Memorial Day Gratitude: False and Real

 As per U.S. custom, we are today inundated in mindless speeches and inane editorials praising U.S. soldiers who allegedly died "to preserve U.S. liberty" at home.  Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

To begin with, the U.S. slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan have done nothing to protect U.S. liberty.   In fact, quite the contrary.  The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are directly related to the destruction of U.S. civil liberties via the Patriot Act, the use of military commissions instead of civilian courts, institutionalized torture, preventive detention, the jailing of whistle-blowers, and Obama's incredible insistence that he has the right to murder U.S. citizens anywhere in the world on his say-so alone.  

We should stop mouthing idiotic slogans romanticizing war. Congress has sole authority to declare war, a power it has not exercised since WWII. None of the dozens of U.S. wars and CIA interventions since then have had any legitimacy, and all of them represent a deliberately engineered decline of  American liberty. So the premise of establishment editorials ostensibly praising the troops is radically false.

In fact, it should be obvious by now that those who send young people to fight illegal wars don't "support the troops" in any meaningful sense at all.  What kind of "support" is it to force soldiers to illegally invade other countries, placing them in direct opposition to occupied populations that far outnumber them, and have every reason to loathe their presence?  The young men and women put in that position do not realize until far too late that they are being treated with cynical contempt by the very men and women who incessantly praise them as "heroes."  If they kill innocent people, as they almost inevitably must, they must kill conscience as well, or else suffer the grotesque realization that all the platitudes about martial virtue are simply an elaborate rationalization of mass murder.  On the other hand, if they  recognize the claims of innocence, they place their own lives and the lives of their fellow soldiers in extreme danger, as an occupied population is legally and morally justified in using violence to expel invaders.  So in both cases innocents die - occupied civilians or soldiers conscripted by poverty -  only the proportion dead from each group varies.  Is it any wonder that U.S. military suicides have hit an all-time high?

If establishment elites want to express gratitude to the troops, let them pay what honest gratitude demands: (1) A lifetime income for the many soldiers who return unable to function normally ever again (2) Unlimited free medical and psychological treatment for the physically wounded and emotionally traumatized (3) A permanent guaranteed job at a living wage for every returning soldier capable of fulfilling the demands of employment.

Surely, this would be but modest compensation for men and women who are routinely placed "in harm's way," and are often called upon to "make the ultimate sacrifice?"

Everybody Must Get...Straight!

The global condition can at any time be likened to the situation on the sinking Titanic with its crew re-arranging deck chairs and throw pillows as the ship continues to submerge. This analogy may not quite fit the present status of the global center, the USA. Here, the situation at a mental health crisis center under a full moon while suffering a shortage of powerful tranquilizers might seem pleasant by comparison. As always under profit and loss economics, increasing numbers face growing hardship bordering on absolute disaster while some enjoy ever more lavish splendor with their servant class living in relative if temporary comfort.

Just another day at empire’s headquarters.

The imperial subjects in the rest of the world suffer far more with the austerity religion of fundamentalist capital turning Europe into a snake pit of material inequality. Things are much worse in the Middle East with savagery increasing in Syria as hypocritical clucking from those who are behind the mass murder induces mass nausea among those still spared from the descent into mass idiocy. Danger of a wider conflict increases as “the west” – the USA and Israel – bring a dangerous situation threatening a world war to a breaking point with behaviors that would have an individual put in a strait jacket, heavily sedated and placed under 24 hour watch in a padded cell.

As always, a fiend dictator-murderer-tyrant-genocidal-satanic monster is identified as the cause of everything that is wrong, and as always, this is a gross simplification and often a total lie, even when the dictators or tyrants really are awful people presiding over worse regimes. Individuals always loom larger than systems, whether the problems are an unemployed worker who is told she needs therapy to improve her unmarketable neurotic tendencies, or the problem is a CEO or head of state who is made to seem a single-handed creator of misery who needs to be terminated to make everything right while an entrenched corporate bureaucracy of state is invisible, existing in a social vacuum.

