he has the right to make.

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Of course, young Mr. Obama may actually want to continue the practices of the Bush regime. He has all this new power now. Why should he prosecute Bush for giving it to him?]

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posted by Lorenzo 11:48 AM

 

How Rick Warren Is Undermining AIDs Prevention in Africa
(Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast,January 8, 2009)
Warren's defense against charges of intolerance ultimately depends upon his ace card: his heavily publicized crusade against AIDS in Africa. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod cited Warren's work in Africa as one of "the things on which [Obama and Warren] agree" on the Dec. 28 episode of Meet the Press. Warren may be opposed to gay rights and abortion, the thinking goes, but he tells evangelicals it is their God-given duty to battle one of the greatest pandemics in history. What could be wrong with that? . . . But since the Warren inauguration controversy erupted, the nature of his work against AIDS in Africa has gone unexamined. Warren has not been particularly forthcoming to those who have attempted to look into it. His Web site contains scant information about the results of his program. However, an investigation into Warren's involvement in Africa reveals a web of alliances with right-wing clergymen who have sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education. More disturbingly, Warren's allies have rolled back key elements of one of the continent's most successful initiative, the so-called ABC program in Uganda. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told the New York Times their activism is "resulting in great damage and undoubtedly will cause significant numbers of infections which should never have occurred." . . . By 2005, billboards promoting condom use disappeared from the streets of Kampala, replaced by billboards promoting virginity. "Until recently, all HIV-related billboards were about condoms. Those of us calling for abstinence and faithfulness need billboards, too," Ssempa told the BBC at the time. A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch documented educational material in Uganda's secondary schools falsely claiming condoms had microscopic pores that could be penetrated by the AIDS virus and noted the sudden nationwide shortage of condoms due to new restrictions imposed on condom imports. . . . AIDS activists arrived at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006 with disturbing news from Uganda. Due, at least in part, to the chronic condom shortage, HIV infections were on the rise again. The disease rate had spiked to 6.5 percent among rural men and 8.8 percent among women -- a rise of nearly two points in the case of women. . . . Warren, in his effort to dispel criticism, has denied harboring homophobic sentiments. "I could give you a hundred gay friends," he told MSNBC's Ann Curry on Dec. 18. "I have always treated them with respect. When they come and want to talk to me, I talk to them." . . . But when Uganda's Anglican bishops threatened to bolt from the Church of England because of its tolerant stance towards homosexuals, Warren parachuted into Kampala to confer international legitimacy on their protest. . . . "The Church of England is wrong, and I support the Church of Uganda on the boycott," Warren proclaimed in March 2008. Declaring homosexuality an unnatural way of life, Warren flatly stated, "We shall not tolerate this aspect [homosexuality in the church] at all."

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 11:11 AM

 

"Time" Calls Obama a Bigot
(Kilian Melloy, EDGE Boston,Dec 22, 2008)
The GLBT community and liberals have joined in their condemnation of President-Elect Barack Obama’s selection of mega-church pastor Rick Warren to deliver the Inaugural Invocation. Now Time Magazine has joined the chorus. . . . "Homosexuality, Pastor Warren explained in the virtually content-free language of the dogmatist, is 'not the natural way.'" . . . Cloud recollected that Warren, speaking with an interviewer, had compared marriage equality with incest and pedophiles, and wrote, "I wish the reporter had asked the next logical follow-up: If gays are like child-sex offenders, shouldn't we incarcerate them?" . . . Added Cloud, "Gays and lesbians are angry that Barack Obama has honored Warren, but they shouldn’t be surprised. . . . "Obama has proved himself repeatedly to be a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot. He is far too careful and measured a man to say anything about body parts fitting together or marriage being reserved for the nonpedophilic, but all the same, he opposes equality for gay people when it comes to the basic recognition of their relationships."j . . . Cloud compared Obama to Richard Russell, Jr., "the longtime Senator from Georgia who--as historian Robert Caro has noted--cultivated a reputation as a thoughtful, tolerant politician even as he defended inequality and segregation for decades." . . . Wrote Cloud, "Obama gave a wonderfully Russellian defense of Warren on Thursday at a press conference. Americans, he said, need to ’come together’ even when they disagree on social issues." . . . Added Cloud, "Russell would often use the same tactic to deflect criticism of his civil rights record. It was a distraction, Russell said, from the important business of the day uniting all Americans." . . . Cloud's editorial went on, "Obama also said today that he is a 'fierce advocate for equality' for gays, which is--given his opposition to equal marriage rights--simply a lie. . . . "It recalls the time Russell said, 'I'm as interested in the Negro people of my state as anyone in the Senate. I love them.'" . . . Addressing the popular speculation that Obama's repeated claim not to believe in marriage equality is ideological smoke concealing a more equitable disposition toward gay and lesbian families, Cloud noted, "People seemed to feel that once he had won, he would find a way--in his contemplative style--to help convince Americans that gay people really do deserve basic equality. . . . "Instead, he has found a way to insult gay people deeply."

