More Breathtaking Hypocrisy From the Demopublicans

The Democrats are continuing their ridiculous equation of Voter ID laws with the lynching era in the Old South. After Jonathan Tobin commented in CommentaryMagazine.com that Americans need to show a picture ID to board a plane, conduct a bank transaction, and even just "buy a beer," Eugene Robinson replied in the Washington Post that buying a beer "isn't a constitutionally protected right," adding that to violate such rights "is a crime against democracy." And Andrew Rosenthal in NYTimes.com chimed in with the claim that about 18 percent of voters in heavily black Philadelphia have no ID, which could lose the swing state for the Democrats in November.

At this point, an annoying question intrudes, though apparently not on Democratic minds. If 18% of Philadelphia voters are so marginalized that they can't even cash a check or take out a book from the local library, doesn't that mean that the Democratic Party has utterly failed to relieve the plight of the poor, and should therefore forfeit its support at the polls? Nearly half a century after the launching of the Great Society this should be an obvious point, but Democrats are staggeringly obtuse and don't see the obvious.

Furthermore, even taking the Democratic Party point of view at face value on this issue, how serious a "crime against democracy" is interfering with voting, as compared with restricting viable candidacy to those who completely prostitute themselves to wealthy corporate campaign donors? The latter absolutely guarantees that the popular will is perpetually thwarted, whereas vote suppression at most determines the form anti-democratic politics will take in a given election cycle. In short, much ado about very little.

Far worse than all this was President Obama's call at the United Nations for Arab leaders to denounce the anti-Washington violence that has erupted across the Muslim world in recent days. After conceding that yet another Western occasion of crude anti-Islam propaganda had inflamed Muslim passions and contributed to recent riots, the president had the nerve to lecture Muslims that the U.S. First Amendment protects even hateful writings, film, and speech, so that Arabs who denounce "the slander of the Prophet of Islam" should also speak out against radicals who destroy Christian churches, deny the Holocaust, and "use hatred of America, or the West, or Israel as the central principle of politics."

Whew. Let's start with the Holocaust. Assertion and denial are characteristic of argument, so what's wrong with denying the canonical Holocaust? And if denouncing Holocaust deniers is obligatory, shouldn't we also "speak out" against anti-Christian fanatics who "deny" that a baby can be born to a virgin? How hateful can they be?

In any event, in spite of the First Amendment, U.S. immigration authorities cooperated with a German extradition request to have Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel put on trial in Germany for heresy. Zundel had already been tried and convicted of heresy in Canada, and, as a result of the two trials has spent a great deal of his life in prison. For thought crimes. Card-carrying A.C.L.U. members are completely unconcerned.

Furthermore, if the U.S. is so unalterably opposed to punishing speech, why was Julius Streicher put to death at Nuremberg? Streicher's only crime was writing and publishing Nazi propaganda. And lest one think that the U.S. was justified in that instance because of being in a declared war, what is the justification for Obama seizing the right to assassinate Americans on his say-so alone, for speech "aiding and abetting" terrorism? Since Washington is the leading terrorist in the world today, and has been for some time, a literal interpretation of this standard could lead to the liquidation of the entire U.S. intellectual class. There must be better ways to liberate the public mind from the lunatic orthodoxies of Wall Street and the Israel fanatics.

Incidentally, if destruction of Christianity is an issue, what about Israel's destruction of Palestinian Christian churches? Doesn't that count? For Obama, it clearly doesn't. Why not?

Finally, if hatred of the Soviet Union could serve as the central principle of U.S. politics throughout the Cold War, why can't hatred of America and Israel serve as the central principle of politics for Arabs and Muslims today? Recall that the Soviet Union carried out nothing remotely comparable to the U.S. and Israel's constant bombings and invasions of Arab and Muslim peoples, most notably in Palestine. Why shouldn't people hate being subjected to that, and why shouldn't that hatred be at the center of their politics?

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal objected to Obama's attempt at conciliatory rhetoric (the president conceded that the recent anti-Islam video was "crude and disgusting"), reminding readers of Obama's pledge to prevent Iran from going nuclear, and warning that "the cold reality is that after nearly four years of failed diplomacy and half-hearted sanctions," neither Iran nor Israel believe him. The proof is said to be that Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was "jaunty and arrogant" during his recent visit to New York, where he was seen "snidely flashing peace signs," and describing Israel as a "short-lived historical aberration" soon to be "eliminated."

It is difficult to know where to start with this barrage, which is more crude and disgusting than whatever might have appeared on the anti-Islam video. In the first place, there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear bomb. What it has is a nuclear electricity program, which admittedly can conceal a bomb-making motive fairly easily, but since Israel has hundreds of nuclear bombs and refuses to enter negotiations designed to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, how seriously can one take the Wall Street Journal's accusations, which make no mention of this? Not very seriously at all.

As for Ahmadinejad, just how does one "snidely" flash a peace sign? The suggestion is that Iran, which is supposedly an "aggressor" because it is accepted in the Middle East and allegedly lends aid and support to peoples Washington and Tel Aviv have chosen to attack, has no more business flashing a peace sign than Adolf Hitler. This is absurd, of course, as Iran has attacked no one in 2000 years, whereas Washington overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953 and has been unremittingly hostile to Iran since its revolution in 1979, including lending support to forces committing major acts of terrorism against Iranian government officials. In short, Obama and Hillary Clinton are far more cynical in their calls for peace than Ahmadinejad could ever be. But don't hang by your lip waiting for the corporate media to report this.

