Clinton In Mexico

Clinton Voices U.S. Support of Mexico in Trip

GUANAJUATO, Mexico — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came here on Monday to deliver a message of solidarity with President Felipe Calderón and to rebut public doubts about persistent violence.

She solidified relations between the U.S. and Mexico by hiring a gardener and a cleaning woman and a body guard for the cleaning woman. She said the cleaning woman might need protection from some, uh, man who might be, uh, hanging around the, uh, vicinity of her home.

Does "Change" Mean Anything?

"What is government if words have no meaning"     Jared Loughner

Two years ago Americans voted for change. Two years later Americans again voted for change. This voting ritual is generations old but the only change we’ve seen is in the skin tone, ethnicity, gender or sexuality of those selected by one minority to be elected by another. The word has no meaning. Absolutely nothing has changed about the substance of our problem:

 A dysfunctional system is destroying democracy, faith, sanity, morality and the natural environment in which they all exist.

The recent tragedy in Arizona was a direct result of that social dysfunction but ignorance purveyors have used it to indict only that state, or small groups, or individual personalities, finding them guilty of creating a frustrating climate easily manipulated to bring angry division to the American public, thereby making that public easier to control.

The people at the top of a political economy that exports costly jobs while importing cheap labor remain secure while scapegoats are blamed for being unemployed natives, employed illegals or overburdened taxpayers. The wars that have cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars and created threats to Americans that never existed before are expanding to new nations. Those bloody actions are opposed by a majority, which also calls for tax increases on the richest Americans, but government consistently rules against them and for its minority owners.

The corporate state provides brainless entertainment to help control the national consciousness, and news and political commentary that make the entertainment seem brilliant by comparison. We are all but guaranteed misguided reaction at best, and homicidal lunacy at worst. If the Arizona terrorist had chosen broadcasting instead of violence, he might have had his own show on Fox, CNN or MSNBC.

The present congress will be even worse than the previous group that was of the ineffectual president’s own party. He no longer has the majority with which he did nothing but obey his corporate employers, so he can be even more bipartisan and further enrich billionaires and their servants who privately profit from all our public loss. No less a teacher of capitalist economics than Bernie Madoff reminded his investors that a profit on one side always means a loss on the other. He practiced what he preached to create fabricated billions and was sent to prison, but those who locked him up are still doing it to create fabricated trillions. Instead of being in jail, they are running the global empire. Their private profits are our social loss. Meanwhile, we are distracted by self-serving and often near imbecilic ravings that pass for political democracy as our society disintegrates while creating new billionaires.  Is it any wonder that some people seem to be losing their minds?

The minority leading us to social degradation will maintain control until the majority creates a truly democratic state. In the short term that may seem as likely as visits from extra terrestrials, but there may not be a long term unless we transform the morally perverse and environmentally poisoned corporate empire that threatens all life on earth.

Right now we’re still attacking scapegoats within, or fighting outside forces non-existent until we create them. Mind managers label our problems as creeping socialism or stalking fascism, with little understanding of what those words mean. The bitterness of language is countered by attempts to make certain words criminal, with charges of “hate speech” leveled by supporters of alleged “free speech”. A nation committing hate crimes of mass murder all over the globe has its citizens despising one another and paying little attention to the systemic roots of their problem.

Just as corporate capital’s White House cheerleader has done nothing to change the economy, the new congress will do nothing to change the relationship of the USA to Israel. That sordid union with a racial supremacist nation held in contempt almost everywhere but in the American government has billions of our dollars and thousands of our lives expended in wars for its support. And the president and congress will continue raising the budget for private banking by cutting the budgets for public service. The problems that outrage millions are blamed on everything but their source and so distressed Americans helped elect the new congress. But the change they are offered by the right is as much language distortion as the change previously offered by what passes for a left. The problem is that politicians who supposedly represent competing parties are united as employees in support of the minority-controlled system. That system is what must be changed, not simply the hired hands administering its needs at public expense.

The popular big government versus small government argument disguises the reality of a corporate state owned by a tiny minority, with political factions fighting to share in its wealth. The overwhelming majority of Americans are not served at all but are in fact robbed in this false debate that results in continued damage inflicted no matter which faction operates on behalf of its wealthy minority controllers.

We suffer financial inequality so blatant it’s a full time public relations job for consciousness controllers to keep us dulled into believing their tales of outside terror and inside socialism. Looking at America objectively would make it easy to assume that most of us are ignorant, stoned, drunk and homicidal. But majorities oppose the wars and support taxing the rich, while a substantial minority is growing in resistance to the uncritical relationship with Israel. As soon as we stop blaming those below us and start dealing with those above us we may give real meaning to the words government and democracy. We are slowly joining the world in  a  global revolution to transform reality and not continue endlessly re-branding failure. We’re  just not doing it fast enough to give it meaning. We need to speed up the process.

Presidential Elections and the Supplicant Mentality

by Michael K. Smith

It is nothing short of amazing that so many apparently well-meaning people are still prepared to argue that an Al Gore presidency in 2000 would have changed the course of history, avoiding the disaster of the 2003 Iraq War and guiding us to a saner 2011.