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 10:05 AM

 

Israel's U.S. Senator Retains Homeland Security Chairmanship
Zionist Senator Lieberman, who primarily represents the interests of Israel in the U.S. Senate, has been allowed to retain the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. This is the vile man who called Obama a traitor, a Marxist, and unfit to lead the country. .... So let's hear it for the Gutless Democrats, Fascism's best friends.

(James Oliphant, Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2008)
Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut senator who was vilified by Democratic activists for his support of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, escaped serious retribution from Democratic Senate colleagues today. . . . Lieberman will remain in the Democratic caucus and keep his chairmanship of the prestigious Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. . . . The result is a far cry from the sentiments voiced by many Democrats after Lieberman spoke at the Republican National Convention this summer and suggested Barack Obama wasn't ready to be president. McCain seriously considered Lieberman as his running mate. . . . Democrats talked about expelling Lieberman from the Democratic caucus and stripping him of the Homeland Security chair. . . . After the recent election, when Democrats gained a bigger majority on the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid met with Lieberman and let it be known that serious punishment was required. Lieberman, for his part, made noises about going over to the Republicans. . . . But there was no sign of that today. Lieberman and Reid stood together before the cameras after the caucus vote, and Reid praised Lieberman's commitment to Democratic principles. "This was not a time for retribution," Reid said. "It was time for moving forward." . . . Lieberman said he regretted some of the statements he made about Obama during the campaign. And he credited the president-elect for calling on Lieberman to stay with the Democrats. Obama last week suggested that Lieberman should not be severely punished. . . . "My hope is that he becomes a Democrat again," California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said after the vote. . . . The resolution was sponsored by Sens. Christopher Dodd (Connecticut), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Thomas Carper (Delaware) and Ken Salazar (Colorado). With the newly elected members of the senate voting, it passed by a 42-13 margin. . . . "The mood overall was 'Let's move on from here,' " Dodd said, adding, "we understand completely the frustration that a lot of Democrats feel." . . . Reid also was elected to another term as majority leader and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was reelected as the majority whip. . . . [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Hey, Democrats, why don't you just go ahead and make Lieberman your leader in the Senate .... I am ashamed to have once called myself a Democrat. I find your party to be filled with despicable cowards. Where is this Change that I'm supposed to believe in?]

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posted by Lorenzo 4:07 PM

 

Understanding the Bailout
If you are confused by all of the jargon being thrown about regarding why the U.S. Taxpayers were forced into bailing out Wall Street, check out the short video clips on Richard Grove's important Web site. ... The bottom line is that we covered the bad bets of the Fat Cats on Wall Street and in financial capitals all around the world.

But there is a lot more valuable information on the site than just the bailout. For example, as a Viet Nam veteran, I also consider it to be a top anti-war site as well.

An interview with Richard Grove is available as Podcast #119 on the C-Realm with KMO.

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posted by Lorenzo 4:01 PM

 