Which leaves the matter of Israel being a short-lived historical aberration soon to be "eliminated." Of course, Palestine was quite literally eliminated by the formation of Israel, and the hysterics now beating the war drums for a desired USrael attack on Iran are very well aware of it. One day Palestine was home to a viable indigenous Arab culture and the next day it was declared a Jewish state, which proceeded to drive out as many Arabs as it could and subjugate those that remained. Since that time Israel has dedicated itself to the suppression and destruction of Palestinian Arab culture, which is genocide under current international law. One can only hope that Ahmadinejad is correct in stating that this aberrant (apartheid) state will indeed be transformed into something humane and decent in the near future, although there is no reason to suppose that Iran intends to achieve this end militarily, which it could not do even if it wanted to.

In any event, the intent of the Wall Street Journal's disgusting propaganda is for readers to conclude that Iran is preparing to nuke Israel off the map. But we've been down this road before. Remember Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? They, too, were allegedly a dagger pointed at USrael. The only problem was that they didn't exist.

Iran has attacked no one, and it has no suicidal ambition to nuke Israel. The danger to the Middle East emanates from the fanatic ideology of Washington and Tel Aviv, which their media lapdogs are endlessly striving to cover up.

Source:

The Week - The Best of the U.S. and International Media, October 5, 2012

False Savior: Barack Obama (6) - The Honduran Coup

Although officially opposed to the 2009 coup (Obama publicly opposed it, saying it set a "terrible precedent") President Obama did nothing to defend democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, and much to oppose him. Washington joined the Organization of American States in criticizing his overthrow, but it did not withdraw its ambassador in protest, as did Latin American and European countries, a more appropriate reaction to thugocracy, but only if one truly opposes authoritarian rule. However, U.S. leaders have what is called a "pragmatic orientation," which means that they judge right and wrong based on whether or not it advances their power agenda. So what's good for Wall Street and the Israel fanatics is good for the country.

Manuel Zelaya's sins were unforgivable. He had raised the Honduran minimum wage, while also carrying out other populist reforms, declaring undeferentially that U.S. aid did not "make us vassals" or give Washington a unique right to humiliate the country. He also began to improve relations with Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, joining the Venezuelan-subsidized oil program Petrocaribe, and then the anti-"free trade" bloc ALBA as well. (Washington supported the 2002 coup against Chavez in Venezuela and is determined to limit his influence to this day.) And Zelaya had taken steps toward allying himself with liberation-theologian priests and other environmental activists protesting mining and biofuel-induced deforestation. So when he raised the minimum wage, the U.S.-trained military kidnapped him in his pajamas, put him on a plane, and flew him out of the country.

Institutional support for the Honduran military was not interrupted by the coup. Washington continued to train Honduran officers, and the largely U.S.-controlled International Monetary Fund extended a $150 million loan to the coup regime, this after having withdrawn loans to the democratically-elected Zelaya government because of disagreement over his economic policies.

Obama separated the U.S. from virtually all of Latin America and Europe by accepting the coup government, which he refused to describe as such, and by recognizing subsequent elections under military rule. With no sense of irony, Obama's ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, called the coup-produced elections "a great celebration of democracy." Meanwhile, Arturo Valenzuela, Obama's State Department official in charge of Western hemisphere affairs, told the press that the coup had majority support: " . . .the issue is not who is going to be the next president . . . The Honduran people decided that." How? By choosing between two coup supporters while the elected president Zelaya was holed up in the British Embassy. Adding sting to the insult, Obama's representative to the Organization of American States instructed Latin Americans, long regarded by Washington as naive simpletons on a wayward course, that they should abandon their "world of magical realism" and accept the legitimacy of the coup.

Whatever is, is right. Long live democracy.

After Zelaya was expelled to Costa Rica in June 2009, economist Mark Weisbrot, an experienced analyst of Latin American affairs, commented that the social structure of the coup was "a recurrent story in Latin America," pitting "a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president." Whatever their moral flaws, "mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt leaders" are better than populist democracy for U.S. business interests, so they tend to win Washington's backing.

Economist Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus at the Wharton School of Finance points out that, "Obama's support of the June 28, 2009 military coup that ousted a democratically elected president is a throwback to the National Security State years . . . it is clear that the (Obama) Administration knew the coup was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was actually shipped out of his country through the U.S. base in Honduras. It is also clear that while there have been occasional verbal criticisms of the coup, and even penalties, the United States has stood alone, supported only by a few reliable Latin American clients - Panama, Costa Rica, and Colombia - in accepting the coup. . . . The [subsequent] election was a coup-ratification effort with no alternative candidates, under conditions of state terrorism." Amnesty International reported that after Zelaya was overthrown thousands of Hondurans were arrested, hundreds beaten and hospitalized, dozens charged with sedition. Many more were kidnapped, raped, tortured, 'disappeared' and assassinated. (Edward S. Herman, "Liberals and Military Dictatorships: From Johnson to Obama," Z Magazine, January 2010)

Key members of the Honduran military involved in the coup were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas (known as "the school of coups" in Latin America, and now renamed, "The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" in the U.S.), including Generals Romeo Vasquez and Luis Javier Prince. As mentioned, after the coup the Pentagon continued training members of the Honduran military at Fort Benning, Georgia, so Obama's weak criticism of the coup was merely rhetorical.

At the Summit of North American Leaders in Mexico in August 2009, Obama tried to portray his refusal to come to the aid of a democratic government being overthrown by the military as evidence of his anti-interventionist politics! "The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening . . . If these critics think that it's appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is that maybe there's some hypocrisy involved in their approach to U.S.-Latin American relations that certainly is not going to guide the policy of my administration." Of course, no one had advocated that Obama dispatch the Marines to Tegucigalpa, merely that he take concrete actions to see that democracy was restored, which he refused to do.