As with matters of faith in general, the way they know this is from sheer personal conviction. According to this romantic scenario, in the wake of 911, with Republicans screaming about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of Islamofascists and demanding Saddam Hussein's head, Al Gore, described by his own mother as "a born conformist," would have struck out on an independent path for the first time ever and refused to invade a country that was already being continually bombed by the U.S. with (then Vice-President) Gore's hearty approval. Maybe, but given Gore's record, the conclusion is something less than totally obvious.

Gore is the man who caved in to the Miami Cuban fanatics insisting that Elian Gonzalez had an inalienable right to live with his kidnappers forever; the man who reached the House of Representatives on a platform of guns, God, racism, and states rights; the man who marched in lockstep with the NRA and supported the Hyde Amendment denying government-funded abortions to poor women, even voting against an early version of the bill that would have made an exception in cases of rape. Gore supported Ronald Reagan's war on tiny Nicaragua (which the World Court ruled was international terrorism), the disastrous deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada, the 1991 Gulf Slaughter, and the bombing attacks on Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. He approved of the C.I.A's arming and training of moujahedeen guerrillas and declared he wouldn't "hesitate to overthrow a government with covert actions."

Gore worshipped Israel, at whose prompting Washington invaded Iraq, and was insulted at Papa Bush's initiative to withhold $10 billion in loan guarantees until the Holy State talked to the PLO. When Jesse Jackson stood up for Palestinian rights Gore was first to insist that it was racist to not attack him for defying the consensus of the white candidates in the race. Since the white candidates were agreed that indigenous Arabs had no rights in Palestine, they were obligated to not let sympathy for downtrodden blacks in America lead them to find fault with Israel's campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine.

Gore was also an arms dealer's wet dream. He voted for the neutron bomb, the B-1 and B-2 bombers, the Trident II missile, the MX missile, the Midgetman, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and mini-Star Wars. After backing a nerve gas missile called the Big Eye, he asked President Reagan to phone his mother in hopes the Great Communicator could explain his vote.

Gore was a long-time supporter of the Clinch River breeder reactor, which manufactures plutonium, a millionth of a gram of which is sufficient to induce lung cancer when inhaled, and was an enthusiastic proponent of the free market theology that treated nature as a boundless sewer. While advancing the agenda of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, he billed himself as the Green Prince of the Environment.

This is the man on whom hopes for a decent future allegedly depended. He was so bad he couldn't even carry his home state of Tennessee. Of course, that's not the fault of Gore's appalling politics, but rather, of Ralph Nader's ill-advised presence in the 2000 presidential race. Damn egomaniac!

It's a reasonable surmise that a Gore presidency would have been a disaster, just like every other 20th century Democratic administration was (see posts for 8/20/09, 7/3/09, 6/25/09, 5/11/09, 4/27/09, 4/15/09, and 4/1/09 for a review of the seven Democratic administrations of the 20th century). Yes, there are differences between the GOP and the Democrats. No, exploiting those differences will not lead us away from the precipice of human extinction, a matter allegedly of some concern to "progressives."

Barack Obama was supposed to be an obvious improvement over George Bush. He hasn't been. He has increased the Pentagon budget, extended the Bush tax cuts, escalated pilotless drone attacks, endorsed assassinating American citizens, expanded the "war on terror" into Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, continued torture and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, backed Jewish apartheid, given trillions of dollars to looters on Wall Street, and presided over the worst unemployment situation in 80 years, with millions of Americans losing their careers, their homes, and their pensions. His single legislative achievement - health care "reform" - keeps the HMO profiteers in control, guaranteeing that thousands of Americans will continue dying every year due to undiagnosed and untreated illnesses.

It is long since time we questioned our allegiance to the crackpot realism that makes a God of expedience and demands nothing more from us than quadrennial ratification of the evil of two lessers. Over the course of time the choice becomes not Gore or Bush, but Gore and Bush, not to mention Carter-and-Reagan, Nixon-and-Clinton, and Ike-and-LBJ. The point is that calls for capitulation easily masquerade as political pragmatism, making subservience a way of life.

This may come as news to the "let's go down on our knees and fight like hell" crowd, but the reality is that there was no more practical value to the Warsaw ghetto revolt than there has been to Ralph Nader's repeated presidential campaigns. Doomed to failure from the start, it needlessly claimed the lives of German security forces who had been assigned the task of ethnic cleansing for Hitler. So if the "let's be practical" logic of the Nader-phobes is correct, the Jews who rose up to defy Nazi power were egomaniacs pointlessly committed to self-serving theatrics.

It should be clear what's wrong with that picture.

Those who would make an argument for cowardice ought first to declare themselves cowards. If we cannot stomach this, we should stop babbling about microscopic differences between Israel-worshipping corporate candidates, and mount a popular challenge to Zionized capitalism that will make the Tea Party look like, well - a tea party.

Otherwise, we have no one else to blame but ourselves.

Source:

Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair, "Al Gore: A User's Manual" (Verso: 2000)

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George" and "Portraits of Empire" both with Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com