Rising Number of Racist Anti-Obama Actions Reported
(Dexter Hill, Editor and Publisher, November 12, 2008)
Away from the spotlight, many local newspapers around the country have covered recent incidents of racially-motivated reactions to last week's election, from flags hung upside down to the dangling of nooses and cross-burnings. As we noted last week, a couple in northern New Jersey who had an Obama sign on their front lawn woke up to find the charred remains of a cross out there. . . . The Associated Press revealed today, "Police on eastern Long Island are investigating reports that more than a dozen cars were spray painted with racist graffiti, reportedly including a message targeting President-elect Barack Obama. The graffiti included racist slurs and sexually graphic references. At least one resident in the quiet Mastic neighborhood told Newsday her son's car was scribbled with a message threatening to kill Obama." . . . Employees at Hampel's Key and Lockshop in Traverse City, Michigan, flew an American flag upside down last Wednesday protesting of the new president-elect, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported. One worker used a racial slur during an interview with the Record-Eagle: "(The inverted flag is) an international signal for distress and we feel our country is in distress because the n----- got in," said Hampel's employee Rod Nyland . . . Also in Michigan, in Midland, a man dressed in full Ku Klux Klan regalia walked around toting a handgun and waving an American flag. Initially denying it, the man eventually admitted to police that the display was a reaction to the Obama victory. "[The man] had a concealed weapon permit and was walking up and down the sidewalk in front of a vehicle dealership while some motorists shouted obscenities at him and others shouted accolades," police told The Saginaw News. . . . In Pennsylvania, an interracial couple in Apolacon Township discovered the remains of a burned cross in their front yard. "The couple discovered the remnants of the cross about 8:15 a.m. Wednesday (Nov. 5) when a man knocked at their door. Johnson looked out the front window and noticed charring on the utility pole, then discovered two charred 1-by-3-inch planks, each about 4 feet in length, beneath it," according to the Star-Gazette. The woman, who is Jewish, lives with her husband, who is black. "The Little Meadows area was the site of KKK rallies several decades ago, and a local woman who worked on Obama's campaign said Wednesday she heard tales of racist remarks directed at supporters," the story concludes. . . . Authorities in Temecula, Calif., found spray-painted graffiti on a city sidewalk containing a swastika and anti-Obama slogan. . . . From today's Los Angeles Times: "Vandals spray-painted swastikas and racial slurs on a house and several cars in Torrance that displayed campaign signs or bumper stickers for President-elect Barack Obama, authorities said Tuesday. . . . "At one house, the phrase 'Go Back to Africa' was spray-painted across the wall, in addition to a racial epithet on the garage door, Anderson said. Several parked vehicles on the streets were spray-painted with racial slurs, he said." . . . Today, the NAACP called on North Carolina State University to expel four students who spray painted racist messages about Obama. Two of the messages said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head" and "Hang Obama by a noose." . . . Another post-election noose incident happened in Maine. "More than 75 people rallied Sunday against an incident last week in which black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island the day after Barack Obama won the presidential election," according to the Bangor Daily News. At a high school in Gray, a student was suspended after standing up in class, making a racist comment, and saying Obama should not be president, the News reported. Later that day, graffiti making a similar statement was found in a boys' restroom.

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posted by Lorenzo 5:09 PM

 

Keith Olberman Speaks Out Against Bigots

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posted by Lorenzo 8:22 PM

 

Utah Boycott Urged After Calif. Vote
(Brock Vergakis, Associated Press, November 8, 2008)
Utah's growing tourism industry and the star-studded Sundance Film Festival are being targeted for a boycott by bloggers, gay rights activists and others seeking to punish the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its aggressive promotion of California's ban on gay marriage. . . . It could be a heavy price to pay. Tourism brings in $6 billion a year to Utah, with world-class skiing, spectacular red-rock country and the film festival founded by Robert Redford among popular tourist draws. . . . Gay rights activist John Aravosis, whose well-trafficked AmericaBlog.com is urging the boycott, is unapologetic about targeting Utah rather than California, where voters defined marriage in the state Constitution as a heterosexual act. . . . Utah, Aravosis said, "is a hate state," and on this issue, "at a fundamental level, the Utah Mormons crossed the line. . . . They just took marriage away from 20,000 couples and made their children bastards. You don't do that and get away with it." . . . The Mormon Church, based in Salt Lake City, encouraged members to work for passage of the ballot measure. Thousands of Mormons worked as grass-roots volunteers and gave tens of millions of dollars to the campaign. . . . Proposition 8, the measure passed Tuesday, overrode a state Supreme Court ruling that briefly gave same-sex couples the right to wed. . . . The backlash against the church was immediate. Protests erupted outside Mormon temples, online groups formed telling people to boycott Utah -- where more than 60 percent of residents are Mormons, the church says -- and Web sites began popping up, calling for an end to the church's tax-exempt status. . . . Church spokeswoman Kim Farah said in a statement Friday that it is "disturbing" that the church is being singled out for exercising its right to speak out in a free election.

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Although the Mormons may not have noticed, but there is a clause in the U.S. Constitution requiring the separation of church and state, not that the Bush Crime Family has noticed either. They have crossed this line, and IMHO should lose their tax-exempt status.]