Even the more reactionary governments of Alvaro Uribe of Colombia and Felipe Calderon of Mexico felt the need to denounce the Honduran coup. But when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked if "restoring the constitutional order" in Honduras required restoring Zelaya, she would not say yes. Philip Crowley, Assistant Secretary of of Public Affairs at the State Department, stated that the coup should serve as a "lesson" for the deposed Zelaya, who had signed trade and oil accords with Venezuela. This is the "pragmatic orientation" at work. It's useful, so we must overlook incidental matters like the mass arrest, torture, and murder of Honduran civilians justifiably outraged at seeing their democratic government overthrown.

The evidence of recent years demonstrates that the era of U.S.-supported coups is far from over. Washington supported the Venezuelan coup in 2002, kidnapped and exiled the president of Haiti in 2004, and aided and abetted coups in Honduras and Paraguay in 2009 and 2012 respectively. Obama is just the latest imperial handmaiden of Wall Street's America, the White House Negro mopping up for his Masters.

Voter Suppression: An American Tradition

The political ploys of our corporate parties can be seen as unique to them  if you accept the fiction of our  national democracy. That fiction is more a religious faith than it is a democratic system. It serves to not only keep things as they are but make them worse when voters seeking change are tricked into maintaining rather than solving our problems.

The center-right party is campaigning to keep the November vote down, especially among so-called minority Americans. This is the divisive policy practiced by both sides even if to bring different outcomes. Along with their brain dead notion that elections are being decided by illegal voters, there is an equally democracy damaging idea on the center-left that bringing minorities to the polls – only as minorities - can assure corporate rule superior to that of the center-right in the way that polio is superior to cancer. Meanwhile, voters get to choose which disease will be maintained as proof of our great democracy.

People from the center-right are obsessed with the idea that illegal immigrants are voting in numbers great enough to affect election outcomes. It may be that somewhere, at sometime , an immigrant voted illegally. But that happens about as often as someone is simultaneously attacked by a shark and struck by lightening. The potential is a little greater than that of alien invasion from outer space. Yet people are feverishly protecting a democracy - which has never really  existed – from this alien invasion out of foreign space.

Almost as bad is the idea from the center-left that votes are being stolen by computerized voting machines endangering that same non-existent but devoutly believed in democracy. This one is entertained by people who think themselves intellectually superior to the illegal voter folks but while the scare stories are as gripping, the material evidence is as far fetched.

Elections are regularly stolen from the people, but hardly by illegal voters or nefarious machine tampering. As this is written in September, nearly 500 million dollars has already been spent on the campaign. Each corporate candidate has already raised more than 700 million dollars . Democracy?  Sure, right over there under the illegal voter’s foot and next to the computer stealing her vote.

Propaganda about votes stolen by machines, foreigners or Plan Nine From  Outer Space only serve to cover a history of national elections controlled by great wealth with voters herded into polling places with no more real choice than cattle herded into a slaughter house. If that seems harsh, consider our history.

The nation’s origin, biblically taught as a patriarchal benediction by “founding fathers”, was essentially an organization to keep wealth in their hands and see to it that their peasants, servants and slaves remained worshipful of the fathers and mindful of their lower status. Despite this, desires for real freedom and democracy persisted, with enough people fighting for them to bring about great advances in the material status of the common people. But the power relationship of rulers to ruled has not changed, even if  descendants of those peasants, servants and slaves now ride cars instead of horses or rent condos instead of hovels. At least in some cases.

It is the perpetuation of this class division that our national electoral process has always served, with prevention of majority organization sustained up to the present.

But the threat to global minority rule and American royalty is under great stress, not the least because the world is facing a crisis of capital that is really a crisis for humanity. As imperial power is opposed by greater numbers demanding majority control, the need for heightened divisions among the people becomes more urgent. Thus, we have our voting public turned against itself by a propaganda barrage which would be hilarious if not so deadly.

Voting is already easy in much of america and perhaps should be even easier. The hard part is having anything to actually vote for, and that should be our real concern. Which is why our minds are occupied with stories about illegal voters and voter suppression, some of it true, but all of it unimportant in the larger picture of what we call, despite all evidence, our democratic tradition.

Some feel that having to provide a photo I.D. in order to vote ranks as a crime against civility. What is really criminal is that some born in this country are unable to get such identification because they are poor. This in an economy that imports cheap labor, even illegally, and provides them with social security numbers and driver’s licenses so that profits can be gleaned from their labor. And in some places, voter registration is possible by mail and all you need is an address and ss#, which feeds into the fantasy of legions of foreign voters.

As loopy as the seekers of alien voters are their  brethren who claim Gestapo tactics at having to show personal identification to do things like vote. Certain civil libertarians would find it intolerable to be asked to identify themselves? Imagine this:

You march into a bank, say “Hi, I’m Warren Buffet and I’d like to withdraw  50 thousand from my account. No, just kidding, I’m really Bill Gates and I only need 25 thousand. Still joshing you; I’m really Barack Romney and I just need 10 thousand. Thanks. Have a nice day.”

Of course that’s ridiculous, but if you have to prove your identity to do something like get a license, open a bank account, cash a check or get married, what is wrong with doing so in order to exercise the cherished, if fictional, sacred rites of democratic tradition?

The fact that some use the lack of I.D.to suppress votes is not nearly as bad as the fact that a system does not provide such identification to all its citizens, but distributes them as it does food, clothing, shelter and health care: on the basis of whether it can be purchased. Viva democracy?