In this environment switching from ruling by AI (artificial intelligence) to dominating with SI (superficial intelligence) could pass without anyone noticing. Apparently it has.

Recent signs of hysterical hypocrisy continue a historic trend but increase in number and seriousness. Israel conducts attacks on Syria and the international community – the USA, Israel and a couple of islands in the pacific – yawns. Syria is alleged to have used chemical weapons, the charges coming from a group less trustworthy than wall street banks, and the shrieks and screams from the same minority of ruling jackals drown out the cries of hunger and pain emanating from those who suffer all day, every day, at the ravages of a system that allows a minority to dress up in finery for temporary visits to the opera house while a near majority wears their reject rags as it moves permanently into the poor house.

The U.S, military suffers an out break of rape and suicide while tv ads implore more youth to seek a career in the exciting field of killing foreigners, raping women compatriots and then killing themselves at contemplation of what a sordid immoral mess their lives have become.

At the rate things are going the legalization of marijuana won’t come soon enough to bring some much-needed relief. Meanwhile, the increased strains and pressures creating more common mental cases who murder or blow up their neighbors are a deeper threat among the supposed leaders and decision makers who not only threaten a family, co-workers or neighbors by totally flipping out, but all of society and maybe the world. These borderline certifiable loonies aren’t funny in that they have or remotely exercise control of nuclear weapons.

Israel has several hundred nukes which everybody knows about but no one is to speak of (because, you know, the holocaust and three, four, five or six thousand years of extermination policies that make you wonder how any jews at all are left), is run by a group dementia extending to the US government, which has thousands more nukes and is the only nation ever to have used them to slaughter tens of thousands of humans at a time. You know, democracy, higher form of civilization, western Judeo-Christian morality and stuff like that? This is a situation that calls for democratic control to be exercised quickly, but when such reality threatens to exist anywhere it is quickly attacked – see Venezuela - by the alleged leaders of that international democratic community which is killing and suppressing more people than past fascist tyrants could ever have hoped – assuming they did – to slaughter.

Good marijuana may not be a powerful enough tranquilizer for this mob that would be a bunch of laughable buffoons if they weren’t such a deadly menace to the future of all humanity and not just one nation. Getting them stoned won’t help, and all of us getting stoned will be worse. We can party after we deal with the crisis but until then, stay straight, maintain vigilance and take democratic action to transform reality. And work faster.

Washington's Agenda: Make War For Peace in Syria; Hold Millions of Economic Refugees Hostage to "Reform,"; Subsidize HMO "Disease Care"; Keep Torturing POW's

After years of U.S. and Israeli slaughters in the Middle East, President Obama somehow announced with a straight face this week that Washington had "a moral obligation" to intervene in Syria in response to alleged use of chemical weapons by Damascus, which has suffered repeat bombings and nearly half a century of military occupation at the hands of the Jewish state. Obama affected deep concern about the alleged Syrian WMD transgression, as though we all hadn't been led down this WMD path before with George W. Bush and Iraq, a gruesome tale that turned out to be one of the most spectacular crimes in the world since WWII.

The point should be obvious. If the use of weapons of mass destruction justifies military intervention, then someone had better invade the U.S. right away for its repeated use of WMD and other weapons of wholesale killing, including atomic bombs, Agent Orange (100,000 times more potent than Thalidomide), depleted uranium, CS, CN, and DM gases (Vietnam), arsenic, cyanide, napalm, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and on and on and on. There is no other country that comes anywhere near equaling Washington's achievements in inflicting mega-death on those in its political way, and Syria is simply USrael's latest target for "regime change." Let's declare zero tolerance for this disgusting hypocrisy.