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posted by Lorenzo 11:47 AM

 

Mormon Churches Face Nationwide Protests over Gay Marriage Ban

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posted by Lorenzo 2:53 PM

 

Why McCain Wasn't Qualified to be President
(Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, November 6, 2008)
Look: I understand that information given strictly off the record cannot be used. I am a stickler for that myself and there's stuff I know that I cannot tell Dish readers because of those rules. But at the same time, my commitment to you is never to bullshit my opinion that reflects that information. And the reporting of Palin fell into that category at times. I became convinced very early - just from public information - that she was obviously a disastrous choice, made on a whim, and obviously not ready for prime time. On August 30, I posted the following quotes from serious leaders in Alaska who knew Palin: "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?" . . . And this: Anchorage Democratic state Sen. Hollis French said it's a huge mistake by McCain and "reflects very, very badly on his judgment." French said Palin's experience running the state for less than two years hasn't prepared her for this. . . . But actual reporters were soon finding this out for themselves - and not even conveying the gist of that to their viewers and readers. Why not? . . . They kept taking Palin seriously as a veep candidate when she didn't come close to even minimal standards for passing a citizenship test. I'm sorry but I think this is a terrible failing, and it is a reason the mainstream media are imploding. They let the rules of the game over-rule their duty to tell the American people the truth as they began to discover it. The truth is that Sarah Palin had no business whatever being on a national ticket. It was an insanely reckless choice. She could never adequately perform the job of president at a moment's notice, and the McCain campaign and their media enablers were putting this country and the world at serious risk by perpetuating this farce. . . . It was a farce. And it was a potential threat to national security if anything happened to McCain in office. But they couldn't admit a mistake because it would have killed their campaign, destroying our impression of McCain's judgment and management skills. So they kept this farce alive for two months, putting the country at potentially great risk to massage their own careers. Now they are doing all they can to dump on her. But the dumpage goes both ways. The McCain camp picked Palin and stuck with her far longer than any people who put country first would have. Every reason why she should not have been picked is a reason why McCain should never have been president.

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posted by Lorenzo 4:42 PM

 

Too True to be Funny ... CHANGE!

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posted by Lorenzo 9:07 PM

 

Obama Rally In St. Louis Draws 100,000
(Huffington Post, October 18, 2008)
Barack Obama drew a crowd of 100,000 at a rally near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis on Saturday, the AP reports. McCain spent the day campaigning in North Carolina. . . . The focus on the stump Saturday for both Obama and McCain continued to be taxes, and the candidates traded sharp criticisms of each other's plans. . . . More from the AP: McCain, trailing in the polls, fired the first volley, likening his rival to the socialist leaders of Europe and saying he wanted to "convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington." ... [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Hey! Wait a minute. Isn't what Bush and Paulson are doing right now ... a massive redistribution of our treasury, by politicians, into the hands of their cronies?] . . . McCain added, "Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut; it's just another government giveaway." . . . Obama responded a few hours later in appearance before an enormous crowd, saying his Republican rival "wants to cut taxes for the same people who have already been making out like bandits, in some cases literally." . . . "John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people 'welfare,'" Obama said.

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posted by Lorenzo 1:48 PM

 

Why Voter Turnout Is Crucial
The Birth of VideoTheVote
The election's been stolen. What you have to do is to steal it back. --Greg Palast, Investigative Reporter

If you are wondering what you can do to make a difference this time around, it may be worth your time to watch the full length feature or the trailer of this interesting, informative, and very well-produced feature-length film.

BuzzFlash review of this video.
. . . Free For All: A Must-See Movie Before Election Day

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posted by Lorenzo 2:57 PM

 