Instead of going to the polls on election day, would you be better off going to a church, shul or mosque and saying your prayers?. Probably so, unless you make a truly democratic choice and vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party or some other candidate who is not a corporate servant. That might strengthen a real democratic tradition by ending minority rule, along with fear of alien votes and rigged computers.

Islam, Elections and Managed Lies

While a multi-million dollar ad campaign posing as a democratic process informs us of the startling news that Republicans lie, Romney is a capitalist, Obama is a Muslim-socialist-communist agent of terror- and- the only hope black people have, and American Idol isn’t a TV show describing the plight of citizens without employment, serious problems and their possible solutions might better be found by excavating ancient ruins to find evidence that Jesus was married or that Moses was gay.

Separating truth from lies is not the job of our mass media . It is joined at the hip to our government, which is locked in a passionate embrace with corporate capital in a perverse ménage-a-trois that threatens to bring forth ever more mentally disabled offspring. What this unholy alliance does to our social and natural outer environments is matched by its endless attack on our internal system, especially our capacity to think. When it comes to thinking about the more than a billion Muslims of the Abrahamic triad of Judeo-Christian-Islam, our media and government are united in creating an atmosphere of hateful and near raving insanity.

The western establishment uproar over violent reactions to an islamophobic film that continues a program of intense disrespect and fanaticism directed at  Muslims all over the world led to an even greater uproar of arrogant ignorance in response. How can they be so childish, echoed angry voices from the U.S. secretary of state to corporate pundits and other media stenographers. Why this allegedly irrational response to what is seen by the intellectually blind as simply a stupid film of mysterious origins? While blamed on an alleged Coptic Christian zealot, well financed Israeli supporters at work for years in denigrating Islam and casting the religion as a super-nazi plot to control planet earth and kill its jewish population went unquestioned.

More popular for western consumption were analysts (?) debunking every action by angry mobs in Muslim nations as poor, manipulated people too ignorant to understand that western neo-colonialist invasions and intrusions, especially American and Israeli, were all about importing enlightened democratic standards to help them overcome their backward ignorance. The murders of American members of the diplomatic corps in Libya unleashed an especially vivid example of blighted mentalities confronting a situation of the west’s creation, and blaming the results on people who have suffered for so long almost any match is likely to set off a raging inferno. Whatever its supporters or critics may have believed, Libya was a nation and has now been shattered and divided into a series of fiefdoms controlled by armed militias, many of them the very forces said to be terrorist enemies of the west which somehow became allies in destroying the Libyan regime. Now, they are enemies again?

Whether or not political manipulations figure in this matter we should all understand that we cannot, with impunity and unconcern, murder people in far away places and not expect actions to be taken in retaliation. In the case of the embassy attack in Libya, the deaths were of conscious promoters of  American power in the middle east, unlike the innocents sacrificed in the USA on 9/11/01 and at so many other  locations and times before and since.

Unless we stop our government from conducting the savage attacks that take lives in so many countries under the guise of fighting a terrorism it is responsible for creating, we can expect more, not less such retaliation. Until then we can only hope  that no more innocents will pay the price of our systemic contempt for human life that stands in the way of western, most especially American and Israeli, pursuit of profit.

Failing empires and nations are often run by people whose intellectual capacity reflects the deteriorating material conditions they preside over. The greater the crisis, the more likely that the psychologically damaged and mentally challenged may assert command. When the crisis is systemic and transcends borders, the weapons handled by the incompetents are so lethal, and the area blanketed with homicidal ignorance extends from nation to global community, far more than a local population is under assault. The threat to Islam and Muslims, as grave and bloody as it is, merely expresses a part of the greater threat to humanity represented by a system of profit and loss economics which is making the great majority of us losers in a market place of madness, social division and ecological destruction that can only be stopped by a unified democratic force.

What Islamic people in some parts of the world are trying to assert is no different, in essence, from what the Occupy movement in America is attempting and what many in South America have started doing via the electoral process. These are all really parts of the same struggle to meet a menacing threat to humanity with the force of united people asserting their democratic will. A positive outcome to this global struggle will be more difficult than many imagine but it has never been more possible or necessary. Whether in the U.S.A. , Spain , the arab world, Greece or anywhere else, progress in one place will affect the outcome everywhere else . If we allow the loonies to remain in control of the west and start a war with Iran, we may face an immediate future that will make the economic breakdown of the last few years seem a picnic by comparison.

Whatever the outcome of the  ad campaign posing as the November elections in the U.S.A., the loonies will still likely be in charge. It’s the immediate aftermath that should most concern us since what we do then will hopefully begin the democracy we need and end the oligarchy we have. That is far more important than which corporate politician takes up residence in the tax payer subsidized housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In Praise of Job Creators

The American Bu$ine$$man's Ten Steps to Product Development

1. Can I cut corners in the design?

2. Can it be shoddily built?

3. Can I use cheap materials?

4. Will it create hazards for my workers?

5. Will it harm the environment?

6. Can I evade the safety laws?

7. Will children die from it?

8. Can I overprice it?

9. Can it be falsely advertised?

10. Will it force smaller competitors out of business?

Excellent. Let's get busy.

-----George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty

Big Big Big News: Jesus Married!

A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife

Published: September 18, 2012 1428 Comments

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ” 

Legalienate's Archeology Department  reveals the news this article left out:

Her name was Milton!

911 Fantasy and Reality

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The day passed with more personal and less public commemorations in 2012 than in the past 11 years , but while tens of millions have watched videos of the flaming towers to the point of inducing numbness about the horror, some still advance metaphysical propositions for what was hidden from all eyes and consciousness but theirs. Many others ask legitimate questions about why the government did not know what was threatened and why it didn’t react properly when it was informed of  that threat by the CIA.