Continued Congressional idiocy was the order of the day on Capitol Hill this week, as Republicans redoubled their efforts to heap unmerited hardship on illegal immigrants while Democrats absurdly countered that the mass importation of poorly educated workers without authorization to be in the country has no social costs, but in fact benefits everyone. Neither group of political dinosaurs has a clue. The Republicans can't see that sermons about obeying the law reek to high heaven when delivered by blood-soaked imperial cheerleaders who have helped devastate one country after another in the name of "Israel first" and "free trade," and who by now are well on their way to destroying even the U.S. middle class with their unfettered support for keeping government off the backs of swindling bankers who looted the public of God-only-knows how many trillions of dollars in the wake of the financial meltdown in 2008. The Democrats, meanwhile, stubbornly refuse to get that U.S. foreign and trade policies ensure that impoverished populations around the world are eternally exploited by the I.M.F. and World Bank, whose parasitic interventions guarantee that fat profits are extracted from lands teeming with hungry and diseased people, thus providing the impetus for millions to flee to industrialized countries in hopes of gaining at least minimal access to the capital that has been extorted from them in their countries of origin. This does not mean that they are "aspiring Americans," though they will accept that designation by default if there is no prospect of a change in U.S. policy that might lead to a decent life back home. But of course, with the Republicans dragging their knuckles along the House floor and the Great Half-White Hope muttering irrelevant platitudes from the White House, there is fat chance of that.

Obama-care supporter Ray Fisman said in Slate.com that the findings of a New England Journal of Medicine study showing that patients enrolled in Medicaid were no healthier than were the uninsured is an occasion for him to "eat humble pie." It turns out that providing broader access to medical care in a sick society doesn't automatically produce better health. Surprise, surprise. Hypertension, cholesterol, and diabetes, not to mention cancer, continue to wreak their customary havoc on a sedentary U.S. population marinating in untested chemicals and bombarded with propaganda celebrating ever-escalating consumption for the greater glory of limitless profit. Unfortunately, for Fisman the issue isn't the profit system driving us to an early death, but rather, how to persuade individual Americans to lead a healthy lifestyle. But this is like trying to make fish in Lake Erie be healthy. Without addressing policies that have converted the world to a combination gas chamber and toxic waste dump, there is no possibility of having a broadly healthy American population.

Amidst a hunger strike involving 100 of the 166 "detainees" at the U.S. gulag in Guantanamo, President Obama renewed his call to close the torture center, while his gulag officials continued to force a greased tube down the noses and throats of the protesting prisoners, until they gagged and bled. Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy in National/Review.com asked who really cares if jihadists "starve their way into the Great Orgy in the sky?"

Is ours a great two-party democracy or what?

Source:

"The Week - The Best of the U.S. and International Media," May 17, 2013

Pentagon Study Sees Sharp Rise in Sexual Assaults:Urges Warfare As Best Solution To Problem

Pentagon Study Sees Sharp Rise in Sexual Assaults

 

The study estimated that the number of people in the military who were sexually assaulted in the 2012 fiscal year rose to 26,000, from 19,000 in the same period a year before.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with congress, the president and the NRA urged immediate invasion of Syria, Iran and other enemies so that our military might rape and murder foreigners instead of American citizens.

 "There's no better way to occupy the minds of our troops than invasion and mass murder of foreigners. This may not afford safety to all American women, but at least those in the military will be able to concentrate on murdering others instead of protecting themselves from sexual assault" said an unidentified multi-cultural spokesperson of color from the Pentagon.

President Shocks DC Press Corps and Israeli Knesset at press conference: Wears Propeller Yarmulke, Waves False Flag, Uses More Cliches Than Usual

 

We are pushing the envelope and remaining transparent but I must say, uh, that we can no longer kick the can down the road and if a red line is crossed it, uh, will be a game changer that forces an agonizing reappraisal of all our options which have been on the table since Israel (blessed be her name) placed them there and, uh, we may have to put american boots on the ground , uh, if chemical use can be traced beyond our own and Israel’s (blessed be her name) and we find genocidal use of weapons of mass destruction , uh, by other forces of the axis of evil, like iran, Syria and North Korea that threaten Israel  (blessed be her name) we will act with all due diligence to, uh,  rectify…uh, what was the question..?