Is the Federal Reserve Engaged in Acts of Economic Warfare Against America?
(Mike Adams, Natural News, October 8, 2008)
Today, the Federal Reserve is engaged in an eerily similar operation, counterfeiting trillions of dollars in U.S. bank notes and flooding the U.S. money supply with money created from nothing. The result, of course, is the same as was intended by Operation Bernhardt in 1942: The economic destruction of the target nation. Only this time, the target is the United States of America. . . . Hilariously, the Fed claims it's doing this to save the economy. Yet the laws of economics tell us that flooding the money supply with trillions of dollars in new money actually harms the economy. And the Fed has been hard at work causing this harm: $250+ billion two weeks ago, $600+ billion last week and $900 billion earlier this week! It's beginning to crank up the printing presses to the tune of a trillion dollars a week, and by doing so, it’s contributing to the destruction of the U.S. economy at a pace the Third Reich could have barely imagined. . . . Has the Fed declared war on the working class? . . . If the actions pursued by the Federal Reserve were being masterminded by Al-Qaeda, they would be denounced as acts of war. In World War II, such actions were deliberate acts of war. Targeting the economy for destruction by flooding the money supply with counterfeit currency is, by any measure, a threat to any nation. . . . So why is the Federal Reserve engaged in actions that, if committed by other nations, would warrant a military response? This is not an idle question. I'm not asking this in a satirical way. I'm quite serious about this: Why is the Fed committing acts of economic warfare against the United States of America? (The Fed, by the way, is a private company. It is not, as you've been led to believe, part of the U.S. government.) . . . By counterfeiting trillions of dollars like a Sachsenhausen operation on steroids, the Fed is carpet-bombing the U.S. economy with an unprecedented flood of fiat currency, causing the exact same economic destruction intended by the Nazis in World War II (but on a much more devastating scale). And it's doing this as part of a new economic war. . . . Class warfare has begun . . . What war? The war between the wealthy elite and the working class. The Fed is working hard, of course, to protect the wealthy elite. Over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money has already been earmarked to bail out the rich, elite bankers who lost other people's money in a series of idiotic bets on fictitious financial instruments. . . . The Federal Reserve is now doing to the U.S. what the terrorists could never have accomplished: The destruction of a large portion of its economy, its currency and the savings of its people. . . . The economic losses of 9/11 pale in comparison to the financial destruction that has been unleashed onto America by the Federal Reserve. . . . Yet, amazingly, it wasn't "terrorists" who put this plan into place. Who was it, exactly? Your Congressional representatives played an important role in allowing this to happen. In a grand, historical betrayal of the American people, members of your own U.S. House of Representatives and Senate voted to initiate a massive economic coup in America, violating the wishes of 99% of the American people (who are aligned against bailing out the rich on the backs of the poor). . . . The Real Agenda: A Massive Transfer of Wealth We are not watching an economic rescue, friends. We are watching an economic coup. Creating and dumping trillions of dollars into the money supply is an act of war. But it's a war with a specific purpose. . . . What's happening right now is that the United States is being taken over by King Henry and his accomplices. More than fifty percent of the housing and nearly twenty percent of the entire U.S. economy is now controlled by one person -- Henry Paulson -- and that person answers to no one. He isn't elected, he can't be removed from office, and he's subject to no law. . . . My reporting on the U.S. financial situation is downright tame compared to what's really going on behind the scenes. I can't get radical enough to accurately describe the degree of deception and outright theft that's taking place in Washington right now. . . . History will show that not only were my warnings accurate, they were understated by a wide margin. Reporting the truth is a delicate thing. People can only stomach so much truth at any one time. Few people can handle the whole truth, which is why I usually refrain from reporting it. There are things stated in this article that only hint at much bigger stories that will someday be told by others. . . . Only the most open-minded, skeptical thinkers can even mentally consider the real truth of what's happening in our world today. Most people have been brainwashed into living in a fictional world, and they are unable to even consider truths that threaten their grip on reality. . . . As a result, the public has to be led by the hand from one realization to the next, little by little, until they attain the ability to see the world as it really is rather than the illusion that has been constructed for them by the very people running this financial scam.

Why the U.S. Economy is Collapsing

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posted by Lorenzo 2:58 PM

 