The most feverish speculations deny any possibility that the suicide terrorists who hijacked the planes and killed more than 3,000 others could have had any reason for their acts. If they existed at all - there are claims that all 19 were fictitious beings - they were just tools in the hands of conspirators, who must number in the thousands if one puts all potential theories into the same mix.

Apart from possibly unconscious racism which often dismisses the perpetrator-dupes-puppets as “Arabs in caves”, omitting the fact that some of the cave dwellers had college and even graduate degrees , the doubters make assumptions about government information control that are certainly reasonable. Dishonesty is a standard of governments in any crisis and american rulers easily meet that norm. A history of slanted reporting of almost everything , especially international conflict, is cause for healthy citizen skepticism. But some of what passes for critique of the 911 events makes the story of the creation of the universe in six days, or in the big bang six million millennia ago, seem quaint little folk tales by comparison.

The most deranged have the buildings prewired to create a controlled demolition, indicating zero awareness of many things but especially that “controlled” demolitions cause no harm to surrounding structures. The 911 attack on the  WTC also destroyed buildings three and four as well as seven, due to fiery debris from the towers falling on them. This  is unknown or disregarded by the true believers in the way that any suggestion of material evidence can always be seen as part of the plot, as in: they destroyed the other buildings in order to cover the fact that it was (ominous background music) a controlled demolition (violins swell to piercing volume).

Also left out of the controlled demo fantasy is the level of arrangement and coordination necessary to have the towers so wired to explode, with no one among the thousands who worked and trafficked there every day noticing anything out of the ordinary, and have the explosion detonated, not by sending an agent into the building and throwing a switch – much too simple – but by organizing a conspiracy to dupe 19 “Arabs in caves” into hijacking planes and killing themselves by crashing them into the towers at which point the core of the conspiracy – Bush? Mossad? Batman? – could throw the switch (from a secret location unknown to anyone) to immolate thousands of innocent Americans so the U.S. could go to war. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Other claims are that no planes were involved at all and missiles – secret and invisible – were the cause of the death and destruction. But these are extremes that many of the  skeptics disdain and claim are  plants by the conspirators themselves, that group growing in number as theories expand to the extent that it may involve a population larger than the number killed that day. And amazingly, not one of these conspirators, co-conspirators, agents, double agents, munitions experts, national and international secret keepers and more, in an environment that finds private conversations regularly filmed, recorded and going viral, have slipped up and revealed anything. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, even though some claim that Israel was behind the plot, that nation and especially its Zionist support group in America get off rather easily. Recent stories about the Bush administration paying no mind to CIA warnings about a pending threat of terrorist attack neglect to point out that the reason for an obsession with Saddam Hussein and not the al Qaida group was the threat Hussein represented to Israel.

The neocons with the greatest influence over that particular white house boob were all Israeli lovers who put that nation’s safety first, easily seeing the interests of a foreign country at least the same as those of the USA, since that has been the case in our politics for a generation or more.

Hussein was a far greater menace to Israel given his nation’s aid to Palestinians, even to the point of making financial contributions to the families of militants who died in suicide terror attacks. He alone among leaders in the Arab world was not only outspoken in support of Palestine with words but with deeds as well, and as such represented a serious threat. So, the Zionist neocons in the Bush advisory cabal laid it on with passion, and  America followed their advice with embargoes, boycotts and invasions. If that sounds similar to the current lunacy about Iran, and you think there is a difference in policy because a religious loony was replaced by a political parasite, guess again.

A battle over american foreign policy has been going on for some time now between the old wasp wing – white Anglo Saxon protestant - and the newer dominant jewish Zionist group. Given the weakening status of the empire in recent years, the wasps have become more outspoken in their criticism of american adherence to Israeli needs at the cost of our own. The present regime in the white house got there in great part because of its faithfulness to the Zionist cause, but once there it has shown some small adherence to the old foreign policy cabal’s view that maybe we have gone just a bit too far in bowing before the money provided by the Israeli lobby. This mistaken power of what is ignorantly called the jewish vote is really the power of that electoral dollar, since the vote of every jew in the usa, whether liberal, conservative, religious or atheist, would be enough to carry several communities and one or two cities. But the power of those dollars helps to buy the votes of the other 97% of Americans who are kept in rapturous expectation of a better hereafter or a promising tomorrow if they just keep selecting what seems a lesser evil on election day.

Unfortunately if this idiotic nonsense continues the death toll is likely to increase, both in the middle east and at home. We can only hope that minds focused on nearly supernatural invisible forces can focus on earthly material reality to avoid another deadly war, this time with Iran but more likely with a great part of a world which is growing tired of an imperial power showing signs of suffering a form of political Alzheimer’s disease, and this with its hands on nuclear weapons. The time for imaginative if simplistic wondering about hidden conspiracy is past; reality has become far too dangerous and needs to be confronted in the material world.

Capitalist Media Schizo? Again?

Friday, September 7, 2012

 

The New York Times
Breaking News: U.S. Added 96,000 Jobs in August;

Financial Times Breaking News

US jobs growth slows to 96,000 in August

Viewer Watches, Lives Through Both Conventions

An average american hired by Legalienate to watch the entire republican and democratic conventions, had this to say at the end of those sur-reality shows:

“It was like watching the dumbest sitcom in the history of tv with the loudest canned laugh track in the history of tv and doing so while lying on a couch soaking with dog and cat piss. It made me feel so american I may enlist in the military, but I’m ninety eight years old so maybe I’ll just volunteer to watch the polls on election day and make sure no blacks or hispanics can vote and that gay couples can vote at least three times each if they can verify that they’ve had an abortion and visited Israel. God bless our democracy.”

Hysteria and the Quadrennial Farce

"The most important election of our lifetimes." The legitimacy czars are working overtime to convince us that the PR extravaganza now taking place before us in the name of "elections" is somehow not the private auction it in fact is. Even if the loser in the fund-raising sweepstakes ends up winning the White House, it's a fore-ordained conclusion that he will be an enthusiastic advocate of the very "free market" delusions that have brought our economy to the brink of collapse, and very likely will again. That's nothing for Main Street to cheer about.

The hysteria of the Democrats is palpable, as the dismal record of their man Obama has largely crushed the rapturous idealism of his 2008 voting base, leaving him nothing but lesser evilism to offer in 2012. Hence the resort to ridiculous claims of a pending abortion ban and the return of "Jim Crow" and/or Soviet-style elections.

Recall that in 2004 Democrats were encouraged to "vote or die" on the pretext that a second term for George W. Bush represented an "existential threat" to the nation that would overturn Roe v. Wade and introduce a military draft, neither of which happened. But facts are not a hysteric's business.

It is a ludicrous stretch of the imagination to think that a voter ID card issued at government expense if necessary is the equivalent of resurrecting Jim Crow. Blacks in the segregation era were regularly lynched, which is certainly not the case today, and those few who attempted to defy white authority by registering to vote were confronted by such qualifying "exams" as, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?"

Requiring people to prove they are who they say they are is hardly in the same league. We do it all the time at the public library, and none dare call it Bolshevism.

Speaking of Bolshevism, the complaint in the West about Soviet elections was that one had to be a member of the Communist Party in order to vote, and the party was closed to all but a tiny portion of the population. Gee, doesn't that sound remarkably like the microscopic Property Class in the U.S., which rejects all candidates who express even the slightest skepticism of their Free Market religion? The major financial donors upon whom both Democrats and Republicans are totally dependent represent an even smaller fraction of the electorate than did Communist Party members in the former U.S.S.R., but that somehow doesn't invalidate the presumed democratic legitimacy of U.S. elections, the way it routinely did (in Western eyes) in the case of the Soviet Union.

Hypocrisy? You bet.

The fact is that U.S. presidential elections are a sham insofar as they are presumed to express a democratic will. Polls demonstrate that a substantial majority of the electorate believes the country is "on the wrong track," and has been through both Democratic and Republican administrations for a long time. If the system were in fact democratic, the two major parties would be busily engaged in correcting this perception - by delivering what the American people want.

Well, what do the people want? Again, polls over a substantial period of time demonstrate majority support for social spending ahead of Pentagon spending: for environmental clean-up, expanded educational opportunity, and government-funded security against illness, injury, and old age, plus state subsidized child care for working mothers who otherwise can't afford it. Such desires are particularly strong among those who occupy the bottom half of the wealth pyramid, and these are the same people who tend not to vote, since no candidate representing such policies is ever allowed to win. Rigged elections? Not in the sense of tampering with electoral machinery, though that occurs as well under "democracy," but certainly in the sense of using elections to thwart the popular will rather than express it.

All of this is bad enough, but our rulers are not content to simply rig the game, they also have to ridicule the democratic will. Thus, the people's desire for social and economic security is contemptuously dismissed as "a letter to Santa Claus" - to quote Ronald Reagan's U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick dismissing the social and cultural protections of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as childish fantasy. (The specific rights objected to are: social security, "just and favorable conditions of work," protection against unemployment, equal pay for equal work, "just and favorable remuneration" i.e., decent pay, the right to join a union, adequate rest and leisure, a decent standard of living, public education, and access to the cultural life of the community and scientific advances.)

A letter to Santa Claus. That's also what Barack Obama and Mitt Romney think of the reigning international standard of human rights, which happens to dovetail nicely with the American people's central political desires. Note that our leaders don't debate these ideas, they simply discard them.

Think about that the next time you are in a voting booth, and ask yourself how long we can afford to leave our leaders' contempt for us unaddressed.

The Economic Religion of Finance Capital

The Virgin birth.

The Chosen people.

The Resurrection of the dead.

The Free Market.

Which of those is unsupported by material evidence but exists by virtue of practice based on fervent , coerced, or simply uncritical belief and is thus subject to failure at any moment when the belief is shaken to its roots by experienced reality? All of them.

Of course farmers and flea markets are real, as are the corporate malls where millions enter with credit desire and leave in debt frustration. But the global financial market whose minority controllers run the planet is a vast electronic church sustained by a congregation of mentally and physically brutalized parishioners. A political clergy of rabbis, priests and ministers operate its banking cathedrals as an international casino whose minority profits accrue on the loss of billions of people forced to gamble their existence on its success, and their failure.

The ruling minority relies on its giant computers, mathematicians and symbol manipulators to transform global wealth into weapons of war for humanity’s forced use on itself, and luxury goods for lives of wretched excess for them and their servants. All this is supported by the majority whose struggles for survival increase in debt, pain, and endless war.

Financial dictatorship is maintained by military power capable of slaughtering thousands of people instantly and destroying governments through domination of minds as well as bodies. It is more profitable to manipulate worshippers through the consciousness control of political media rather than by brute force. Propaganda is especially useful at programming patriotism during wars, and civic duty during elections. Voting rituals have servant clergy driven into the collective mind as representing an abstraction called “the people” rather than the financial elites who run the temples, banks and  the election business.