U.S. Combat Troops in Iraq repatriated to "help with civil unrest" in USA
(Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 26, 2008)
The Army Times reports that the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is returning from Iraq to defend the Homeland, as "an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks." The BCT unit has been attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). (See Gina Cavallaro, Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, September 8, 2008). . . . "Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks. . . . It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. . . . But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. . . . After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one. . . . The BCT is an army combat unit designed to confront an enemy within a war theater. . . . With US forces overstretched in Iraq, why would the Pentagon decide to undertake this redeployment within the USA, barely one month before the presidential elections? The new mission of the 1st Brigade on US soil is to participate in "defense" efforts as well as provide "support to civilian authorities". . . . What is significant in this redeployment of a US infantry unit is the presumption that North America could, in the case of a national emergency, constitute a "war theater" thereby justifying the deployment of combat units. . . . The new skills to be imparted consist in training 1st BCT in repressing civil unrest, a task normally assumed by civilian law enforcement. . . . What we are dealing with is a militarization of civilian police activities in derogation of the Posse Comitatus Act. . . . Civil unrest resulting from from the financial meltdown is a distinct possibility, given the broad impacts of financial collapse on lifelong savings, pension funds, homeownership, etc. . . . The timing of this planned militarization is crucial: how will it affect the presidential elections scheduled for Tuesday November 4. . . . But at the same time, the Bush administration may be seeking a justification to establish martial law and intervene militarily within the USA. . . . The deployment of an Army combat unit on US territory, with a mission to curb "social unrest" constitutes a dangerous historical precedent. It creates a new legitimacy, namely that combat units can integrate civilian law enforcement functions and that this comes to be accepted both by the US Congress and the American public. . . . It should also be under that the combat units repatriated from Iraq to "defend the Homeland" will be replaced by mercenary forces.

. . . Read more!


posted by Lorenzo 4:59 PM

 

Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
(William Greider, The Nation, September 19, 2008)
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses--many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What's not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction? . . . If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics--exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice. . . . A kindred critic, Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher in New York, defined the sponsors of this stampede to action: "Let us be clear, it is not citizen groups, private investors, equity investors or institutional investors broadly who are calling for this government purchase fund. It is almost exclusively being lobbied for by precisely those institutions that believed they were 'smarter than the rest of us,' institutions who need to get those assets off their balance sheet at an inflated value lest they be at risk of large losses or worse." . . . Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough--using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. . . . More important, if the taxpayers are compelled to refinance the villains in this drama, then Americans at large are entitled to equivalent treatment in their crisis. That means the suspension of home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies for debt-soaked families during the duration of this crisis. The debtors will not escape injury and loss--their situation is too dire--but they deserve equal protection from government, the chance to work out things gradually over some years on reasonable terms. . . . The government, meanwhile, may have to create another emergency agency, something like the New Deal, that lends directly to the real economy--businesses, solvent banks, buyers and sellers in consumer markets. . . . The agenda is staggering. The United States is ill equipped to deal with it smartly, not to mention wisely. We have a brain-dead lame duck in the White House. The two presidential candidates are trapped by events, trying to say something relevant without getting blamed for the disaster. The people should make themselves heard in Washington, even if only to share their outrage.

[TO THE BARRICADES!!!!]

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posted by Lorenzo 10:03 AM

 

McCain, American Traitor, Covered-up News of Live POWs Abandoned by USA
(Sydney H. Schanberg, The Nation, September 17, 2008)
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books. . . . Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them. . . . The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number--probably hundreds--of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain. . . . The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine. . . . Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington. . . . Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners--just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home. . . . Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data--letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind." . . . Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were still alive. . . . There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan's presidency, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992. . . . Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory had played tricks on him. . . . But the story didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify. . . . On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE. . . . The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE." . . . McCain, whose POW status made him the committee's most powerful member, attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect--she began to cry. [COMMENT by Lorenzo: I was deeply involved in the POW movement at this time and know the people involved. And there is no doubt in my mind but what McCain knows we left men behind, ALIVE, but he failed to do anything about it except attack the families. He is as unpatriotic a person as I've ever encountered. McCain is a liar and a traitor in my book.] . . . After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those 20 POWs. . . . The committee's final report, issued in January 1993, began with a forty-three-page executive summary--the only section that drew the mainstream press's attention. It said that only "a small number" of POWs could have been left behind in 1973. But the document's remaining 1,180 pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally rebelled against the cover-up. . . . Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam--nor had they ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the ground. . . . In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me privately that as it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips but also a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men--those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture--were eventually executed. My own research has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few--if any--are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.) . . . For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of McCain's role not only in keeping the subject out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal campaign. [Comment by Lorenzo: Yes. The traitor John Kerry was also deeply involved in this cover-up.] The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others (including Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary). . . . An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved 1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said that the "head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency." . . . Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge--only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. . . . McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against "any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the Pentagon. . . . McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs. . . . McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair. . . . The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them. . . . It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by McCain. . . . In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II, was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace." . . . McCain still didn't know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes, "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father." . . . Does this hint at explanations for McCain's efforts to bury information about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.

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posted by Lorenzo 9:03 PM