Philosophers who once claimed that god was dead encountered little resistance since no material evidence could oppose an immaterial charge. But the time for secular and spiritual communities to unite and proclaim that the financial market-god is dead may be at hand, before fanatic faith in this deity of the dollar obliterates us all.

What many religious people site as indications of the downfall of humanity sometimes offer a clearer view of reality than that of secular  types skeptical of mythological belief, while they help perpetuate the most fantastic fable:

A political economic dementia that claims minority rule of the planet by a tiny caste of master-race-self-chosen people is creating the best life imaginable for their subject billions, while evidence increases that the material world can no longer support this fanaticism without ultimate destruction of much that passes for civilized reality.

Social critics who hold the spiritual in disdain can make seemingly more credible scientific arguments to indicate that radical change is needed in the political economic foundation of society in order for the race to succeed. Whether one side or the other is right is a dualistic argument and part of the problem.  Both are correct to argue that we can’t go on as we have or we will face possible failure for humanity itself and not just the usual segments always sacrificed to the unjust dogma that benefits some at the cost of all.

While severe problems increase, protectors of the status quo take a more crazed and sadistic tone, screeching about peace and democracy while they murder the first and make the second impossible. Public programs are savaged by policies which lavish money on those who have great wealth, steal money from those who create all wealth, and deny money to those who have no wealth. The increased suffering inflicted on western populations manipulated into accepting the irrational idea that minority created financial collapse is the fault of majority need for human service is countered by more savage brutality inflicted on foreigners, especially in the middle east.

The plan to break up Arab nations that do not obey the west, criticize Israel or relate to Iran as an ally, has taken a more brutal turn. Viciously punishing any disobedience to the dogma of the great white church of the west, first Libya and now Syria - with Iran still pending - have been subjected to open warfare and the more covert murder of embargoes and infiltration by illegitimate outsiders who pervert insider’s legitimate struggles for change.

Libya has been shattered and the same fate is sought for Syria, but the shaman shysters of global finance capital have learned no lessons from their near destruction of Iraq. That nation is now an ally of Iran, strengthening the supposed center of an “axis of evil”. The real evil,  known to be so by the overwhelming majority of global people, is the dualist deity of Israel and the USA. An entity calling itself the international community is actually a relative handful of toadies and one massive military power, insisting that the world is its possession to be regulated by a perversion of language, thought and practice that it calls democracy.

All of this is motivated for the gathering of profits by minorities at the expense of majorities, and the loss sustained by the earth and its people has become so staggering that life itself may be scarred for generations if we do not pierce the darkness of compulsory ignorance and create a more enlightened future of hope. That means tearing out the roots of superstition imposed by a few in order to enable the growth of wisdom for the many.

We are all forced into worshipping this false god, no matter what label we attach to ourselves, our nations or our faiths. Continued belief in and support of the religious madness called global finance capitalism  will be the undoing of  the ultimate identity group; deists, atheists, agnostics and the rest of humanity. In short, all of us.

False Savior: Barack Obama (5) - The Bailout Fiasco

The federal rescue of bankers deemed "too big to fail" went far beyond the $812 billion TARP bailout. The federal bailout incorporated funds from a variety of federal agencies - the FDCI, the Treasury Department, and a host of others. Nomi Prins, a Wall Street veteran of 10 years at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs (author of "It Takes a Pillage") says the total cost to the U.S. taxpayer was $17.5 trillion ($9 trillion through the Federal Reserve alone).

U.S. officials of course needed to arrest the financial meltdown that nearly crashed the world economy in 2008. However, the U.S. was uncommon among the developed nations in bailing out its banks without any requirement that those rescued extend loans to relieve the credit crisis. This meant that the ingredients of the runaway speculation that produced the 2008 collapse were left in place: large volumes of speculative capital, securitized debt, and the expectation by investment bankers that there would always be a boundless taxpayer bailout fund to save them from their own reckless disregard for prudent financial practice and the requirements of the law.

In other words, we are well on our way to the next catastrophe, with bank profits once again being driven largely by speculative investing. The banks continue to sit on more than two trillion dollars in cash and liquid assets, which they refuse to loan to small and medium size businesses to prevent further layoffs (S&P 500 corporations are also hoarding). Meanwhile, they eagerly extend loans to professional speculators to finance quick capital gains in Chinese properties, Brazilian currency, short selling of Greek bonds, gold futures, and emerging market funds.

We don't know precisely what was done with the bailout funds because the recipients of the money consider it an affront to even be asked. No bank has provided even the most basic accounting of what exactly it has done with the free money, simply replying, "we're choosing not to disclose that." We do know that money was used to speculate in foreign currencies, stocks, and properties abroad, and that banks were allowed to pour money into their own pockets for recapitalization or mergers, and to make loans to government-guaranteed borrowers, thus undermining the alleged purpose of the bailout.

In the wake of the bailout banks showed their gratitude by charging customers higher interest rates (credit card companies successfully thwarted timid Congressional efforts to place a cap of 34 percent on credit card charges and fees), instituting a range of new penalties, and hoarding cash in offshore tax havens while U.S. unemployment soared. At a time when homeowners couldn't get their mortgage loans modified, couldn't get funding for their children's college education except at extortionate rates, and were increasingly denied bank loans they needed to keep their businesses from collapsing, wealthy bankers and corporate executives continued giving themselves enormous bonuses. As the working poor and middle class lost their homes by the millions, or were forced to watch the value of those homes fall below what they owed on their mortgages, companies like A.I.G and Goldman Sachs got reimbursed 100% by the U.S. Treasury for their loans and speculative bets, many of the latter made against the very securities they were aggressively selling.

While Obama clearly rescued Wall Street, he appears to have left Main Street in the lurch. His 812 billion dollar stimulus package had little or no effect on lowering unemployment, which is now higher in "recovery" than it was in the wake of the financial collapse. The problem is insufficient aggregate demand in the wake of Wall Street's looting: consumers can't lead a recovery because they lack the resources to do so after being robbed. And stimulative tricks don't work because no business is going to invest and expand after a tax cut, or hire more workers, if there is no demand for the increased products and services produced by those additional workers. And even Obama policy-makers at the highest levels admit that the bleak outlook will not change anytime soon. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, for example, has predicted that it will take until 2016 to return to the level of jobs we had in 2007.

Let's recall the events that brought us to this point. A series of big banks went bust in an avalanche of worthless paper, including Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, and the insurance giant AIG. The stock market plummeted several thousand points. Credit markets froze up. Banks of all kinds and sizes were writing down and writing off hundreds of billions of dollars in losses due to collapsing housing markets and an alphabet soup of odd assets like CDOs, CLOs, CDSs, and the like. Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced that the solution to the problem was to buy up the bad assets. But the banks didn't want to sell those assets at their collapsed market prices, they wanted the public to be forced to buy them at the prices the banks had originally paid for them (but the assets had since lost about 90% of that value). So much for the "free market" never needing state intervention to get prices right: If you're "too big to fail" you get a special deal.

Meanwhile, whereas the Obama "recovery" has been great for Wall Street, it has been the weakest and most lopsided recovery from any of the recessions since 1947. Pre-tax corporate profits almost doubled in just over two years, from $971 billion in December 2008 to $1.876 trillion in March 2011. By early 2012 they surpassed $2 trillion. This while workers' wages were slashed, jobs were eliminated, work hours and benefits were reduced, and gains from rising productivity were channeled exclusively to corporations. So now more than 40 million U.S. workers have no full-time jobs, and earn on average 70% of full-time pay as temp and part-time workers; 47 million are under the official poverty line; and 45 million now receive food stamps, including more than 15 million children. Incidentally, the true number of U.S. jobless is between 23 and 25 million, not the much lower official figure, and the true unemployment rate is between 18 and 19 percent. Between 30 and 40 percent of American homes are under water.

Amidst these dismal circumstances, Obama and the Democrats offer no resistance to cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, employer provided health insurance, Social Security, public employees wages and jobs at all levels of government, pensions, unemployment benefits, and the gutting of middle class tax cuts like the alternate minimum tax and the mortgage deduction. Whereas federal spending should have focused on direct job creation and on reducing homeowners' mortgages and payments, Obama saw that it went instead towards subsidizing a few mortgage leaders and mortgage servicing banks.

And he has proven totally unwilling or unable to create jobs, stop foreclosures and spreading negative homeowner equity, and prevent chronic fiscal crises at the state and local levels. He has, on the contrary, decided to become an austerity hawk, as cutting deficits and the debt became his policy centerpiece by late 2011.

But no economy has ever recovered through austerity measures, and ours won't either. Obama's recovery strategy has failed because the original stimulus was too small and not focused on immediate job creation, but rather, corporate subsidies. It also showed an over-reliance on business tax cuts that were hoarded rather than invested. Obama declined to require bank lending as a pre-condition to receiving bailout funds. He simply disregarded the crisis in jobs, housing, and local budgets, sponsoring an ineffective traditional policy response to the first economic relapse in the summer of 2010, and then eagerly surrendered to Republican focus on deficit cutting and austerity solutions in the face of the second economic relapse in 2011.

As a result, there is now no way the U.S. can recover as the world economy continues to slow. The much celebrated 200,000 a month in job creation largely reflected seasonal and other statistical adjustments and is now a thing of the past. We're in for a long period of suffering.

Austerity, we should keep in mind, is a maneuver by bondholders and bankers to buy time in hopes that somehow "market forces" can be brought under control, so they won't have to sell their bonds at a loss. The Obama administration's three recovery programs since 2009 also represent attempts to buy time. (Economic growth, reflation, liquidation, are the three programs). The subsidies to states, cities, the unemployed, schools, etc. were designed to arrest the massive collapse of consumption that was occurring in '08-'09, but only for one year. After that year, the $300 plus billion in tax cuts passed in 2009 and the additional $802 billion in tax cuts in 2010, were supposed to kick in and produce business investment and job creation in the U.S. But corporations continued to sit on a $2.5 trillion cash hoard, and did not invest in U.S. workers. Meanwhile, U.S. multinationals are sitting on an additional $1.4 trillion in offshore tax havens, in order to avoid paying U.S. corporate income taxes.

While the global capitalist banking system gets constant liquidity injections composed of zero interest loans and "quantitative easing" - the Fed printing up money to buy bad assets from banks and lenders - the economy is not, in fact, re-inflating. The only result has been the Federal Reserve spoon-feeding speculators around the world and juicing up stock markets, real estate, currency speculation and volatility, oil and commodity prices, and financial securities in general. This does nothing to bail out Main Street.

Meanwhile, the portion of income claimed by the richest 1% is its highest share since 1928, just before the U.S. economy collapsed into the Great Depression. According to the CIA's annual World Factbook, which ranks nations on a "Gini" formula designed to measure inequality, the U.S. is in the company of the Philippines, Ecuador and Rwanda in the global inequality derby.

And forget about borrowing to meet your needs. Most banks still refuse to loan at reasonable rates.

We are in the midst of a bankers' strike designed to make U.S. workers pay endless tribute to America's newest Robber Barons.